Travelling Hopefully - Fuck That Hurts Edition

 OK it has to be admitted that I pushed my flabby, aging body a bit far with the shrine walk.  It was only eight kilometres but it was mostly up and down on unstable ground and the next day (and for a number of “next days” after that) I was in a goodly amount of pain.  Also pretty much every muscle from my diaphragm down seized up.

The next day started with a happy jaunt from our accommodation down to where we left the bus.  Once again mules did the heavy lifting which was convenient as I could barely lift myself.

Somehow I made it to the bottom.  The same young members of our group who had breezed up to the shrine now breezed down to the village while the halt and lame hobbled behind them.  As a charter member of the halt and lame I cursed them with every breath or at least I would have had I possessed sufficient breath to do so.

Eventually we arrived back at our bus where a group of recently unloaded mules stared at me with smug contempt.  The bus trip was a blur.  We went up things and down things, possibly the same things.  Gradually the scenery changed as we left the Atlas Mountains and entered the Ounila Valley, our destination was the village of Ait Benhaddou once an important stop on an ancient trade route leading to the Sahara.  Salt from the surrounding countryside was traded for gold coming out of the Sahara.  According to our guide the exchange rate was one kilo of salt bought you one kilo of gold.  I was surprised as I didn’t realise they had the metric system back then.  It’s an indication of exactly how valuable salt was back in the day particularly in the Sahara where supermarkets are thin on the ground.

Nowadays of course that trade is gone and Ait Benhaddou seems to make a lot of its money simply from being picturesque.  If you’ve seen Gladiator or Game of Thrones for example then you’ve seen Ait Benhaddou.

There was a walk through the old town when we arrived because of course there was.  A tall imposing building sat alone on the top of a hill and without even asking I knew that would be the destination of the walk.  Given that I could barely move I was going to give it a miss but Pam who is a few years older than me and also did the shrine walk filled me full of Advil which brought a temporary spriteliness to my creaking limbs and enabled me to do the walk.

Over the next couple of days it was the presence of Pam and a packet of Advil that allowed me to walk at all.  She took pity on me because in her words “I looked like death.”  Thanks Pam.  

So we walked, we climbed the hill, took sunset photos from the top of the hill and then descended again.  After which I had just enough energy left to eat dinner and crawl into bed.

Incidentally the imposing building at the top of the hill was once the bank.  It was built at a time when banks needed more in the way of security than silent alarms and chaining the pens to the desk.  Here a dominant hilltop position surrounded by a defensive wall was considered the minimum necessary to protect depositors funds.

Travelling Hopefully - Inaccessible Shrine Edition

 Having imbibed more culture than a pot of yoghurt left out in the sun we left Marrakech just before I decided to launch my own fashion line.  Our destination; the Atlas Mountains.

Our gallant minibus ground up hills and around hairpins, climbing ever higher until it shuddered to a halt in a small village.

“We’ve arrived,” I thought.

“We walk from here,” announced our guide.

Apparently the village we were staying at was further up and could only be accessed by foot.  Our luggage was loaded onto mules (they were on foot too) who set off at a deceptively slow pace.  They would comfortably beat us to the destination.

The path upward started at a deceptively gentle gradient.  Irrigation channels carried snowmelt past us and through what looked like bush but was probably farms.  Walnut trees were one of the crops grown.  We weren’t the only ones making the trip, our route was essentially the only street leading in our direction and so there were others also making their way up.

After teasing us which gentle slopes and smooth surfaces for the first few hundred metres the path got rougher steeper and rockier and the gasps of the less fit (me) grew louder as we struggled ever upward.  Finally our guide pointed at an imposing building at the top of a particularly vertiginous climb.

“Is that where we’re staying?” I asked more in hope than expectation, I know how this works now.  The guide pooh poohed such a naive thought but did acknowledge that the gite we were staying at was just behind it.  With the salt of my sweat mingling indistinguishably with my tears of despair we continued.

Eventually we arrived at the village of Aroumd where we would be staying for the night.  We were just in time for lunch.  To add some context another tour group arrived at 2.30 in the morning and they were just in time for dinner.

We were staying in a gite, a family run home stay/guesthouse which afforded spectacular views of the High Atlas.  While there I felt something I hadn’t felt before in Morocco, cool.

With lunch disposed of the question arose of what to do with the rest of the day.  Some four kilometres further up the same mountain was the shrine of Sidi Chamharouch.  Visiting it would be a four hour return trip.  The younger and fitter amongst us were keen and some of those who were older and putatively wiser decided to go along as well. For reasons I can’t begin to explain I was one of them.

Off we set pointing our noses at the heavens while our feet tried to avoid the mule crap.  The path was narrow, rocky and mules had right of way which required a certain amount of cliff hugging from time to time.  The aforementioned youngsters capered ahead bounding from rock to rock and finding the time to chatter amongst themselves the while.  The only reasons they weren’t murdered by the older travellers were a) they were out of reach and b) sheer physical incapacity.  The journey was gruelling but the scenery was stupendous, the air was crisp and there was a guy with an espresso machine partway up the mountain.  I visited on both the outward end return journeys.

The shrine itself was a little underwhelming but its location, high in the mountains with a stream gushing through was superb.  I allowed myself a feeling of triumph and took photos to prove I had made it.  Then it came time for the trip back down.  This was if anything even worse as much of the path was loose rock and needed to be taken with extreme care if you didn’t want to descend the mountain at a rate unconducive to good health.  One of the other shall we say, more mature travellers and I helped each other over the difficult bits (most of it) and eventually we arrived physically exhausted in the village of Aroumd for the second time that day.

Travelling Hopefully - Cultural AF Edition

We arrived in Marrakech after a hot, semi sleepless night rattling through the Moroccan countryside.  Hot, grimy and weary we were delivered to our hotel which cheerfully stored our bags but refused to let us into our rooms until the day was a little older.

“Who wants to go on a four hour walking tour of Marrakech?” asked our guide.

“No” I whimpered.

“Yes,” said everybody else.

So off we went into the depths of Marrakech.  We passed by the oldest mosque in the city which is right next to the ruins of what would have been the oldest mosque in the city if they hadn’t demolished it immediately after construction.  Mosques are supposed to be aligned so that the faithful can face towards Mecca when they pray.  Unfortunately the architect got his calculations a bit wrong so they replaced it with a new one.  Unfortunately the architect overcompensated for his original mistake and this one isn’t properly aligned either.  Rather than build a third they redesigned the interior so that prayers could be accomplished appropriately.  They also stuck an iron structure on the roof pointing in the appropriate direction.  Local legend also claims this is what the Sultan hung the architect from after botching his calculations twice.

Once past the geographically challenged mosque we headed into the old town.  While we were there I broke a palace.  In my defence it was a very small break and the palace was very large.  We managed to leave before anyone noticed.

For the record the palace was a beautifully laid out structure with exquisitely decorated ceilings.  There were handsome gardens and open courtyards with fountains (one of which may now be a little bit damaged).  It was truly a palace fit for a king.  It will probably come as no surprise to learn it actually belonged to a grand vizier.

Having been hastened away from the palace before I could do any more damage we returned to the Medina presumably on the assumption that any damage there would go unnoticed.  People tried to sell us things, sweat rolled into my eyes (and pretty much everywhere else) and I stumbled blindly on.  Eventually the tour ended and we caught a bus back to our hotel which graciously deigned to let us enter.  

That evening we had dinner at a rooftop restaurant overlooking the main square.  Above street level it was confusingly chilly a situation which lasted precisely until we returned to ground level.  Our dinner was enlivened by the call to prayer as it turns out there was a mosque literally next door.

After my introduction to both Marrakech and heat exhaustion I planned a lazy day but eventually wound up accompanying one of my tour comrades to visit the Jardin Majorelle a beautifully created garden right next to the Yves Saint Laurent museum.  Saint Laurent didn’t create the garden but acquired it and essentially turned it into a design showcase.  I took a photo of frogs in one of the ponds.

Being more of a performance piece than an actual park you can’t just wander around.  You have to follow a specific set path that will take from the entrance to the inevitable gift shop at the end.  Any deviation from this route would see you set upon by park security who were significantly more numerous and fitter than the park employees I’m used to.

At the end of the park was a small museum housing Berber jewellery which I popped into because it was included in my ticket.

What was not included in my ticket was entrance to the YSL Museum.  This was by design as my interest in Yves Saint Laurent pretty much begins and ends with the garden.  My companion took herself along to be immersed in all things fashion while I repaired to a convenient cafe for an appropriately overpriced sandwich.  

As far as culture goes Cindy I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.

Travelling Hopefully - A Train From Tangier Edition

 Tangier is legendary to people of a certain generation.  A haven for artists, beatniks, deviants and the sort of people you generally boast are part of your cultural heritage while simultaneously refusing to let them into your home.

On the negative side there was a depraved, drug addled degeneracy living side by side with all this creativity and free expression.  On the positive side there was a depraved, drug addled degeneracy living side by side with all this creativity and free expression.

The cause of Tangier’s status as a free wheeling, anything goes location was the fact that for several decades during the twentieth century it was ruled by a combination of several European countries who used it to experiment with policies they could never have got away with at home like absolutely free trade and minimal taxation. 

Or to be blunt Tangier’s status as an artistic Mecca completely depended on the sort of colonial occupation that is now considered quite a bad thing.  The Europeans handed the place back to Morocco in the 1950s and Tangier sank to a squalid crime riddled hole.  Which is pretty much what it always was but now without the artists.

However Tangier is now on the up.  The government has invested a lot of money giving the waterfront a facelift and setting up industries in the city and now nobody needs to make a living robbing, selling drugs to or ripping off tourists unless they really want to.

Into this freshly rejuvenated city came our little bus load of tourists.  Those who had been here before marvelled at the improvements those who hadn’t simply assumed it had always been like that.  We would get the opportunity to get lost in the Medina later but first there was a picnic in a park stuffed so full of eucalyptus trees that you could have imagined you were in Australia.

After a stroll around a suspiciously clean Medina we made our way to Cafe Hafa which is famous as a place where artists hung out when artists hung out there.  It opened in 1921 and doesn’t seem to have been renovated since.  The views over the harbour are stupendous and the over sweetened mint tea is free.  At least it’s free if the waiter plonks it in front of you and then wanders off.  Apparently he returned demanding payment about fifteen minutes later but we’d left by then.

But the real attraction for us was the Tangier train station where an overnight train waited to take us to Marrakech.  I bunked in with my guide and the only two other males on our tour.  As we waited for the train to leave we were entertained by a Frenchwoman having a meltdown because she thought booking a berth entitled her to a compartment by herself.  Both our guide and the train conductor agreed that the French are irrational, demanding pricks (sorry Alison) and on that note of agreement we rolled into the night.

Travelling Hopefully - Blue Edition

The next day our guide approached the group with tears in his eyes.  Between sobs he announced that he had been unable to book us tickets on the local bus to Chefchaouen and had been reduced to hiring us a private minibus instead.  We bore up nobly under this disappointment and wrestled the gun from his hand as he attempted to expunge his shame in the traditional way.

Once we had dried his tears we piled into the hired minibus with an almost obscene enthusiasm.  A few hours of thundering privately down the roads of Morocco later and we arrived in Chefchaouen a name which means “we found a bunch of vowels lying around and decided to use them all.  

We’re now in the Spanish portion of Morocco which is to say that bit of Morocco that was once ruled by the Spanish.  Ironically Chefchaouen was settled by refugees from Spain fleeing the Reconquista and subsequent expulsion of the Moorish population.  Apparently the only thing they managed to take with them was a supply of blue paint.

At some point the inhabitants of Chefchaouen decided to paint their houses blue and white.  Our guide suggested that this may have been inspired by the Jewish population but the remaining locals picked up on the idea enthusiastically and now the city is a blue beacon in the Rif Mountains some of which are a little close to the town for comfort.

Naturally Chefchaouen has an old town complete with casbah, mosques and shops, so many shops.  All in a haze of blue.  Here I bought Humpy the camel who will probably feature further in this blog and managed to get a shave.

The barber had a TV broadcasting stories from the Quran (helpfully subtitled in English).  While I waited for my shave I listened to the story of Joseph who was betrayed by his jealous brothers and sold into slavery but gained the favour of the pharaoh and wound up as a high ranking governor and was reunited with his grief stricken father praise be to Allah the All Merciful and Compassionate.

Much of the remaining time I spent in the company of two of my fellow travellers who turned out to have a serious blue door fetish.  We roamed the Medina photographing blue doors.  Every single door in the Medina is blue.  I diverted them temporarily by pointing out some nearby goats which led to a flurry of goat photographs but pretty soon we were back to doors again.

The next evening we went up to the Spanish mosque which overlooks the town.  The Spanish built this to pander to the natives when they took over however the locals showed their disdain for the occupiers by never using it.  Now it serves as a convenient place for tourists to take photos of the city and for the locals to try and sell them hashish.  I got five offers in the time I was up there including two from the same guy.  We were in Chefchaouen for two days and I was offered drugs eleven times.  Maybe it’s something about my face.

Travelling Hopefully - Fes edition

Replete with camel burgers we hopped on a train to Fes.  Fes is one of the old royal capitals of Morocco and is famous for the age and size of its Medina or old town.  It also has a new town and then an even newer town.  This is the trouble with naming things “new”.  By the time you get around to naming them “new” they aren’t any more.  The “new town” in Fes dates to the fourteenth century, it was plenty new back then but time passed as time has an annoying habit of doing and now Fes has a large collection of buildings that date from well after the fourteenth century.  Some of them are even new although they won’t be by the time you read this blog entry.

We went past the royal palace which is right next to the New (ie Old) Town and admired a handsome door.  This door is recent (I hesitate to say “new”) and was a gift to the king from the city of Fes.  He spent a couple of years here while Covid was at its height.  Now things have died down a little he’s out and about showing the royal visage in other cities of Morocco.

Once the palace had been appropriately gawped at we were taken to a pottery.  Fes produces a fine grey clay which when baked becomes a brilliant white.  We were given instruction on how the journey from clay to souvenir shop took place picking up mosaics on the way.

Loaded down with crockery we stumbled on.

It is the Medina or “old town” (that’s a name that just keeps getting more accurate) of Fes that we’ve really come to see.  Parts of it date to the eighth century (the fourteenth is looking pretty new now I bet) and it is the largest non car urban environment in the world.  There are fifteen thousand streets in the Medina not one of them wide enough to drive a car down.  Still each of those streets has a name, receives mail and, more impressively, has plumbing, electricity and internet connections.

The Medina has mosques, markets, what claims to be the world’s first university, workshops and a tannery.  We visited the tannery because there’s nothing like the pervasive odour of pigeon shit to make you feel properly medieval.  The fact that you could purchase the tannery’s products on your credit card did spoil the illusion a little.

On our way in we were handed sprigs of mint to hold to our nose like a seventeenth century nobleman.  This was to make sure that the pigeon shit didn’t quite overcome us.  We were not I hasten to assure my readers down amongst the vats ourselves.  We gazed down from on high  as the labourers toiled among the filth below.  If this is inequality them I’m all for it.  In actual fact most people are in favour of inequality as long as they’re on the right side of the ledger.

From our eyrie we watched the toiling masses (about a dozen guys actually) and held mint delicately to our noses when some faint trace of the odour of labour came our way.  Then we turned our attention to buying the products of said labour.

So in essence they take an animal hide, soak it in limestone and pigeon shit for about twenty days, beat the crap out of it , soak it in various vegetable and mineral dyes and then persuade someone to drape the finished product over their person.  Despite the fact that we saw all this happening some people did indeed make purchases.  The camel belly leather was absolutely beautiful and not for the first time I regretted the fact that I tend to fill a bag before I go on holidays.  I should really just take an empty bag and fill it as I go.

In addition to the tannery we went to a fabric makers where we were shown exactly how much repetitive, gruelling work it takes to make something we can toss lightly about our shoulders.  I did buy something there.  

Then we retired for lunch before we got on with some serious sightseeing.  In truth the Medina was a little too much of a good thing.  I love the medieval streetscape and the incredible amount of activity that happens here but it’s just too big.  We had a local guide as our regular guide frankly admitted that he got lost every time he went in there.  If I had gone in by myself you would never have seen me again and this blog entry would have been scratched on a Medina wall next to my withered corpse.

Travelling Hopefully - Camelburger Edition

 After a too short stay in Moulay Idriss we headed back to Meknes but we didn’t go directly; that’s exactly what they would have expected us to do.  Instead we dropped in on the Roman city of Volubilis.

Volubilis was once the Westernmost city in the Roman Empire but sometime in the fourth century with the western empire in fast rewind the city was abandoned.  The local Berbers may or may not have had something to do with this abandonment.  According to our guide the Berbers then razed the city to ensure that the Romans didn’t return.  Another option is that the subsequent power in the area decided Fes would make a better location for a city.  Since Fes is still there over a thousand years later who am I to argue.

Of course when they say “ruined city” what they actually mean is ruined foundations.  The bit of the city that protruded above the ground suffered from, well it suffered from a number of things actually; earthquakes, abandonment and the fact that having a source of immediately available dressed stone proved irresistible for the builders of other cities in the vicinity.  This is either a staggering act of cultural vandalism or a laudable form of recycling depending on your point of view.

There were however floors in abundance some of which had some very beautiful mosaics.  A few structures have been partially rebuilt with the original materials as far they were available/identifiable to give an appropriate “ruined city” appearance as opposed to just a field of overgrown rubble.

On our way back to the exit we came across a turtle (or tortoise) rustling through the grass.  Over the course of the next ten minutes we traumatised the crap out of that poor reptile trying to take photos of it while it huddled inside its shell and waited for the storm to pass.  I got a couple of good pictures of what appears to be a tortoiseshell stone weeping with fear myself.

Once we were done with the tortoise torturing we left the poor beast to whatever peace it could find and piled into taxis bound for Meknes.

Meknes has a royal palace you can look at when it isn’t closed which it was and the mausoleum of Moulay Ismael, one of Morocco’s greatest rulers.  As is usual you can determine a ruler’s greatness by the accompanying body count and Moulay Ismael had a tally that looks impressive even by today’s standards.  To be fair when you have eighty three brothers and half brothers with a claim to the throne then a certain level of homicidal mania is probably a vital survival trait.  It was Moulay Ismael who kicked the British out of Tangier (what were they doing there?) and his campaigns conquered much of what is now Morocco.

The mausoleum was large and beautifully decorated with gorgeous mosaic tiling, plush rugs and fountains.  It was also cool which is a major draw card pretty much anywhere in Morocco.

After gawping at the mausoleum we wandered through the market where someone adorned me with a possibly dead snake for photo purposes and a storekeeper sold me a Moroccan football shirt while commenting that I was too fat for a medium size.  He was obviously pretty confident that he wouldn’t be getting any repeat business out of me.

With reptile photography and personal insults taken care of we repaired to a cafe apparently owned by a couple of cats.  There was a small boy whose job appeared to be to fail to chase the cats out of the dining room.  At this cafe those of us who weren’t doing the southern part of the tour and thus wouldn’t get the opportunity to ride a camel could make up for this by eating one instead.  For the record the camel burger was perfectly nice.  It tasted like pretty much any other meat that is ground into a patty and served in a bun.