Travel with Indigo

A seaside resort city, Agadir has colorfully landscaped boulevards, a fine beachfront promenade and a modern marina/condo/ retail complex where we were pleased to dock.  There is little of the tumbledown squalor so evident in Casablanca. Here, too, the severe strictures of Islamic life are nowhere to be seen. Casinos, Western style nightclubs, bars, beach resorts and brothels abound, all repugnant to the imams but delightful to their flocks.

Docked near us was a high-tech row boat on which a man and woman were about to set out to sea in an attempt to break some record for an Atlantic crossing, maybe that for Middle Aged, Mixed Doubles. They were busy storing supplies when we tied up. Both easily in their forties and neither looking particularly fit, I suppose they must have had a hard time of it if they made it at all.

Wishing to see the interior of Morocco and particularly its vast desert, I rented a car, bought a map and set out for the exotic city of Marrakech on the flat plains northwest of the High Atlas Mountains. To get there, I took a route deliberately off the main highway and through these mountains so that I might gain an impression of local village life. What I saw on the way to my first stop was an endless procession of flyblown dusty villages, almost entirely without benefit of greenery and littered with the trash the villagers routinely discard at their sides.

Every village was much like every other in its dispiriting appearance. Two- and three-story, flat roofed, unadorned buildings built of cinder block on simple concrete frames and smeared over in khaki-colored stucco line both sides of the road, each adjoining the other in row house fashion. In every case, the ground floor is a shop of some kind and the upper floors house the extended family that owns and built the building.

Men all over Morocco dress in a floor length, snug fitting, long sleeved robe called a jellabah, which come in a variety of colors all of them dull. Its most peculiar feature, seen on no other Arab or North African robe, is its tall conical attached hood resembling that of a KKK white-sheet outfit giving the wearer the look of an Imperial Wizard or, more benignly, a Smurf. Their choice of footwear is often brightly colored, leather slippers whose pointed, upturned toes contribute to a generally cartoonish appearance. In a weak moment, I bought a pair of these but you’re unlikely ever to see me wear them in public, barring some overly celebratory occasion.

The women, however, are among the most vividly attired people I have ever seen anywhere. Their long robes and headscarves come in a wide variety of bright fabrics varying from garish solids to wildly floral patterns, some neon in their iridescence. Against the relentlessly dreary village backdrop, these striking hues offer a meager touch of cheer. On many occasions, I saw farm trucks transporting these women to or from some agricultural job. With all of them standing in the breeze of the truck bed, the scene brought to mind a very large open box of richly colored Crayons traveling down the road. I rarely saw women wearing the burqa.

I stopped for lunch in the first large town I came to, called Taroudant, a regional market center. It is a medina, the term for a traditional Arab town enclosed by high ramparts, which gets its name from Medina in what is now Saudi Arabia where Mohammed found refuge from persecution. The town’s four miles of enclosing ramparts are smoothly finished in stucco and freshly painted in red-ochre, roads around them are tastefully landscaped and recently repaved and the enormous gated entries through them into the town are marked by an array of flagpoles all with flags flapping in the wind. These features suggest that inside the high walls there must be something like an historic theme park but once the visitor passes through a gate he gains an altogether different impression.

What the walls have shielded from view is an authentic and very active Moroccan market town, warts and all. Narrow laneways, barely wider than my car and often blocked by donkey carts, twist and wind through the town in such a haphazard pattern that it’s impossible to know where you are. The air is filled with dust kicked up by the ever present desert wind bringing with it pungent smells of donkeys, fishmongers and exotic spices and the ground is littered with trash.

In no time at all, I became hopelessly lost in the confused labyrinth unable to find the central square that I sought. At that moment, a motorbike with two young men aboard pulled up next to me and the one on the back began chattering away in passable English to the effect that he could see that I was lost and that I should follow him to the square. I had the impression that he did this sort of thing for a living and that I had been chosen much in the manner as a con man chooses his mark. They led me on a bewildering trail through the town until finally we came to a congested parking area at the edge of a souk where a man standing there as if an attendant directed me to a parking slot. According to the chatterer, the man was one of his many cousins. Of course he is, I thought.

My newly acquired guide, Golub by name, turned out to be an affable and helpful fellow, despite my initial misgivings, and took me on a delightful tour through the bafflement of laneways stopping for lunch at a popular café located right alongside the public square. Instead of escorting me to the ground floor where the locals, all men, were eating and jabbering away, Golub directed me to a shady table on a rooftop veranda with a fine view of the square. When asked why he wished to separate me from the locals, he grinned and said, with surprising prescience for such a young man, that he thought I might like to have wine with my meal and, after all, this is a devoutly religious town where alcohol is strictly forbidden. With that, he disappeared and returned shortly with a bottle of a strictly forbidden, though outstanding, French rose´, properly chilled and wrapped discreetly in old newsprint, thus revealing himself to be a clever and resourceful guide and one whose attitude toward Islamic constraints can only be described as carefree. I didn’t know what the penalty was for an American caught drinking alcohol in a devoutly pious Muslim town and hoped I wouldn’t find out.

After lunch, Golub took me down a few grimy back alleys to a tiny house that, like all the others, lacked refinements and needed paint and a good cleaning inside and out. There I was introduced to a man who led me inside to its cramped front room where three matronly ladies were squatted on the floor operating primitive hand powered grinding machines in which they were gnashing argan nuts in the process of turning them into a rare and costly oil for which he claimed an assortment of fanciful properties. I passed up the chance to buy direct from the manufacturer.

It was in this town that I first saw black African men dressed in the same get ups as the locals. They were from the desperately poor neighboring country of Mauritania come to the merely poor Morocco to find jobs. If Mauritania is on your list of places to visit, I recommend you remove it. Only trouble and bad food await you there, so Golub and others told me.

Two-thirds of Moroccans, including most of the people from this part of the country, are Berbers, an ancient indigenous people who historically inhabited the Maghreb from the Nile Valley west to the Atlantic coast. Although they continue to speak Tamazight, the Berber language, most are also fluent in a dialect of Arabic and may also speak French or Spanish. Although few speak English, I was always greeted warmly.  When told that I was an American, they smiled broadly with evident approval and went on cheerfully about President Obama. Darker skinned people around the world often occupy the lower rungs of society and are consequently elated that a man with skin like their own could attain such a high office. If he can do it, there’s a chance that I too can climb the ladder they think.

Morocco’s culture, rich and varied, is predominantly Berber with strong influences from the French and Spanish. Though there is much corruption, it is a constitutional monarchy, generally liberal and very much pro-Western and especially friendly to the U.S. Sunni is the principal Islamic sect, but surprisingly Jews have lived in the country more or less peacefully and undisturbed for centuries. Once numbering about 265,000 in the 1940s, they are down to about 5,500 now as a result of migrations to France and Israel. On the darker side, Morocco is a major producer and transshipment point for drugs flowing into Europe.

Golub and others told me that Moroccans despise the people of neighboring Algeria for a variety of reasons, not least because they harbor jihadists who, he said, subscribe to a corrupted reading of the Koran and in their murderous evil give the religion a bad name it doesn’t deserve. In fact, he said, not far from one of my intended destinations in the desert is a remote Moroccan village, called Tindouf, where Al Qaeda operates a training camp for terrorists, mostly Algerians. Don’t go there, he said, or they’ll spot you as a Westerner and kill you on sight. With that, I decided I would not go wandering about in the far desert or anywhere in Algeria as I had planned. The warning about Tindouf was also delivered to me by another man I met farther along on this trip, so I take it to be reliable. Why the Moroccan government tolerates such a camp I don’t know. An even greater mystery is why the US government, with Moroccan consent, hasn’t destroyed it.

From my visits to various towns, especially those in the interior, I can say that Moroccans have undoubtedly the worst teeth of any people I have ever encountered. Golub, for example, is only in his mid-twenties and has what appear to be just four upper teeth, all hanging precariously at irregular and various angles and stained in a variety of the darker hues, none of them appealing. His lower jaw is somewhat more populated, holding maybe eight or ten teeth, and these too are twisted at odd angles and badly discolored. Older men and women, meaning anybody over about 40, have almost no whole teeth at all, just blackened stubs with wide gaps between these. Despite this, Moroccans insist on smiling quite a lot, something you soon wish they would not do. The cause of this deformity, as best I could determine, is their habit of drinking sickly sweet tea and eating lots of sugary dates, combined with obviously poor home care. A Moroccan taxi driver I encountered in New Orleans (really!) told me when asked about this that there is a chemical naturally occurring in their drinking water that eats away at Moroccan teeth, a claim I doubt.

Upon leaving Taroudant, I took a road that ran high up into the snow dusted Atlas Mountains on its tortuous path to Marrakesh, my next destination. It turned out to be at once the most scenic and most treacherous road I think I’ve ever traveled. That a part of it was marked as dangerous on my Michelin map should have been a hint had I bothered to notice before setting out. Scenery along the way was much what I expect a road through the Hindu Kush would reveal: nearly treeless soaring mountains, roads in disrepair and their cliff-side edges unprotected by guardrails, goat herders clogging the way with their flocks. So severe are the mountains that progress up them is made in tightly wound switchbacks. Here and there are tiny villages plastered onto the precipitous ground, their houses made entirely of dried mud bricks with flat mud roofs.

Unable to make more than about twenty miles an hour, night descended long before I reached Marrakech adding an extra dimension of excitement to the driving. With help from a GPS, I reached my hotel just before midnight. Part of a huge golf resort on the outskirts of town, the place looked next morning as if it belonged somewhere in Florida were it not for some distinctly Moroccan design features. During my brief stay, it was host to a convention of French doctors. If you’re interested, it’s called Palmeraie Golf Palace, named after the expansive palm grove in which it is sited.

Marrakech, known as the Miami of Africa, was one of the best places I’ve ever visited and I would gladly return there often. This Berber city of a million inhabitants sits on a plateau at the point of interchange between the Sahara, the High Atlas Mountains and the Anti-Atlas Mountains and was once the capital of a great empire. It is today the principal city of South Morocco and is the country’s third largest city after Casablanca and Rabat. Its fabulous palaces, luxuriant palm groves and wildly exuberant central market hold a powerful fascination for visitors, including me. I loved the place. For a photo gallery on the city, see the iPad app called fotopedia Heritage and there bring up the Marrakech Medina.

All first-time visitors to the city head straight for the enormous medina, and so did I. Its ramparts, at 12 miles long, up to 6 feet thick and 30 feet high, are impressive to say the least and kept in immaculate repair. Within these are souks (specialized markets) specializing in just about every product Morocco offers, like brass and copper items, carpets (of course), jewelry, leather goods, clothing, fabrics, skins, fruits and vegetables, live chickens, basketry and much, much more. These days there are many fashionable shops and swish restaurants too, mostly with a French flair. As in Taroudant, the ramparts hide a confusion of narrow streets, alleyways and paths all going this way and that, often blocked by the ubiquitous donkey carts, and blanketed in smells, not all of them pleasant.

At the heart and soul of the medina, indeed of all Marrakech, stands the riotously seductive and always fascinating Place Jemma el-Fna, or Jemma as it is locally known, said to be the world’s busiest square, a claim I would not dispute. As darkness settles in, Jemma begins to take on a character like no other place I know of, becoming a gigantic, multifaceted open-air spectacle. Water sellers, snake charmers, mystics, palm readers, dancers, acrobats, magicians, musicians, storytellers, showmen, con artists, soothsayers and tooth-pullers gather to practice their trade on locals and tourists alike. The air soon fills with leaping flames and dense smoke from grilling meat, the aromas of spices and cooking food, the sounds of exotic music and the hectoring of insistent merchants. As the night wears on, the music becomes louder and more hypnotic, and soon you begin to think you have stumbled into a joyous Arabic version of Dante’s Inferno.

Outdoor food vendors selling everything from fresh squeezed orange juice to sausages, soups, salads, and lamb kebabs, all outstanding and tasty, make it unnecessary to dine in a restaurant. You can just buy what you like and take it with you as you walk around astounded by the feverish delirium that surrounds you. Jemma alone is worth the trip to Marrakech, though with a word of caution kept firmly in mind.

Just a few months after I was there, a Moroccan affiliate of Al Qaeda detonated a powerful bomb in the always crowded two-story Café Argan fronting on the Jemma plaza killing 15 and wounding 23. It was past this very café that I strolled several times, on each occasion deciding not to go inside because it was so crowded. Eight years before, the same group killed 45 in a bomb attack in Casablanca. One more note of caution: while I was there a young, blonde Western girl was attacked at 7 in the morning as she walked to her car parked in the medina but was rescued by passersby responding to her screams. Marrakech is a generally safe place, always full of Western tourists, especially the French, but, as anywhere, you do need to be mindful.

Within the medina’s ramparts is also the more sedate and decidedly tidier Kasbah, a term meaning a fortified citadel. From the Jemma, it is entered through a massive portal called the Bab Agnaou.  Inside are the Royal Palace and a variety of souks, food stalls, restaurants and hotels.

Wishing to be nearer the action and to avoid having to search for a parking spot, I moved to the justly legendary La Mamounia Hotel, surely one of the finest in the world, and at 800 Euros a night for a basic room, one of the dearest too. Its magnificent 20-acre garden is lush with olive and orange trees and stately palms, and it is just a ten minute walk from Jemma. You will not stay in a finer, more sumptuous hotel anywhere. Check out the website at mamounia.com, especially the amazing photo gallery. It received the Conde Nast 2011 Award for Best Service, only the latest among the many prizes it has collected since it reopened in 2009 after a three-year renovation.

Most of the low-rise structures throughout the Moroccan interior, including ramparts, kasbahs, palaces, enclosing walls and even modern desert villas (although not Hotel La Mamounia) are built using a construction method called pise´, a French word for rammed earth. These look as if they were made of stucco or adobe, have smooth surfaces and are almost uniformly the color of red clay or khaki. If you can picture a desert fort used by the French Foreign Legion in movies of the 1940s, you’ll have a good idea of pise´-built structures. For a description of the technique, see Wikipedia under Rammed Earth.

Other buildings are built of dried mud bricks, sometimes with chopped straw added, and often have flat roofs made of dried mud. The warm coloration and use of rounded edges and their simple unadorned surfaces give these buildings a much softer and more restrained appearance than if they were built of concrete.

While the exterior of so many Moroccan structures are unadorned, the interiors are often extraordinarily ornate, employing intricate geometric patterns, mosaics and rich hues. See the fotopedia Heritage app for excellent examples from the Medina Mosque, among others.

Had I had more time, I would have stayed in Marrakech a week or more. It’s just a fascinating place that I liked very much. But Indigo needed to get moving so we could cross the Atlantic during a time of year with generally favorable weather, and thus I needed to get moving on my land adventure.