A North African Sojourn

It was all Bart´s idea. He finished his Masters degree in Nutter studies a few months ago but has never been to an Islamic country. The problem is that all his young friends are not walkers so he is often stuck with someone 30 years older than himself if he wishes to venture into the mountains. Bart has several good points, he is a very good mule and, when asked about hiring a donkey or horse, I just had to point to Bart, carrying both packs. As you know there are two languages in the world, English and Foreign. The problem is that Johnny Foreigner keeps insisting on changing his dialect to confuse me. I have just about stopped using a Chinese dialect in Spain so we go to Morocco and what sort of dialect do they speak (apart from some oddity with no vowels and lots of grunting and coughing that is) – yes French. Of course all my foreign kept coming out as Spanish – much to the young whipper-snapper´s amusement. As he understands many dialects this is also another benefit of his presence. Oh yes, he is also an excellent payer. The fool also laughs at my jokes! What benefit am I to him you may well ask. I have been asking the same question. Well he is a lazy navigator – not incompetent just lazy. Apart from that…
So it was off to Morocco at the end of December. Obviously a good idea, Africa is warm all the year round. Correct? You could have fooled me. It was cool and damp every day except the three days we were walking in the mountains. However, it is cheap and I mean cheap. We never spent more than 150 Dirham´s a night for a room. Breakfast was normally 30 or 40 for the two of us, and dinner normally less than 200. (1 Euro is about 11 Dirhams, 1 RMB is about 1.2 Dirhams. The rest of you that use those dodgy, unstable currencies like the pound and assorted dollars will have to work out an answer that you understand.) The quality of the food for a non-carnivore is limited, and I mean limited. The main local cuisine is called tajine; this is not a particular dish but a method of cooking – a sort of boiling stew cooked in a clay pot. Ingredients can be many and varied but about 80% of tajine dishes have meat in them so a bit of a bummer for me (and Bart to some extent, he is trying to reduce his meat eating). Actually the vegetarian ones are pretty tasty and the occasional fish one was a relief. Oh, and I don´t like cuscus.

Anyway we met safely at Marrakesh railway station in the evening and proceeded to the hotel that Bart had found (he had arrived the day before me) and dumped my bag. Time for a spot of food (my first tajine) and beer, of course. Bart was impressed that the first question I asked in the hotel was the location of a local hostelry for the dispensing of the aforementioned beverage. This can be an issue in Morocco as it is officially a Muslim state but, fortunately, not that Muslim. So there are a few bars – for the tourists we were informed later by a distinctly drunken but very pleasant Moroccan. The beer was called Flag and cost 25 Dirhams for a 24 ml. can. When you work out the cost you will realise why we only had four each. It is also, if you will pardon my Foreign, piss water. The brewers are very proud of the fact that they won the gold medal in the International class in Amsterdam. Very worthy you might think but it was in 1981! Think about French beer 30 years ago and you will get the idea.

The centre of interest in the city at night is the very large square, which has a collection of snake-charmers, jugglers, animals on display and other assorted hustlers. At night it is also a place to eat but not for locals, the people eating were all tourists.

Up quite a long time after the lark in the morning and a quick wander round the square again (this time the produce was much more for the locals) and souks including breakfast (pancakes with honey plus coffee) but Bart had had a day and a half to wander round before I arrived so we hired bikes for the afternoon and headed out of the city. This was fine for me as I had three days to fill after Bart left so I could spend some of the time doing the wandering bit. Or so I thought.

We had probably got as far as 500 metres when we had the first incident. Bart (who was in front of me) hit a roadside sign. Unfortunately, I didn´t see this as, at the same moment, a moped came out of a side road and hit my front wheel. The moped rider wobbled, looked round at me and carried on! This was not a real problem as I didn´t fall off in the traffic, the front wheel just twisted through 90 degrees whilst the handlebars didn´t move. This is obviously a safety design feature. Although slightly chastened by the experience we weren´t deterred in the least; we have both done a fair bit of cycling in countries where driving standards are not of the highest on bikes also not of the highest quality. I did get a little nervous on the dual carriageway leading out of town. Of the two lanes half of the kerbside one is naturally used for parking and the other half of that lane is used for intermittent double parking. Obviously you are a bit exposed on a bike but that wasn´t the real problem. There was a pavement (sidewalk) about 4 metres wide down either side of the road but did all the pedestrians use it? No of course not, the road is nice and smooth so they walk two abreast down the road outside the double-parked cars. Naturally you are just passing on your bike as well and have to swing wide or you would hit the poor innocent pedestrians on their afternoon stroll. You can imagine the location of the cyclist at this point.

Marrakesh itself is certainly not rich but it does have a bustle about it and people are pretty well dressed – well they are at least dressed. Once we got out into the villages (which wasn´t far) standards dropped substantially and the quality of the housing was typical of many parts of Sub-Sahara Africa. There were lots of kids around and even the girls were laughing at the fat old foreigner on the bike. However, for once, I was in the lead and it was Bart that got hit by a stone fired from one of the catapults all the boys carry! We did the usual trick for assessing poverty levels of counting the number of satellite dishes per household. It was close to 100% so the local people weren´t complete basket cases.

We headed back into the outskirts and stopped for a late lunch which was, of course, pizza. Yes I had been in the country less than 24 hours and was already fed up with the local cuisine. Bart´s vegetable (note not vegetarian) pizza didn´t have very much meat on it. Later we headed out into a different suburb and what a different story. Rows and rows of beautiful new villas – 90% of them empty. Yes the property collapse has reached Morocco as well.

Normally I only use guide books to get a general idea about an area and any hotel or restaurant mentioned by Lonely Planet has to be avoided like the plague because the only people you see in such places are foreign tourists. However, The Rough Guide described the Bar Samovar thus “An old-fashioned low-life drinking den. The customers get increasingly wasted as the evening progresses – if you want to see the underside of Moroccos´s drinking culture, this is where to come.” How could we resist? It was an all-male preserve, except a couple of working girls and we were the only foreigners there most of the time. (It was in the Samovar that we were told that bars are for tourists.) In fact it was a pretty good place, people were cheerful and happily drinking their beer and liked to talk to the foreigners. Bart was cheerfully drivelling away in the French version of foreign but a couple of people were happy to chat to me in a proper language. Beer was half the price of the bar the night before. (If this was an email there would be a smiley emoticon here – aren´t you glad this is a real communication.)
Off to the mountains in the morning. Rather against our better principles we got a taxi. We could have saved about 200 Dirhams (D from now on) but it was just a lot of hassle to get three buses and not know if we would get accommodation when we arrived at Imlil. Anyway this was successfully achieved and we settled down for a lunchtime freeze. Imlil is at 1,700 metres and it was dull and drizzling. A stroll in the afternoon up a side route from the planned route on the morrow (up Toubkal, at 4,207 metres the highest mountain in North Africa) was pleasant and green but nothing special. When we got back to the hostel there was a fire going and three Irishman who had just returned from Toubkal so we were set for a wild New Year´s Eve. These guys had been in Morocco for nearly three weeks, much of it camping in the south of the Atlas and were travelling so light that they had no books with them. Yes and no beer for three weeks. I will repeat that - three Irishmen, three weeks and no beer! They had all seen a few winters and were very experienced walkers and informed us that we would need crampons and ice-axes from about half way on the following day, and it was two days to the top. They had been lucky and reached the top the previous day before the wind and the snow made reaching the summit impossible on the day we arrived. Bart and I had had a slight difference of opinion before we left England, I had pointed out that we would need serious equipment for such a mountain in winter. Bart said a friend of his had done the trip at the same time of year and it was easy. I had just about enough equipment but Bart was not well equipped for such conditions. (He subsequently revealed that his friend was rather gung ho about many things, including climbing mountains.) A Scottish/Australian couple came in a bit later and provided a solution, up the valley we had strolled up earlier in the day. The change of heart by me had nothing to do with me being an old fart worrying about his blood pressure, no, definitely not. Bart was happy to agree with the change of plan, or at least he has such good manners that he said that he was.
Dinner was finished by 8.30 so only 3 ½ hours until the New Year. Mine host had put up a few decorations (apparently this has nothing to do with Christmas, they were for New Year, they just happen to have been up for quite a few days) and constantly played some dreadful music on a terrible piece of sound equipment. I think he was a bit perplexed that the music mysteriously went off every time he went out of the room. About 10 o´clock he produced a sparkler and started to dance. I was invited to dance with him but protested that I needed some alcohol. He wandered off and a produced a bottle of, wait for it, balsamic vinegar! After we had stopped laughing Bart kindly explained what it was for. Long before midnight there was only Bart and I left and at the magic hour I was reading a book and Bart was cleaning his teeth. I cannot remember the last time I had a dry New Year but it was a long time before Thatcher.
Off in the morning after Bart announced that the Irish had won the snoring competition and a different Irishman lent us a plastic bag in which to leave the stuff that we didn´t need for the next two or three days – the two events weren´t related.
Lovely half days walk, and that is all it was, the next stopping point after the one identified by the Scot/Aussie couple was too far. We got accosted as we reached the village by someone offering accommodation. This was cheap, and I mean cheap – 30 D each for a bed or 100 for Dinner, Bed & Breakfast. After inspecting the plentiful accommodation we enquired about a fire (there was no fireplace) and, upon being reassured that one would be present, duly accepted. We enquired of our host about buying fruit and chocolate for the morrow. He was good enough to point out that there was only one shop locally but if we walked down into the village there were many, many shop. This seemed like a kindly suggestion and we had a pleasant time looking round the village in which there were many, many child, a few women, no men and only one shop to be seen; this was, of course, closed. One peculiarity we noticed here but is not unique to this village – all the house numbers are on steel plates and locked to the wall. No, these are not letter-boxes, there is nowhere to put any letters in, they are just house numbers locked to walls. We wandered back up the road to find our host buying from his local shop about 100 metres from the abode. We bought Bounty bars (10D each), water (10D) and bog paper (yes you guessed it, 10D). It appears that pricing in the mountains is a very simple process and we were subsequently shocked to find that a few items (but not many) didn´t cost 10D.
Dinner was tajine, pretty non-descript and not adequate if we had done a full days walking but what do you expect for 4 euros. Our host disappeared for a while and, when he returned, I conspicuously did up my coat. He asked if I was cold then disappeared off again after we paid him. By 8 it was getting distinctly nippy even with quite a lot of clothes on (it was 2,100 metres up) so we dragged the gas cooker into the room we were in and were trying to light it when the guy reappeared. He showed us that there was a leak from the cylinder by lighting it! (We had wondered about the smell of gas while he was cooking) He explained that there was nowhere to have a fire inside. I was a touch irritated and insisted that he had promised one. He went off and returned a few minutes later with a mobile fire (these are quite common in some parts of the world but here it was the standard contraption to cook tajine). This looked OK but was basically a few twigs with some paraffin (by the smell). It gave some warmth for twenty minutes then thick smoke for an hour. Opening doors didn´t work and by the time we gave up and put the thing outside, the room was so smoky that Bart soon retired. I persisted for a while before going to bed on a dry New Year´s Day to follow the dry New Year´s Eve. This is a record I hope never to equal!
The route proposed for the next day by the Scottish/Aussie couple looked horrendous and Bart came up with the excellent suggestion that we go skiing. Did you not know that before the Second World War Morocco was home to the highest ski lift in the world (3,207 metres)? You didn´t? Tsk! Where were you educated?
So off we went. There was a bit of a problem finding the route and this provides an illustration of one of the three occasions when Bart is prone to a humour failure. We had had mint tea for breakfast, Bart cannot function without coffee – quite a lot of coffee - so I was reduced to asking for direction in the French dialect of Foreign. When I suggested this was more Bart´s thing than mine he responded that they were not speaking French. Obviously overnight I had received a Babel fish in my ear and could now sort of understand Arabic or Berber or whatever Bart thought they were speaking. Anyway we were soon shown the right direction and it was a lovely walk. We only met one set of walkers and these did have some interest. They were a couple in their 30s with a guide and a packhorse. The guide was hacking out steps in the snow and the horse was so overloaded that its driver (not the guide, there were four in the group) had some difficulty in coaxing/bullying it along. The load appeared to be about 90% carpets. God knows what they intended doing with them, or perhaps he didn´t.
There are six ski lifts in the resort but only the one to the highest point was running. I mentioned that the lift was pre-war. Well it does not seem to have been modernised since it was built. For the non-skiers, modern chairlifts are slowed down at pick up and drop off points and you keep your skies on so you can easily ski off at the top and straight into your next run. For this one you had to take your skis off and hold them whilst the lift came at full speed, smacked you in the back of the calves and whisked you off swinging wildly backwards and forwards. At the other end it means that you have to jump and run with your skis and poles in your hands or you go straight round and down again. I haven´t been on a lift like that for fifteen or twenty years. Anyway, we reach the ski resort by about three in the afternoon, find an excellent hostel with hot showers, beer and wine. We decided that it was a bit late to ski that day so got stuck into the aforementioned beer and wine.
These had nothing to do with Bart deciding to wash his camera during our early evening stroll round the lake. He merely misjudged the depth of the damp in one spot and overbalanced as he lunged to escape. His clothes needed a wash anyway.
We got reasonably fed and quite well watered that evening so we were raring to go skiing in the morning. Well not quite. Bart needed several cups of coffee because the combination of altitude and alcohol had caused me to be a little noisier in the night than usual. I was fine but looked at the hill bathed in beautiful morning sunlight. From the top the only way off seemed to be either a steep mogul field or steep off-piste. Again for the benefit of the non-skiers, moguls are large lumps of compacted ice that are difficult to ski on, very easy to fall over on and, even when you can ski them, very hard work. Off-piste can be fun if you have a guide who knows where the vertical drops, rock fields and avalanche runs are. Best avoided on your first day in a resort on your own. Anyway I decided that this looked a bit tricky, no it definitely wasn´t cowardice. We wandered over to the lift (closed) and ski hire shop (closed) at 9 and considered our options. We could ski for a few hours and then take a flatish route back or abandon skiing and take a longer hillier route that would be a reasonable days walk. We did spot an exit station half way up the ski-lift but, after a warm up run, the skiing from there would have been too easy so we gave up and walked. The last time we saw the lift, an hour later, it was still not working. One of my better pieces of non-cowardice. It was a beautiful day, silent much of the time. I had my personal pack mule (of course, I relieved him of his extra burden when we approached a village – obviously I couldn´t have the locals thinking I exploited the poor fellow) and a lovely route over a couple of passes.
Bart had got it into his head that he wanted to go to Fez. This is 500 kilometres and 8 hours from Marrakesh by train and he had to fly out of Marrakesh bright and early in the morning four days later. I had consulted the Rough Guide to try and find somewhere nearer so he didn´t waste two days travelling and I thought that Safi was a good idea but when the town was described by the Rough Guide as follows “Flanked by a strip of fertilizer factories, a vast grain silo and sardine-canning factories, Safi is not the prettiest town in Morocco.” for some reason Bart wasn´t persuaded. So we were in a hurry to get the walk done and get into Marrakesh and get a train. Everything went pretty smoothly all day (except the earthmovers starting up specially as we approached and mine host from New Year´s Eve trying to rip us off for an extra night´s sleeping bag hire) until we got in the taxi back to Marrakesh from Imli. Before this happened we had an hour in Imli getting a snack and doing a bit of negotiating etc. It was here that we saw the men. What were they doing? Nothing. Just hanging around, They are pretty good at it, spending hours chatting about nothing and joshing each other because they have nothing better to do but not really up to the standards of east Africans where ten men can all be hassling you about taxis when there is only one to be had.
The taxi driver had appeared to speak some English but spent the first twenty kilometres driving down the one lane mountain road with one hand; the other hand being used continuously to ring people on his mobile phone. I began to protest after he stopped in a village to make some more calls and talk to people. When we set off again I protested that this was a taxi not a phone box. This, of course, had no effect beyond amusing Bart. He was considerably more amused when I seized the phone from the driver´s hand. The driver appeared to accept this perfectly equably and, when the phone rang, pulled over to the side of the road before asking it back from me. When it rang again later he also pulled over before answering it so I was feeling pretty smug about my delicate man-management skills.
Anyway a good train journey to Casablanca where the hotel next to the railway station smelt of sick and sweat but was cheap and handy. We were rather fortunate, for others, that we had a train compartment to ourselves on the way so we could put everything that was dirty and smelly into the large plastic bag (renamed as the international suitcase) given to us by the Irish, close it and not open it for several days. Of course, it was the mule´s job to carry it. Into the city to find a restaurant at 11 p.m. or so. We found one fairly easily and soon after we got in there Bart started complaining. “You come to a restaurant to eat, not listen to crap music” This is no. 2 on the Bart list of getting grumpy. When he is hungry. Apparently there is a third occasion when he gets grumpy – when he wants a drink. I have never seen this because I always want a drink more than he does.
The restaurant had good food, the best we had in Morocco (I went back to look for it on the last day but couldn´t find it.) As we got fed we started to look around. The guy next to us was on his own and lonely so he started insisting that we drink his wine. We noticed that there were some women eating on their own, men would come and chat with them or eat with them. A group of six came in with four men and two younger women. A woman who appeared to be a guest went to the toilet and, on the way back, topped up our wine glasses from the lonely guy´s bottle of wine when he was off using the phone. Then one of the women (she was well dressed up but, like all the women there, of a generous build and not in the first flush of youth, in her thirties I would guess) who had come in as part of the group of six got up and started dancing right in front of another of her party who was twice her age. Yep, we had found a Morrocan lap-dancing restaurant. By 1 a.m. or so Bart was fed, watered, enjoying the music and entertainment and didn´t want to leave.
Back to the train in the morning and a good chance to admire how green northern Morocco is, much greener than central Spain. We got to Fes at lunchtime ready for a tour round the old city. This was the first time (but far from the last) that people in the street told us that the gate was closed. We, of course, ignored them and wandered around for 20 minutes or so until we left by the same gate that we had entered by. We were in the kasbah. Many of you will have heard the expression but do you know what it means? A kasbah was (is?) a defensive area surrounded by a mud wall in which lived one, normally, or a few extended families. Of course, the more gates there are the more weak points to defend. This particular kasbah had solved the problem by, apparently, only having one gate. No wonder the gate was closed in the direction we were going. Anyway, it meant that our first attempt at viewing the city was a failure, we were in the wrong place.
A hotel secured and a spot of lunch (tajine naturally) consumed and we were ready for a stroll round the old city proper which we had found by then. This is your image of an Arabic city, a few streets up which a horse and cart could get with lots of side-streets not much wider than your shoulders and shops everywhere, most of them small, often with some sort of factory attached. We were lost much of the time (an experience I repeated several times after Bart left) and after wandering round for a while emerged. And that was it for Bart. He had spent eight hours on a train (and eight hours back again) for that. We found no sites, he bought no souvenirs, didn´t inflict his Arabic on anybody or do any of the other things you might have imagined we had come for.
In the first half of the twentieth century most of Morocco was under French control and you have to say (whisper it quietly) they did a pretty good job. They built a good selection of roads, schools, hospitals and railways. The northern coast (as well as what was then called the Spanish Sahara until 1976) was under Spanish control. I say control, this term is used lightly; most of the time the Spanish were fighting the locals in the Rif, the mountains near the north coast, and, how can I put this without upsetting my Spanish friends, the Spanish did SFA. (Ha, the Spanish won´t understand that term.) The main result of the Spanish occupancy of their part of Morocco was to provide Franco with a battle-hardened army, which he used to seize nearly half of Spain in 1936. It is quite easy to conclude that the Republicans would probably have won the Civil War if it wasn´t for the fighting in Morocco.
Anyway, when the French arrived at an old town they did not tend to rip it down but build a modern, fresh town next to it with nice wide boulevards, street lighting, sewage and the like. Being French they also built some restaurants and bars (plus an off-licence in Fes) so that is where we headed in the evening. In Marrakesh the new town is just outside the old, in Fes we could not seem to find it until we had walked three kilometres. Why build it so far away? I only realised a few days later, Fes has so many walls of different ages and usages that half the time you do not know whether you were inside or outside them. In fact the new town is about as close as you can get to the old. We found some OK food and another bar like the Samovar in Marrakesh with similar results except that Bart quite liked the music.
In the morning did we not return to the shops of the old town. Just breakfast and move. A I said earlier, Morocco is Islamic, but not very Islamic as you may have gathered from my references to the consumption of alcohol. I saw no burkhas, less than one per cent of women wear the veil but a substantial majority of adult women where the headscarf; it is a substantial minority of girls and students. Jeans are common but short skirts non-existent, and I don´t think it was just because of the time of year. Of Islamic countries Morocco is alleged to treat its women the best but it is still shit, you never see a woman sat in a café, you never see a women just hanging around. They are always busy doing something when they are out of their houses – and that is just the stuff that is obvious to a dumb male tourist. The most interesting item of clothing is a sort of outer cloak. This is a one piece, ankle length garment usually of a dull colour but many are bright colours or with checked pattern or similar. Generally (but not exclusively) the women wear the bright colours and the men are inclined to wear something that looks like deckchair material. The interesting part is the hood, which is extremely pointed. They often look like extras in The Lord of the Rings or the Ku Klux Klan in a very bad disguise. Anyway, I digress. They are Muslim enough that every mosque has the very loud call to prayer 5 times a day including one before dawn (when an extra line is added to the standard call saying it is better to pray than sleep). We were next door to a Mosque. I thought I was dreaming when it started but woke up and it seemed to go on for hours (Bart confirmed that impression) so we moved to the new town – many less mosques.
By this time I was using the guidebook quite a lot and when we arrived at the hotel in the new town that I had chosen a key was thrown on the desk. We had not asked for a room, not asked about price, shown are passports – nothing. Upon enquiring about this odd approach to hotel management we were told that they had seen us coming, there was a key, what more did we want. When Bart said he wanted a separate room they said “Don´t be silly a room is 140D and has two beds in it.” The longer we stayed, the more obvious it was that the area was the hangout of the local eccentrics, the waiter in the café round the corner would happily talk to us in nice clear English in a cheerful manner but we had no idea what he was talking about. There were another guy cheerfully shouting at God knows what. We liked the area.
Bart had seen enough of Fes so we went to a natural hot spring where there was an indoor bath. This was crowded, male only and not of the cleanest but very hot. We got a rub down with a rough cloth and a very half-hearted massage. Good fun, no other foreigners of course. When we were heading back up the hill to get a Grand Taxi back we met the only serious hassle of the whole trip. It was a beggar whose sole conversation in foreign consisted of “Monseur” with his hand held out. All other beggars, con men, street sellers etc. had given up in seconds but he hung on for fifteen minutes endlessly repeating himself whist we strolled up the hill. Not even my invitation that he should go forth and multiply was enough to dissuade him. Irritating but the only serious bit of shit we got anywhere.
Amazingly we had a quiet night in (after visiting the aforementioned off licence – twice actually) playing the dice game and Bart was gone in the morning. I was left with a couple more days in Fes during which I actually went around a few tourist sites and even bought a couple of things. I also set a new record for use of a nickname. I have never had any nicknames that have stuck – Jesus Christ, Bwana Madevu (Swahili for Mr. Big Beard), Eric and George Best (for my ability with a glass, not a ball) have never lasted but in Morocco I heard Ali Baba every few seconds. I assume every aging man with a beard gets called the same but I heard it so often, I thought that there had been a national radio broadcast to instruct people about my nickname. My main achievement whilst I was on my own in Fes was finding the really seedy bars. One Bart would have approved of because there was an empty pool table but two were pretty similar, men sitting on their own drinking beer and looking at the TV. However, I did find a real success. A truly seedy place; a shop with a counter selling beer to drunken men who were either arguing or looking continuously into their beer. There was one light bulb, revolting highly distorted music and no sign of the place having been washed since the French left. Perhaps the best indicator of the real quality here was that the beer was half the price of the Samovar, it was even 30% cheaper than the off-licence round the corner.
On my last day in Fes shortly before leaving I saw a truly odd site. There was a young woman with a mid-thigh length coat (and presumably a skirt the same length or shorter underneath it) and uncovered dyed blonde hair wandering around the edge of the old city. When she tottered inside on to the cobbles and mud in her huge stiletto heels I had to have a closer look and see what nationality she was – Japanese (or possibly Korean) – and admire this icon of cultural sensitivity.
Back to Casablanca for a couple of days in a place from The Rough Guide. I really was starting to get the hang of being a guide-book tourist. Casablanca is quite a modern city that is 150 times the size it was 100 years ago. It is easily the most important city in Morocco and is capital of everything except politics. Touristically it is not great, the high spot is the art-deco buildings in the middle of the city. Ten minutes of that and you are done. The most interesting place I came across was a mosque! This is the Hassan IInd mosque. In Morocco I think that the kings are in a uniquely powerful position. They are (like Henry VIIIth of England) Head of State, Head of Government and Head of Religion so Hassan could do pretty much as he pleased before he snuffed it in 1999. The minaret for the mosque is 200 metres high. I thought that this claim was bullshit as I walked up to the building but it is not, everything is in proportion, huge proportions. Only the mosque in Mecca is bigger and St Peter´s would fit easily inside. You realise your error when you have people next to the building to give a proper scale. Amazingly, unlike most mosques, the infidel are allowed in on tours. I was so impressed that I think I would have swallowed my religious convictions and coughed up but I was saved by the fact that it was Friday – holy day – so no tours. Just as I was about to wander on my way the call to prayer went up and I actually saw two men heading towards the place. I have to say that this lack of religious fervour did not fit in with my stereotype view of Muslim countries. My belief is that it is not surprising that they are poor if they spend all their time in the mosque and never do any work.
Being a man and travelling with another one does not put me in the best of positions to judge how foreign women are treated. There were not many wandering round on their own but we didn´t see any sign of the hassle that we have been told foreign women get when they travel without a man. Maybe I am just too stupid but I suspect it is the fact that tourists have become so common in the tourist towns that the hassle level has dropped. This conformed with my general view that, within the fairly obvious limits, Morocco is a good place to visit and I will probably return.
Having failed to find the lapdancing restaurant on my last night I resorted to The Rough Guide again and went to the best local restaurant in the area, or so it said. The service was dreadful, it was the worst and most expensive tajine I had had on the whole trip and there were only western tourists in there. I followed this by a visit to the (recommended) local Spanish bar that was packed with the most orderly crowd of people I have ever seen in a bar paying 6 euros for a beer. Strange people. It serves me right (going to the bad places), I should know better than to trust a guide book in these matters, even a good one. Needless to say I wandered off to next door, a much less salubrious place with, surprise, surprise no tourists in it and where a lady of the night made a half-hearted attempt to accost me.
And what happened to the international suitcase I don´t hear you ask. It is being despatched (after a prolonged airing) with a copy of this to:
McCarthy Palmer (The Walker)
Waterford
Ireland.