Rocking the kasbah
Trip Start
Nov 03, 2004
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70
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Trip End
Nov 23, 2006
Where I stayed
Marrakesh, Morocco
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
haunting call to prayer, the barrage of sewer competing with frying
cumin, cinnamon and ginger, the foisting of rainbow coloured
handicrafts upon you, petitions for money, flickering candle light
and glaring electric.
The location of our hotel, Riad Hamza, meant the taxi deposited us
at the end of a pedestrian mall at its busiest time of night,
provided us with some general, arm waving directions and disappeared
into the maelstrom of a roundabout. All of Marrakesh, it seemed,
was out to promenade between us and our hotel - how many had designs
on all our worldly possessions? We plunged off the mall and into
the labyrinth of narrow, twisting, windowless streets that make up
most Arabic towns. We were in the medina, the ancient, original
walled city of Marrakesh. Here the city has literally grown up and
over itself. Houses have been extended out over the narrow streets
to connect with neighbouring dwellings, so often you are walking
through tunnels not just precipice sided footpaths. After only
several misturns and a completely different set of alleyways we
arrived at a bed that was expecting us.
Like most Arabic buildings, Riad Hamza, is uninspired from the
outside [there seems to be a municipal injunction that all buildings
in Marrakesh be chocolat au lait coloured with Islamic green trim] -
rough pise (Moroccan adobe) walls, small windows, a decorative but
solid and uninviting door. Inside it is a tiled wonderland set
around a lush courtyard with serenely playing fountain. The walls,
floors and pillars are all richly tiled in geometrics and there are
opulent, brocade decked, divan coffee spaces for reclining and
unwinding. A simple breakfast of fresh bread, freshly squeezed
orange juice and café au lait is taken on the sunny rooftop terrace.
Each morning begins with the call to the faithful. About 5:30am the
call from the Koutoubia Mosque begins and then slowly the other
muezzins join in until there is a multi-layered devotional hum
rolling out across the city, slowly dragging you to an awareness of
a new day.
Old Marrakesh is defined by two places: Djemaa el Fna and Koutoubia
Minaret. We threw ourselves into Djemaa el Fna and the souk the
next morning. Confident, like trained rats in a lab, we attacked
the maze of streets and popped out (surprisingly easily in daylight)
on Rue Bab Agnadu. The street was teeming, although by local
standards just getting going. Many shops, at 10:30am, were just
ambling open but dodging bicycles and scooters on footpaths will
become second nature. People are bustling, the streets are busy,
industrious, purposeful but there's still always time for an
effusive greeting (is there any other except in the West?) and a
coffee break.
The traditional dress here, for men (not the usual jeans,
sweatshirt, baseball cap uniform) and women, is the djellaba. This
is a long-sleeved, ankle-length, hoodie. Women wear any colour,
pattern or brocade, the hood, weighted with a tassel, is down with
an optional head scarf. Classic Dior styling of houndstooth with
black embroidery and embellishments is popular. The hem brushes
spiky heeled boots as often as Moroccan slippers. Some women choose
a face veil, although the minority, and this is often worn stretched
under the nose. Men usually wear more restrained djellaba in henna,
nutmeg, sage or indigo flannel, although the traditional colour for
men's slippers is saffron. Their unadorned hood is worn up and
provides the perfect frame to turn any face sinister with a hook
nose and villainous, shifty eyes.
Jostling down the street, dodging veiled ladies in rucked up
djellaba erratically piloting mopeds and gesticulating into
cellphones, you pop intothe open air circus of Djemaa el Fna.
Snake charmers, story tellers, watersellers with goatskin flagons
and silly hats and guys with cymbals, long tasseled fezzes and
strangely connected neck joints are all vying for your dirham.
Carts overladen with dried figs and apricots, fresh dates and nuts
and orange juice squeezers fill the air with warm, exotic smells,
competing with the just starting to sizzle lamb and chicken shawarma
spikes.
We ploughed through them all, dodging, weaving, feinting, avoiding
the regular-folks shopping on the outskirts of the souk - the sweat
shirts, blankets, rip-off Dior and Vuitton handbags, spiky boots and
baby clothes.
With the souk just shambling open everything is low-key. Later in
the day the entreaties to come in and sample, handle, try the wares
will become more strident, cajoling, desperate. Just now it's very
casual. In some places we even managed to touch and linger and not
have every vaguely similar product thrust upon us.
The souk is a ramshackle collection of thrown together stalls that
still manage to have a chaotic order to them. There are streets, of
sorts. Some are covered and tunnel like, some overhung by branches
and corrugated iron, some open, almost broad, with canvas awnings,
all are collecting the misty rain and dropping heavy, freezing drops
on the punters and bedraggled chickens awaiting their fate.
But, don't be mistaken, this is Ali Baba's cave of extravagant,
exotic gems and all forty thieves are there. "Looking is free", "Is
just for looking", were like the seductive cajoling of sirens to
me. Once, my grandfather wrote from Morocco to my mother, "... if
Ma had a cargo ship here she could fill it." How I wish I'd had my
grandmother's cargo ship. Every stall, shop, trestle, hole-in-the-
wall was draped with illicit, shiny, sensuous things, like
Amsterdam's window prostitutes - beaded pashminas, silk and satin
wraps, luminous Berber ceramic, hand-tooled leather luggage, silk
tassels, felted wool bags and hats, lemonwood and aromatic cedar
boxes, luxurious, hand-dyed, hand-woven carpets, heady spices,
filigree silver, entrapping perfumes and shoes, shoes, shoes - and
my husband and budgetary conscience was walking right beside me.
[That said, we did, four days later, ship 17kgs of booty home -
ceramics are heavy, the tajines were David's penance for a long ago
missed opportunity in Libya and there were only five pairs of shoes,
alright].
Just the looking was exhausting, let alone blocking the little
devilish voice in my head yelling, "let's buy it!". The bargaining
is expected, tedious and I'm no good at it. Also no matter how many
times I could say "Je ne parle pas Français" perfectly in my head or
to David it always came out "Je no pla pal pas French" which was
starting to piss me off. We needed a coffee. We escaped, blearily
blinking like surfacing moles, to a café on the edges of Djemaa el
Fna. Oh, the beauty of a culture that already understood coffee and
then was colonised by the French!
We settled in for a happy couple of hours over sinus clearing coffee
and the local thé de menthe or "whiskey Morocco" (sweet mint tea
poured from a great height into tiny gold rimmed glasses) and
watched the life of the souk unfold as it should. The apothecaries
were just setting up their blankets with ostrich feathers and
ginseng, camel bits and bobs, plaster anatomical dummies and nigella
seeds; umbrella sellers were doing a roaring trade - yes, it's north
Africa and it's raining; tourists wandered by triumphantly with
bargains and treasures plastic or newspaper wrapped; ladies on tiny
stools surrounded themselves with their woven baskets and chased
likely purchasers around the square; veiled henna tattoo artists
drummed up business for a tourist take on traditional Berber hand
and foot tattoos.
Morocco was, and to some extent is today, a collection of various
clans sitting down uneasily together. Not always able to present a
united front, not necessarily seeing themselves as having common
goals, they had alternately surged forward as a nation under strong
leaders or fractured and succumbed to conquest. The Saadian dynasty
proved a last blast of imperial splendour in the 1500s, regaining
much of the coast which had been extensively colonised by the
Portuguese. The Saadians ultimately fell victim to dynastic rivalry
(the Alaouites continue to rule Morocco quietly today), their El
Badi Palace was reduced to rubble and their mausoleum sealed from
the outside world by Moulay Ismail, one of the more vindictive
Alaouites. It was rediscovered in 1917.
On a glassy, sunny, but still not particularly warm day, we ventured
out to the less tourist trafficked part of town to visit these
forgotten tombs. We picked our way through energetic, cobbled
streets sinking beneath piles of rotting food and plastic jerry
cans, passed oily muddy puddles, over-worked, under-fed donkeys,
wary but hopeful cats and hopeless beggars.
The tombs are accessed through a narrow rebuilt passage. After
what we had passed through they are an oasis of peace, sunlight and
greenery. The royal tombs are contained in two pavilions, soaring,
arched, rooms held high by slender columns. The walls decorated by
delicate plasterwork and the, perhaps ironic for any 16th century
ruler, "And the works of peace they have accomplished will make them
enter the holy gardens". Sunlight filters through the skylights.
The floor is gorgeous with coloured mosaic and slim, elegant stones
covering the dust of kings. The garden is littered with more low,
intricate stones where members of the royal household have been
laid, slowly sinking below the impatiens and hibiscus.
By day Rue Bab Agnadu is a busy, industrious pedestrian mall and
moped slalom. By night it is twice the animal. The street is
riotous with the noise and press of those out for an evening
bargain. All sorts of unofficial vendors have appeared with the
twilight: middle-aged men selling battery-powered plastic
dinosaurs; veiled ladies with trays of biscuits; leather-clad,
shifty-looking guys selling "designer" fragrances; oily teenagers
with racks of rip-off Hermes and YSL scarves. One whiff of a
uniform and they're off in a flurry lugging tarpaulin body bags of
perfume and trailing fluttering multi-coloured silk streamers in
their wake.
Djemaa el Fna has another life at night as well. After dark the
crowds around the storytellers quadruple, mostly with locals, the
musicians come out to play their strange, jarring, wailing music for
a dirham or two. The snake charmers retire but the acrobats come
out to cavort. The open air restaurants have appeared out of thin
air. Your lungs are filled with the scent of char-grilled
brochettes, steamed snails and bubbling harira. If tripe and
lentils or roasted sheep face doesn't stir your gastronomic juices
there are plenty of places offering barbequed shrimp or calamari and
skewers of grilled lamb or chicken. Team these with local olives,
fresh crusty bread and char-grilled aubergine and that's my idea of
the perfect meal. (Unfortunately Morocco is essentially dry so you
have to wash it down with Coke). Finish off the evening with Berber
Viagra, a ginseng, nutmeg, fennel, clove and conifer seed hot, sweet
drink and the same mixture made into a cake the texture of red bean
paste.
On our last morning in Marrakesh we strolled, passed the horse drawn
carriages and shoe shine boys, to the austere Koutoubia Minaret.
The tower dominates the old and new towns. Construction began in
1150 to add the tower to an existing mosque which had previously
been rebuilt to correct its alignment to Mecca. Nearly seventy
metres high it established the classic Moroccan design - Moroccan
mosques have only one minaret. It is square, stepped at the top,
surmounted by three copper balls (said once to have been gold), and,
ironically, the triangular merlons which are the Berber
architectural warding against the evil eye.
Taking that warding with us, we picked up our rental car and
attempted to leave Marrakesh. The town is laid out in a grid
system, there is an incomprehensible one-way street system, some
bizarre roundabout rules, the traffic police stand in the middle of
roads and wear really spiffy Red Baron white leather traffic
directing gloves which don't move from cradling their privates even
as traffic turns to custard around them. Having finally been spat
out of the one-way system in basically the right direction we headed
over the High Atlas Mountains for M'hamid and the Sahara.
We rambled along the N9 heading southish, ultimately aiming for
Ouarzazate that night. At the first signs of snow through the
twisting Atlas pass we threw ourselves around and chucked snow at
each other. Arriving in Telouet (at 2,545m), a one donkey, one
kasbah town at best, we surrendered to the guide who accosted us
with a goodish deal on a tour of the kasbah (us wasn't the only
thing he accosted), naturally overtured by lunch at his cousin's
restaurant.
In the south of Morocco a kasbah is a feudal family castle. Telouet
has a particularly well preserved, but abandoned one. [In many
towns the crumbling remains of the kasbah are used as the centre
building block upon which the village, literally, attaches and
continues to grow.] In Telouet retainers were encouraged to build
their dwellings away from the castle.
The Glaoui clan in Telouet controlled the pass through the
mountains, much like the Rhine barons, and exacted whatever toll
they chose on travellers. The French put an end to this by moving
the road through the pass and destroying the family's source of
income and power. They now live rather comfortably in Algeria but
the dependant village has suffered somewhat.
Although built of pise and not withstanding the elements all that
well the Telouet kasbah still looks very much like a castle. The
turrets are intact with squinty little archer-sized windows, the
gates are solid wood, iron bossed and hanging on battering-ram
resistant hinges. It's beautiful too with green glass glazed tiled
roofs and wrought iron tracery grilled picture windows. Inside the
cobbles are treacherously uneven and the stairs worse so, floors
have dropped away and skylights fallen in. The labyrinth that once
was, it's said no one person ever fully knew the ways of the castle,
is made more convoluted by the collapsed ceilings and gaping holes.
You can climb to the roof and survey the fiefdom that was.
Tonight a group of German tourists have somehow finagled (no doubt
with Euros) a stay at the kasbah. There is to be a traditional
Moroccan buffet and entertainment of horse riding prowess and
singing, maybe some sword dancing. They will spend the night in
Berber tents, cushioned by hand woven carpets, counting countless
stars. The women are in the courtyard practicing their ululating
and the choirmaster (a genuine nomad him) is waving into his
cellphone. Having walked on antique carpets to the gauze draped
reception rooms the tour group are socialising over whiskey Morocco
and honey drenched pastries. These beautifully tiled rooms have
been preserved where others have slowly returned to the desert.
Our guide hurried us on to the inevitable carpet co-operative. The
carpets are woven over winter by villagers, semi-nomads and
troglodytes holed up in their houses, tents and caves. Come the
summer they put their work into the co-operative. If people like us
don't buy then they go as a job lot to the auctions in Marrakesh.
We were adamant we weren't buying but still we had Berber marriage
rugs, troglodyte meeting rugs and nomadic sleeping rugs unfurled for
us. The co-operative co-ordinator was generous with his time, his
carpet waving skills and his knowledge. I liked the idea that a
Berber rug is finished at one end and fringed at the other because
they tell a story that doesn't finish so they can always be returned
to the loom. I'm just a romantic. I don't have the credit card.
While I was taking pictures of the fantasy draped room co-ordinator
guy took David aside to convince him he should buy me a rug on the
sly and have it shipped home in secret. David is strong.
