Last Post on Marrakesh

The absolutely, positively last post on Marrakesh!

Into the Country

On Saturday we hired a guide/driver, Hassan, and went into the countryside. We drove southward to the High Atlas Mountains. Run off from the mountains, as well as springs are the source of water for the city of Marrakesh and for the farming that covers the planes surrounding it.  At 13,000 feet the mountains are gigantic and look like an impossible studio back drop to the miles of flat cultivated fields that we drive through. The variety of crops that we pass by is amazing:  almond trees, olive and date trees, Eucalyptus, apricot and fig trees, prickley pear cactuses, both wild and cultivated. Also the occassional unfinished developement. Like so many places around the globe, Morocco too was victim to housing speculation and simple excessive optimism.

Before I show you the following photos, I want you to understand that there is no practical way that I can think of to travel as a family from the West in a country like Morocco and not basically make a fool of yourselves. Well, maybe if you stay in your hotel room and watch television.

So, okay, our first stop was some camel and sheep herders, Berber friends of Hassan. The family consisted of a boy, a father, who was our host, and a grandfather who was in the field with the sheep. The women were probably at the family's permenant residence in the mountains weaving carpets or some such thing. 

Anyway, they knew what we did not yet know: Westerners love to ride on camels!

Iris was the first to jump up.

I guess it was fitting that I had the mother camel.

The Berber herder who was acting as our host was really amazingly friendly and indulgent. He asked me for the camera so that he could take a picture for us.

You can see in the background here the very traditional Berber tent that the family lives in. It has a distincly camel shape to it.

Here are Hassan and our host. After the ride we went into the tent for tea. One is frequently offered tea in this hospitible country, and it is always a combination of black and mint with plenty of sugar.

Our host amused us as well as himself by dressing Matt up.

Just before we left, the herder showed us this stone gadget which he said is how he grinds mice for the camels. This seemed a startling revelation. Hassan cleared it up for us. He grinds rice between these two stones by turning that little handle.

I looked up this gadget and found that it is called a quern stone. It has been used all over the world since neolithic times to grind all variety of things. In Scotland they used it to grind tobacco into snuff.

We continued on towards the mountains. Stopping, just as we got to the foothills, to visit a cooperative, owned and operated by women, for the production of Argan products. Argan is an oil, derived from this tree:

Here is the nut:

Argan oil is used widely in Morocco, and is prized for its culinary, cosmetic and medicinal properties, yet it grows only in very few places including Morocco, Algeria and Isreal. It's ability to grow in dry sandy soil is unparralled and fairly recently large plantations have been grown to prevent the advance of the Sahara desert.

Outside the cooperative, they were baking bread in this traditional, Berber oven.

Inside, the women are removing the shells and skins from the nuts and grinding the seeds with stones. And look, it is another quern stone.

They made some wonderful things with the oil. Our favorites were a rose scented oil, and a spread made of Argan oil and ground almonds which they spread on the bread from their oven outside.

And on towards the mountains.

Mostly we saw women with children and animals walking along the road, or working in the fields. The men were off selling things at the markets, or in the city, or giving camel rides to tourists. 

Hassan, who is not himself a Berber, referred to "those Berber Gazelles". Gazelle is their term for a fetching woman. Back in the city, more than one determined salesman had tried to pry a little money from my wallet by calling me a gazelle. Imagine!

But speaking of the markets, that was our next stop, a weekly market in a village in the foothills.

As you can see, it was mostly, though not entirely men there. Used clothes from Europe and North America was a major commodity. A tip to donaters: Tie the laces together on those shoes!

The woman sitting here below is putting lemon halves on her temples, which she said prevented a headache from the heat.

As we left the market, we walked through the area where you could buy food that was being cooked in rooms on the left that were open to the alley. It was quite smokey from the grills.

This door had a painting of a stork. Storks in their enormous nests are a common site around Marrakesh.

From the market we started really climbing into the mountains.

The Berber villages look very reminiscent of the villages in the mountains of Southern Spain, except that those are all white washed and look like snow drifts. These just look like a part of the mountain. In fact, many of those Spanish villages were first settled by the Moors.

We came across a soccer field. Hassan told us that the boys were both locals and British kids from a nearby British enclave of vacation homes.

The town that we stopped in had many people traveling by donkeys and mules.

As well as some nicely decorated trucks. Sometimes the load on top of the trucks were boys and men. And they'd be holding onto the railings as the truck went winding along the mountain roads.

Very common are these cars from the 70's and 80's.

This is a school bus. I guess yellow is an international color for school buses.

Our next opportunity to really make fools of ourselves was bargaining over a rug.

In my last post, I mentioned the very persistent and psychologically astute rug dealer.

Eventually we managed to continue our hike into the countryside.

Hassan told us that the typical Berber house has animals on the first floor, grains on the second and people on the third.

Everywhere in Morocco we would see intriguing juxtapositions of the old and the new. Here a woman in traditional garb on the rooftop of an ancient abode stands next to her satellite dish. When we first landed at the airport in Marrakesh we saw a thick forest of satelite dishes rising from the city. I don't think King Muhammed VI would have much chance of seriously thwarting the flow of information here, should he ever wish to do so.

In the center of this valley, with a view to all sides is a very luxurious British Hotel in what used to be a fortress.

We were pretty exhausted by the time we got to the restaurant where we had lunch.

From here we continued into an enormous valley where there is a rare lake, man made however.

There appeared to be cultivation going on here, though it seemed impossible that anything of substance could grow. After many many miles through the dry rocky landscape, we came to the reservoir.

We stopped to refresh ourselves at a French restaurant, or really more like a French club. I felt that I had walked onto the set of a Humphrey Bogart movie. The African Queen perhaps.

I thought the wall with the bathroom doors on it quite fetching. Though I would not have minded some paper towel instead of the one, long suffering washcloth

That was our last full day in Marrakesh.

The next day, the hotel had arranged for a man with a cart to get us through the narrow streets to the square. Matt was relieved not to have to haggle over the cost as the hotel had set a price. But the man was not pleased with the price and complained about all of our luggage.

Actually several of the bags were empty since it was too exhausting to buy things there. But he made a good show of laboring under the wieght, until he got a call on his cell phone and continued pulling the cart with one hand.

Morocco is fabulous.

 

Several people have said they were not able to leave comments on the blog. I don't think Blogger is the best ever bit of software. It might have been nice for you all to see each other's comments, but do at least send me an email, as I would really like to hear whatever you have to say about my blog, or about Morocco. margotkimball@gmail.com

Postscript:I must warn my many adoring fans (I hope!) that I am about to start in on an intensive Spanish class. I hope to do it for 4 weeks, and I plan to not allow myself to be distracted by such things as blogging! Some of you may recall that I took an intensive class in the fall and FAILED miserably the test at the end. Okay, I am really going to apply myself this time. So, you may not hear from me for awhile.

Hasta Luego!