Amazing factoid

You know that annoying incoming text message ring on Nokia mobile phones? The one that goes bip-bip-bip beep-beep bip-bip-bip? It's Morse Code for "SMS". Amazing.

Days 12–16: Marrakesh-Agadir-Manchester-London

Home now. In the final few days, we got the seven-hour train out of Fes, spent a night in Marrakesh and got the bus back to Agadir the next morning, as travelling around was fairly exhausting, time was short, and we needed to return to Angleterre fairly relaxed.


Having spent a few days in Agadir by the pool and on the beach, I am now eerily calm, decently tanned, a master of Sudoku, and more knowledgeable about the nature of organised crime in the UK (thanks to Tony Thompson’s excellent book, Gangs). Which is what you want from a holiday really. I’m predicting that by 11.33 this morning, I’ll be totally stressed again.

Moroccan encounter #94

Me and Sarah have just been for an excellent last night meal, and we walk back to the hotel. In the reception area, there is a chubby middle-aged man onstage in Moroccan dress playing a reedy instrument. It is only after a few seconds that I notice the large black snake upright in front of him. Terrifyingly, he keeps prodding it to make it snap at him. This man is the Moroccan Steve Irwin! And he's in my hotel!

I get back to the room and fall asleep. Suddenly I'm on my feet and a nasty-looking red and black snake is slithering through a hole in my pillowcase. It disappears inside the pillow. I watch, fascinated and horrified. Then I see it coming back out of the pillow through the same hole. Instead of being relieved, crazily and hysterically I start yelling: "What if there was one in there already? What if that's not the snake that just went in?!"

Then I wake up.

Morocco observation #39

It is almost impossible to get the bill in Moroccan restaurants while remaining in your seat. The only way to achieve this goal is to stop trying.

Days 8-11: Fes

Our time in the ancient medieval city that is Fes didn't begin so well; and in fact, until Monday, was peppered with irritating incidents.

First our hotel didn't have a room for us, even though I'd phoned ahead to reserve and phoned again to confirm. Pension Batha, hang your head in shame. Then, desperate for food, we endd up in a typique Moroccain restaurant which served delicious food, but added on some ridiculous surcharges, bumping up the already overexpensive price. Beware the typique Moroccain restaurants! Add to that a few unpleasant run-ins with bumfluffed manchild hustlers - "You don't tell me to go away in my own country!" "Stop following me around then!" etc - and it looked like Fes would be the undoing of us. But thanks to the mostly friendly people, extraordinariness of the city, and metred petit taxis, all turned out good.

Two particular highlights were the Bou Inania Medersa, a truly grand 14th century school / mosque, and the Choura tanneries, where leather has been made for centuries.

The Medersa, built under Sultan Abou Inan, apparently cost a truckload of money to make. It shows. It's hard not to wander round it with your mouth open. The Sultan apparently threw the bills in the river when they arrived, saying, "A thing of beauty is beyond reckoning." I imagine, in reply, the builders said something like, "Yeah. But where's our money?" Abou Inan clearly couldn't get enough when it came to things of beauty: he reportedly fathered around 325 sons in 10 years.

Our visit to the Choura tanneries was a strange but fascinating experience. You can see the dying taking place from nearby rooftops and watch skinny-legged men knee deep in various-coloured pools of dye plunge skins into the liquid. Walk down a filthy alley, with a small river of dirty water running down it and donkeys waiting with piles of pelts tied to their backs and you can see it all - and smell it all from ground level, though you have to grease the palm of the gardien to get in: "Twenty for entrance, twenty for the people." For the people? Yeah, right.

There's an awesome description of all this - and the extreme voyeurism the visit entails - in the Rough Guide. I've included it below, as it's one of those great bits when the guidebook goes both eloquent and profound:

There is a compulsive fascination about the tanneries. Cascades of water pour through holes that were once the windows of houses; hundreds of skins lie spread out to dry on the rooftops; while amid the vats of dye and pigeon dung (used to treat leather) an unbelievably gothic fantasy is enacted.
...
The process can best be seen from surrounding terrace rooftops, where you'll be directed along with other tourists. There is, oddly enough, a kind of sensuous beauty about it - for all the stench and voyeurism involved. Sniffing the mint that you are handed as you enter (to alleviate the nausea) and looking across at the others doing the same, however, there could hardly be a more pointed exercise in the nature of comparative wealth. Like it or not, this is tourism at its most extreme.

Days 1-3: Agadir

Days 4-7: Marrakesh

Morocco observation #17

Italian spaghetti ordered from a Mexican restaurant in southern Morocco is slightly above average.

Moroccan encounter #11

Morocco has these swell little rides called petit taxis (briefly mentioned in Marrakesh post), which are small Fiat Punto/Uno-like cabs that roam around the cities hunting for passengers. Charmingly, their colour varies from city to city: in Agadir they're a pale sun-dried rouge, in Marrakesh a sandy beige, in Fes a bright sports car red.

A Fes petit taxi

Me and Sarah are sitting in the back of a Fes petit taxi, on our way to the Ville Nouvelle part of the city to get a pizza (we're both sick of couscous and tajines, delicious as they are).

"Centre ville?" says the driver as we head out of the old Medina.
"Yes!" we say.
"In Spanish it is 'centro'!" he says, with much flair.
"Ah!" we exclaim, in French accents.
"How you say in English?" he asks, turning round in the seat, and swerving a little.
"'Centre of town'," we tell him. He really isn't looking at the road now.
"How you spell 'town'?" he babbles. I wonder if he is, perhaps, drunk. We tell him how to spell it. Alarmingly, while overtaking a slower car, he starts wildly writing the word in the air in with his finger.

I start to wonder whether it'll be the authorities or the scavengers who'll be the first to peel the passport from my bloody carcrashed corpse.

Days 4 - 7: Marrakesh

In my previous post I was vaguely complimentary about Agadir. Excuse the crudity, but compared to Marrakesh it's shite.

It's hard to describe Marrakesh without resorting to a range of cliches, waxing on about the "maze of mysterious alleyways", the "droves of wily hustlers", the "hypnotic music of the snake charmers". But there's a reason they're cliches: having arrived in the city's Medina (the old bit), we quickly became lost in the maze of mysterious alleyways, only to be fished out by a hustler, who showed us to our hotel in a wily attempt earn a commission. Luckily it was full.

We eventually parked next door, the Hotel Zitoun, a place - gasp! - not mentioned in the Rough Guide. Those who know me well will be shocked at such rash anti-Rough behaviour; it would be wrong to say I consult the good book religiously - I'm more like a zealous lunatic. But such daredevilry paid off: the room was cheap, clean enough and allowed us to foil the aforementioned wily hustler.

The Zitoun, and our subsequent guesthouse, the ace Mogador Hotel-Riad, was just around the corner from the famous Djemma el Fna, a huge open space filled with crowds of people, gathered round an array of performers, including, yes, snake charmers.

Wandering round the djemma you see all sorts: a man with a live chicken on his head dances and plays his two-string ginbris to a manic Moroccan beat; hunched old men in long robes slowly cross the square; juice vendors seated behind rows of oranges desperately invite you closer when you glance their way; lonely herbalists sit looking gloomily at their spices; tourist couples wander hand in hand, cameras swinging; bicycles, motorbikes and petit taxis haphazardly weave through the sparser areas of crowd, displacing people on all sides.

When it gets to dusk, even more people arrive and smoke fills the square as the cooks light up the fires. Soon the constant drum beats will be accompanied by mad yodelling as the call to prayer screeches out from the loudspeakers of the surrounding minarets. You really don't get that in Agadir.

Days 1-3: Agadir

Morocco observation #7

You know how on MTV and the like, you get a tickertape at the bottom of the screen with mindless text messages like "Dave I luv u, Sandra x" scrolling from left to right? Well on Moroccan MTV, because the messages are mostly in Arabic which is read right to left, the mindless text messages scroll in the opposite direction (right to left). It's quite strange to see; even more so as you get the occasional one in English or French, and the tickertape has to change direction for a moment to accomodate it. When you see this happen, it's like a small earthquake inside your head.

An early example of an Arabic text message

Morocco encounter #4

Yesterday, Sarah saw a ring she liked in the window of one of the touristy craft shops opposite our hotel and got persuaded inside to try it on. It turned out her fingers were too thin for it.
"You need to eat more," says the Moroccan shopkeeper. "When you are older, you will be fat."
"No I won't," says Sarah.
"You will be fat like your mother," says the man, with no apparent trace of malice.