We were met at our hotel in the morning by a local woman who would guide us on a walk through a part of the Ziz Oasis.
The main impression, looking at any oasis in these parts, is of hundreds, even thousands, of date palms. What we don’t see until we’re walking in them is that the palms are underplanted by small fields growing barley, sugar beets, carrots, fennel, broad beans, and, I’m sure, many other crops. These are fed by irrigation channels that can be blocked off by a farmer to flood just his plot, then unblocked to continue to feed the length of the growing area. Date palms themselves are sometimes marked for ownership with painted patches. These are family-owned palms, not a corporate plantation.
Our guide through the oasis
Small piles of stones mark boundaries between fields
Our destination was a women’s couscous co-op. Several women from the neighbourhood decided to take on this enterprise. We were greeted at the home of one of them, and shown a small, spotless kitchen that was filled with the scent of something delicious, and invited to sit in a large living room lined with long, low cushions.
Preparing our lunch
Mariam made tea, a necessary part of every Moroccan meal, and necessary for greeting any guest that might arrive. She explained the history of how tea came to Morocco from China. Tea here is a blend of green tea and an herb, not always mint. Traditionally, it is served very sweet, and I remember great blocks of sugar being put into a tea pot during brewing, but Moroccans have learned that tourists prefer a less sweet blend, and will often ask if we want it sweet or not.
Mariam pours tea. The higher the pour, the more honoured the guest.
The women then demonstrated how they make couscous. It is like a ceremony, with the women gathered, singing. This moment, I shall never forget.
Finished couscous, made with half-and-half barley flour and wheat flour
We were then served a beautiful couscous meal, not with the
couscous just made, because it takes hours to steam, but one they had
already prepared for us. We shared stories and laughed together. It was a
room filled with love and sisterhood.
Couscous with chicken, the meal
Mariam is an
indigenous Moroccan. She speaks the Amazigh language, and this enables
her to get us into these places, where people may not speak the
Moroccan-Arabic dialect. She seems to be friends with everyone in the
country, and she is able to facilitate communication between us and
people we would otherwise have no contact with. We are so lucky.
It
was time for us to move on, and our driver, Amal, met us nearby to
drive the two-or-so hours to the desert. Along the way we stopped at a
date co-op where we tasted a variety of the fruit. They are all Medjool
dates, which we get at home, but these were of a variety of quality and
freshness. Yum.
From the van, we began to see the sand dunes we’d
been looking forward to. We outsiders tend to think all of the Sahara
is dune, but in reality, the dunes are patches in a vast rocky place. I
don’t know how or why they occur; you’ll have to look that up on your
own.
Van window view: the desert
Van window view: a grid of pens with straw walls help to keep sand from blowing across the road. First view of the red dunes in the distance.
Merzouga by the dunes, where we'll spend the night
Sue and Bettyanne, ready to walk the dunes
After arriving at Riad Chebbi, yet another beautiful
accommodation, Bettyanne, Sue, and I wandered out on the sand to witness
our first desert sunset. We saw the tracks of 4x4s and dune buggies, and the tracks of camels We saw the tracks of scarab beetles, not
knowing what they were until we saw one beetle dragging its feet across
the sand, looking for a good spot to dig its lair.
Sue and I venture out, followed by the shadow of the photographer
Clusters of camels waiting for sunset tourists
Scarab tracks
We had yet
another tagine for dinner at our riad — no, I’m not sick of tagine! —
alongside s great platter of of veggies, then sunk into our beds
dreaming of couscous and the day to come, when we would head into the
dunes to camp.
I should talk about bathroom breaks. At most places we stop, there is a woman at the door collecting dirhams for 3 squares of rough toilet paper, and permission to wash hands after, but not to dry them, it seems, since there are no paper towels, and the few electric hand dryers we’ve seen don’t work. I think we’re supposed to save a square of toilet paper for the purpose, but we mostly opt to drip dry. It has taken us this long to realize that the going price is 2 dirhams (about 30 cents Canadian), and not knowing this has gotten us in trouble. We toss in a 5-dirham coin, thinking it was good for the 5 of us, only to be faced with hostility. Coins are hard to come by here, so we have rarely enough to pay properly. The WC ladies don’t carry change for a 200 dirham note, I don’t think. So it’s a problem. That said, these women keep the bathrooms spotless, and we’re grateful for that. And it must be said that Wild Women Excursions has done a stellar job in sussing out the best places in the country to pee.
I should also talk about tagine. For those not in the know, a tagine is a particular kind of cooking pot consisting of a flat-bottomed base and a conical lid. The ones sold in Canadian kitchen shops, when you can find them, are usually very decorative, though I have a pair of red enamel ones I bought at Costco some years ago. The tagines that have come to our tables in Morocco are of simple rid clay, and they are huge, maybe 35 cm (14”) across or more. Tagine is also the word used to describe what’s cooked inside a tagine pot. The tagines I’ve made, I now know, are not at all like true Moroccan tagines. I thought they had to consist of couscous topped by veggies and a sauce and a protein such as chicken or shrimp or lamb. I know now that a tagine can be anything, as long as it’s cooked in that pot. Sometimes, it’s just a pieces of meat or a whole chicken, with the juices it makes while roasting plus some spices and maybe some preserved lemon. Sometimes it’s just vegetables, if that’s what you want. Sometimes it’s eggs in a tomato sauce (Berber omelet). Oh, and couscous is another thing entirely.
A beautiful tagine, with Moroccan salad and bread
Another thing to mention is the lack of photo ops on this tour. Well, obviously, there are plenty, but our itinerary is so packed, there isn’t time to linger beyond the tourist must-sees. (And who decides what those are, anyhow?) I had debated bringing my good camera, and I’m glad now that I didn’t, because I would have been even more frustrated at not having the opportunity to shoot, say, the magnificent walls of Fes, or the desolate sight of nomad camps in a barren landscape, or the mud walls of a rural village. We have been shown to monuments and famous gateways, where we line up, along with the tour bus crowd, to have a group shot. This is not really Morocco to me. I hope to be able to catch more of the gritty stuff.
Obligatory group shot in front of the royal palace gate, Fes, before someone asked us to move so they could get their own shot
Update, March 19: When I wrote that last paragraph, we had just left Fes and what I can now call the urban part of our tour. Since then, we have had the great honour of getting close to the people in a variety of circumstances. While the cities were magnificent, the countryside -- deserts, oases, mountains -- is where it's at
After another generous breakfast, we loaded up to embark on another drive of six plus hours. We have left most of the urban part of our tour now, and are headed to the desert and the mountains.
The first rest stop of the day (Mariam is really good at timing bathroom breaks), was in Ifrane, a little mountain ski resort that resembled Switzerland, minus the alps. Chalet-style buildings, a European kind of layout. It was dead quiet there, the only snow left in crusty patches. But there was a souvenir shop, and we were hungry for souvenirs, it seems. We shopped. It was as much fun as we’d had in days.
This is Morocco?
Next stop was in a high pass where there’s a cedar forest and a colony of Barbary macaques. The monkeys were hanging around roadside hoping for handouts, along with a few men selling peanuts to give to the monkeys. We might have felt bad about not feeding the monkeys, but a bigtour bus pulled up with a crowd of people willing to participate.
Monkeys being monkeys. Note patches of snow.
We emerged from the cedar forest into mile after mile of barren landscape dotted with the encampments of nomads. We stopped for lunch at an apparently unused resort beside a lake. We didn’t go in, but climbed the small hill beside it for a picnic lunch that Mariam had put together for us.
Nomad home. Their herd of sheep were nearby.
Melica and Bettyanne at picnic spot.
Amazigh (Berber) home. Mariam bought eggs from them.
We carried on, past more brown lands and past a huge lake/reservoir, to the Ziz Valley. If you look at satellite images of the Ziz, it shows up as a 200-kilometre-long slash of green sliced into the brown of the surrounding lands. This oasis is fed by the Ziz River that flows some 300 kilometres from the High Atlas Mountains. We stopped, along with a bunch of big tour buses, at a viewpoint to overlook this remarkable valley. Vendors tried to sell us scarves and caftans, but again, we were not good customers.
Why look at the view when there are scarves to buy? Photo by Melica.
Our accommodation for the night was a family-run guest house in the valley. Our rooms were simple and funky, and the whole place had kind of a Southwest U.S. feel. We’re a long way from Fes.
I take it back. It's not at all like the American Southwest, not the room, at least
Our first stop of interest early this morning was the Jewish quarter, beginning with the Jewish cemetery. We listened to a long history of the Jews in Morocco, about how honoured they were by rulers, as evidenced by the proximity of the quarters (and the cemetery) to the royal palace. The Jewish population of Morocco before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was estimated to be between 250,000 and 350,000. That population decreased to the current level of some 2,250 people, due to emmigration to Israel. We have heard from at least three of our local guides about the inclusion of Jews, the love and respect for Jews, the honouring of Jews, and how they were an important part of the fabric of Moroccan society. So my question is: why did they leave in such mass numbers? Our local Fes guide, when asked how many Jewish people lived in the Jewish quarter of Fes, said, "There are no Jewish people here anymore." So this street is a museum? We walked the length of it, with its protruding wooden balconies gleaming above the Muslim shops below.
The Jewish cemetery of Fes. We weren't allowed to go in.
The Jewish Quarter. Very quiet because it's quite early in the morning.
Next we were in the van to go to a ceramics co-op. There we saw a number of master craftsmen making pots, painting dishes, and placing mosaic tiles into frames that would become tables. The work these people do is, well, masterful. One man painted fine lines in a repeating pattern, using a horse-tail brush with maybe three strands of hair in it. Another man made a tagine pot, base and lid fitted perfectly, in minutes as we watched. Men were seated on the concrete floor tapping tiny ceramic tiles into complex patterns that they couldn’t actually see, because the colours are face down as they work. There were women, too, but they had not yet worked enough years to be considered masters.
Master potter. Notice the pile of discards by his left elbow.
Master decorator, making absolutely precise brushstrokes despite our gawking
Samples of the designs, not yet fired
After many years of practice, she will be considered a master
Turning the big stuff. Prefers foot power to electricity.
Placing ceramic tile to make a table
Part of a finished table top
At the end, we got a sales pitch, just as we got a sales pitch in Meknes at a cloth shop that was on the tour. I thought we might be insulated from this, being on a tour, but no. We got the whole spiel about how to save on shipping costs when we have a fountain shipped to our homes. Bettyanne and I discussed the practicality of replacing our wood stoves with fountains, but decided maybe in our next homes there would be a place for such a thing. There’s some beautiful stuff, but egads.
We then drove up to a small fortress on the top of a hill looking over the city, to get a panoramic view of the medina before venturing in. We were there with a zillion tour buses, not really knowing the point of it. Couldn’t really tell what was what from up there. So.
Then we finally got to go into the medina itself. I have memories of two things in Fes. One was the entry through a big gate and the subsequent slightly winding medina road down a long slope. The other was being invited by a man who’d studied in the US to have lunch at his mother’s home. Her house was down one of some thousands of dead ends, a lane so narrow we could barely squeeze through. We went through some lanes like that today, and they brought back the claustrophobic feeling I’d forgotten having back then. Her house, I now know, was a very modest riad with a central courtyard. We ate in one alcove off the courtyard, sitting on floor cushions around a low table. Lunch was served on a single platter, and we all ate from it using our bread to scoop up the stew. But that was 1972.
(I know I took a bunch of photos of dark alleys, but they've disappeared.)
I didn’t recognize the streets of the medina today, but it didn’t feel unfamiliar. The streets, if you can call them that, are narrow and dim. If there’s a tourist section, we didn’t see it, walking, rather, through the food section, the wool dyers’ section, the metal workers section, the clothing section. Most of the latter was jellabas and caftans, oh, and running shoes.
Knife sharpener in the metals section of the medina
A highlight of Fes medina is the famous tannery. That’s another thing I remember from 1972. The surprise of it, the stench. This time, our access was through a place that sold leather goods, high above the tanning pots. We were handed mint to hold to our noses to tame the stink. None of it seemed as extreme as it did back in the day; even the smell wasn’t so very strong, not to me or to Bettyanne, whose farm experience has hardened her to these things. It could be that it was morning this time, and the weather is cool, whereas last visit was in June or July, and certainly the vats would have been smellier.
Dye pots, Fes tannery
We went for lunch in the medina, and ate a mediocre meal whose best part was the appetizers. These are the same for every meal we’ve had: eight or ten little plates of various vegetables: cubes of beets, marinated carrots, beans, rice, eggplant, peppers (shakshuka), cauliflower, potatoes, and olives, always olives. Coming up was a tour of a wood factory and a silk factory, and we decided together that we’d had enough of tours, so we asked as a group to just go back to the hotel to hang out. That was no problem; the guides got off early, and we got to rest.
Dinner out was another special evening, this time with musicians, belly dancers, and a magician. We were really pleased to see a mature belly dancer with a realistic body: back fat, loose belly folds. She was a good dancer and obviously loved doing it. Belly dancing, incidentally, is not traditional in Morocco, but brings in the tourists — the place was big, and it was packed.
I do have an update on our spiffy Fes digs. Seems not all rooms are created equal, and one of our members had a room that may have been quarters for staff overflow, I don’t know. She had a full-sized dining table alongside her bed, and a separate room with mattresses on the floor, if I heard correctly. Her heat didn’t work; in fact, hardly anything worked. She had a little window facing outside the riad where she saw a man relieve himself in full view and in more ways than one. Well. We are Wild Women on a Wild Women tour. We can take it!
I have found the sweet spot on the bus: it’s the raised area above the rear wheels, where I’m high enough to see out the front windshield, but not so high that my view out the side is shortened, like in the back row. Seems we’ve all settled into our favoured places now, five of us spread out in a van that can hold sixteen. Pretty nice!
Luxury Van
We wound back down the mountain to the fertile plains below. We saw sheep with their shepherds, cows with their watchers. We saw onions, barley, wheat, sugar beets growing. We saw loaded donkey carts bringing grass home to the cows. We saw a local town market, we saw school kids running to or from their bus, and we saw garbage everywhere.
We stopped for a walking tour (so. many. walking. tours.) through Volubilis, a Roman ruined city in the middle of the plain. I thought it was a strange place for the Romans to choose, but it was the exceptional fertility of the land that enticed them, it seems, in addition to its strategic position and abundant supply of water. In it’s heyday, it was a major producer of olive oil and grains for the empire, housing more than 20,000 people. Much of the structure was destroyed in the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and some of it has been reconstructed. There is not a whole lot to see, but it was good to stretch the legs, and I do love imagining places like this as living cities.
An extension of the Appian Way
One of few standing structures
Twisted column (rare), twisted sisters (just as rare)
There was a single souvenir shop outside the site, and I bought a hat to replace the one that decided to stay behind in the riad in Marrakech. Gotta have a hat in Morocco.
The new hat. It's crushable, and fits my colour scheme! And I had fun bargaining for it.
From Volubilis, we drove an hour or so to Meknes, one of a series of Imperial cities in Morocco, along with Rabat, Fes, and Marrakech. We had a (nother!) walking tour, this one of the medina and of a mausoleum. I think it was a mausoleum; I’m starting to lose track. Our lunch stop, deep in the medina, was a hole-in-the-wall place that serves only camel burgers. Some of us were more successful at enjoying them than others. The meat in mine was very rare, but I assured it was safe to eat. It was really nicely spiced. Probably won’t ever eat another one.
Pretending to enjoy camel burgers
Shadows in the medina of Meknes
Our guide was a very sweet young woman with good stories to spark up the history she was required to tell us. And which I can no longer remember. I’m really looking forward to the mountain and desert part of this trip, away from so much…education!
After Meknes, we drove yet some more, into Fes. I was in Fes all those years ago, and again don’t remember much, and certainly not the magnificence of this city, surrounded by I-don’t-know-how-many-kilometres of walls. Because we were in the van, I couldn’t get any decent shots of the place, the caramel walls riding the hillside, the fortress on the hill. You’ll just have to go there.
We checked into our riad, a place about three cuts above anything I’ve ever stayed in before. Rose petals on the bed. Rose petals on the bathmat. Essential oils in a diffuser. Doors direct into the courtyard. A bowl of fruit on the table. Turn-down service. (Turn-down service!!) Everything screamed luxury. These places make me feel small. The men in their black suits all obsequious, I don’t feel “good enough” to be here, tramping in the schlub that I am. I know I know, that’s a dumb way to think, but it’s not about thinking, it’s about how I feel. I like places more homey, with a few flaws, with proprietors who seem like regular human beings. Some people, obviously, love luxury. I am not one of them. Even when I’ve paid for it.
The Maison Bleue in Fez. Our room is the one at the end.
Note rose petals on the bed
Note rose petals on the bath mat
We went for dinner at another private home, but there was no comparison between this home and the one that welcomed us in Casablanca. While that was a middle-class family apartment, this was a mansion — that Mariam said was also middle class. The owner of this huge house — again, built like a riad with a plain wall on the street and open to a garden courtyard in the centre — is a woman about my age who is of, I think, the fifth generation to own it. Chadia is a trained chef, and has groups of people in to her courtyard every evening. We were one of several groups. She serves, after the usual fantastic array of appetizers, a chicken pastilla, an individual filo pie filled with spiced shredded chicken and topped with a dusting of sugar (which we all scraped off). Desert was whole fruit and a few small pastries. Fruit figures into every meal in this country. “Seasonal” right now seems to be apples, oranges, and bananas.
Dinner at Chadia's
Chadia pouring tea
In the middle of dinner, some musicians came in, beating drums and blowing horns. We got up and danced, along with Chadia, who was beaming and laughing the whole time.
Getting home was a mix of walking and driving. And in the end, despite my proclaimed discomfort with luxury, I slept better than I have in weeks, from 10 pm to 6 am. Maybe I just don’t know myself.
