Apologies for all errors of fact and infelicities, and for all references which are either so English or so personal as to be unfathomable. By all means email both corrections and questions!
Morocco is a wonderful place. If when you have read this diary, you think gosh, I'd like to go there (or I must go there again), then I will be very happy...
A flight to Tangier, and one night's hotel pre-booked: after that... I have read the guidebook, studied the map, talked to John Cambridge, and plotted a tentative course.
Arrive at Rembrandt Hotel, in the centre of Tangier at 8pm and welcomed Ah, you must be Mr Richard and have my fax rustled at me triumphantly. So almost 100% success at the first fence.
Taxi driver on the way into the city said yesterday there was wonderful money to be made - like water falling. He did not explain why. Many new concrete-drab apartment blocks being built along road from airport. Morocco is obviously rapidly developing place and on the go - at least in city like Tangier. Heinekin, Kitkat and Chivers Jam all made here - what more does an Englishman on his hols need? Room OK and has Big View over harbour and bay. (And this is at night - daylight should bring more delight.)
Have a wander out - along Boulevard Pasteur and down to Grand Socco (square) and into the medina (old walled town). A mile or two through faded French colonial/concrete modern and into medieval muddle: past evening promenaders on the decorous razzle, into the shrieking blood-heat of the vast market. Have a couple of beers in a bar and thé a la menthe on the pavement. Then a sort of fruity croissant from a stall and a Kitkat (Moroccan made, of course).
I make a tactical withdrawal for another beer or two in El Minzha hotel. A fabulous hotel modelled on an old Moroccan palace, and, unusually, in the thick of the old town. (These ritzy jobs generally lie discretely out of town - away from hoi polloi.) John C had mentioned the El Minzha: though as he said, the FO paid his £74 a night. Actually, although compared with the downtown flops at 15Dr the El Minzha is revoltingly expensive, compared with anything Euro - it's a snip. Anyway, great to visit. Large central open courtyard with tinkling marble fountain with rooms opening off. Pillars and walls covered in mosaic; painted wooden ceilings. Astonishingly attentive staff and a fellow (German I think) playing cocktail piano including the inevitable Play-it-again-Sam (Casablanca is about three hours down the coast) music twice within 30 minutes. I ask him how often he has to play that particular tune and he scowls. It's quite amusing, I suppose, that a German, of all people, is playing Rick's-bar music.
The curious thing is that on the evening ramble a few beggars lightly importune but no touts at all (apart from two shoeshine boys - who laughed and departed when they saw a whitey unsportingly wearing suede shoes). So far so good.
Come back to hotel and had another beer in bar. Watched three staff have a huge argument about one of them having his paper stolen. It would not have happened at the El Minzha! Picture of Rembrandt on the wall in bar. Did he come to Tangier? I noticed a restaurant Rembrandt down the street too. Will review guidebook now and plan tour of city tomorrow.
Extraordinary thing - in view of guidebook, Jill Walker etc: 10.23am, sitting on stone wall outside Kaspah, and no one (putative guide or otherwise) has yet accosted me, with the exception of two small boys who got me to help them haul a crate of Coca-cola up the hill. Old Tangier is like Clovelly with dirt. All steps and steep slopes, higgledypiggledy houses etc. Probably a bit of Dinan thrown in too. The guidebook describes how the French to a greater or lesser extent left the old walled towns, the medinas with their fortified citadels (Kaspahs), and built adjoining villes nouveaux with boulevards, squares and gardens. (fortified citadel is great guidebook-speak: can you have an unfortified citadel?) Certainly this is true with Tangier, and I have walked from the new town into the medina and up the hill to the gates of the Kaspah.
A few vignettes along the way:
... a fellow dressed like a Jap kamikaze (long scarf tied around head etc) standing on a bronze cannon on the terraced ramparts overlooking the bay, waving a great black stick and loudly haranguing a Spanish ferry in the port below.
... a shop crowded with people but with absolutely nothing on the shelves except five pairs of leather insoles. Have they already bought the stock? Are they inquiring after a robbery?
... a couple of guys with a handcart heavily layered with what look like Victorian encaustic tiles from a Cathedral floor, trucking their way up a hill so steep that they are forced to tack from side to side, dodging nimbly through the traffic.
Tangier is one of those towns where there is old and new all mixed up. Most new building is monolithic concrete but with those odd touches, particularly to the rooflines and door cases which hold it all together. Builders must have aesthetic (or sometimes otherwise) judgement and design in features as they go along. I find it difficult to believe that an architect would make some of this stuff up. Although the buildings range from the immaculately maintained (mostly monumental government-type) to the most frightful rotting slums, Tangier seems quite a clean place (at least in so far as it is generally possible to find somewhere where I don't mind sitting down - the standard Martin Cleanliness Test), and everyone looks purposeful. Even slumped at a pavement café sucking up tea through the inevitable clump of mint leaves in the glass, the people watch alertly as the world goes by.
Outside a school is a crowd (150?) waiting to go in. Two great cheers go up. First a girl arrives with short skirt. She is obviously up to the mark, since she acknowledges the cheers by raising her hands above her head thus raising further the skirt - and the cheers. (Female dress varies from the all enveloping djellabah and veil (chowder?) (I have not yet got the hang of the words) through some quite ghastly nylon-with-plastic- embroidery tunic things to chic western-style clothes. I guess that in certain environments (schools?) changes still cause a stir.) The second cheer was for a boy who arrived with what looked like a large chocolate cake carried aloft on a tray. Ironic cheers all round. A pay-off for teacher perhaps?
Tangerines (?) don't get to business early (though once at it - apart from a three hour siesta a lunchtime - shops stay open until latelatelate at night). Just opposite me a guy has arrived for work operating an al fresco postcard stall. The cards are in racks hanging on the wall. Overnight the racks have hung pictures-to-the-wall - now he turns them round ready for business. Honest fellows these Tangerines must be - though oddly so. Is the idea that people would not seek to steal a postcard unless they can see the picture?
Museum in Kasbah a treat. Very cool with absolutely wonderful floors. Small highly coloured tiles set in cement(?) so worn and dark that it looks like the floor is black, and filmed with oil reflecting the light with rainbows. Clumsy to describe - but great to see. No one else in Museum except two giggling chic Maroc girls taking the money, and a fellow who goes one room ahead to switch on the lights (unnecessary - very good windows in roof) and then dodges back to put them off behind me. Museum has some great leatherwork and textiles. Some carpets in washed out brights remind me of Roger Oates shaker rugs. Also splendid medieval looking pottery from Tetuan - Filigree incense burners in Chinesy jade-green. Volubilis (Major Roman settlement in Morocco - now conserved ruins) looks good in photographs and a wonderful bronze of a boy. (Actually as with other on-the-spot museums, the often excellent exhibits are quietly mouldering against a background of damp walls and exercise-book captions. Roman mosaic of the usual jolly Bacchanalian goings-on set in courtyard floor - also from Volubilis. Exit onto garden. Old boy clipping a hedge around palmtrees growing bananas (are banana trees palms?), old cannons and huge terra-cotta pots. Out through Kaspah walls past Café Detroit (started by someone or other rockmusiciany and famous (a rolling stone?) in 60s).
Back down to medina where sitting a while. American tourist to guide, pointing to pile of wool What sort of wool is that? Guide: sheep's wool. American: really - that's interesting. Me to American (rudely butting in): Good question, Madam. American (with perfect seriousness to me): I thought so too (!).
No one mentioned the hats. Most of the old market women wear hats that look like S Americanish wide straw with flying buttresses of thick ropes of twisted wool. These woollen stays disappear into the crown of the hat and erupt from its top like a pom- pom. Very Mrs Shilling.
Lunch on bread and cheese and bananas bought in the market. Fish market worth a visit: a hundred-plus stalls all with masses of exotic (but fresh) looking fish and a lot of shouting. Then thé a la menthe at the café Gibraltar near the petit socco. This was the centre of seediness 30 years ago; maybe Burroughs scribbled at this very table. By the by - have discovered an important thing: pas de sucre brings the tea without the four double-lumps of sugar which Moroccans accept as standard. (Moroccans have lousy teeth, a likely sequel to a lifetime eating anything sticky, sickly and sweet.) Anyway, wild music swirls out of a little-girl party-dress-shop next to the café and right beside the verandah where I am sitting is a guy carefully unwrapping chocolate bars and cutting them into fingers with a knife. He piles them in a bowl balanced on an old cardboard box and is selling them slice by slice. Doing an OK trade. It's the knife which pleases: he does not just break up the bars as I might - this might give unequal fingers. He painstakingly scores each slice and then carefully snaps it off the bar.
As I finish that sentence, a great commotion as a wheelbarrow-sized lump of masonry peels off the edge of a balcony and crashes 30 feet into the road not twenty feet from where I sit. Everyone freezes. No shouting and gradual relief that no one hurt. Someone peers out from an upper window. Someone else starts to pile and brush the lumps of concrete and bricks into a heap. The old men in the café shrug and from their gesticulations I suspect begin to talk of their experiences of much bigger bits falling off other buildings. Over five minutes or so life begins to wind back up and the potentially ghastly incident is forgotten. As passers-by crunch through the debris they have no idea that if they had passed that way a few minutes before... The chocolate seller throughout this saga has continued phlegmatically to score and snap his bars.
Walked to bus station to check out buses for tomorrow. First importuner. He starts gabbling about how much do you earn in England? I stopped to look at a building. He says In Morocco we sell buildings by the square metre. I say In England we have a saying - do not teach Grandmother to suck eggs. Although he speaks no English, he seems to be struck by this innate wisdom for with a pardon, monsieur, he wanders off. Got to bus station. Several companies - just like Oxford. With competing buskers competing to divert customers to the different ticket windows. The CTM (state bus company - the other companies are private) guy was rather musically calling TetuanuanuanTetuanuanuan and hustling good business. I find I can get to Tetuan more or less at any time of day or night.
Took a Petit Taxi (around-town taxis, as opposed to Grand Taxis which compete on a share-fare system with the buses on the longer routes) back to the centre of town, and then asked for the American Museum. I intended to go to the American Legation Museum (I think it has stuff about American/Moroccan history because Morocco was first country in world to recognise American independence) - but was obviously being driven somewhere different. It turned out to be the Forbes Museum. Quite astonishing place. A splendid house/villa/mansion set in an equally splendid - and extensive - tropical garden. Walks and vantage points with views for miles over the sheer scree slopes to the sea and out across the bay.
Garden dotted with pavilions fitted with glass cases containing hundreds of thousands of model soldiers all depicting different battles. Ancient Roman, British Empire, American, modern Arab: the whole of fighting history frozen in miniature. I suppose its extremely funny really - a rich man's fancy run riot, but I am bowled over by the obvious enthusiasm which spawned the enterprise. I wonder who owns it now that Forbes Senior is dead. I seem to remember that Forbes would have fitted into the exotic Tangier milieu. A guy (Moroccan) came up to me in the garden and said do you know Brighton and Hove? I said no. He seemed somewhat disappointed because he had been there, did not like it and I think wanted to discuss its bad points with me.
The Forbes Museum is actually closed on Thursdays but the doorkeeper let me in so long as I said I was part of the crew of a cruise-boat - say you work for The Button Line (I think he said). I suspect that he thought I would not blend in with the ritzy passengers who were drifting about the museum by special invitation, but might be taken for a deckhand. Later in the evening I saw from my hotel window a cruise ship in the bay lit up from stem to stern with white fairy-lights. A hell of a sight and I think I owe it to this boat's presence that I got to see Forbes' toy soldiers. Thank you ship! I spoke to one passenger in the museum - an American woman. She was looking at a case showing a crowd of happy people waving flags and looking victorious amid palmtrees and a lot of sand. The scene was commemorating The Green March, when King Hassan urged 350,000 Moroccans to walk into the Western Sahara and annex it for Morocco (I am sure there were perfectly good reasons!) Anyway, this American woman, seeing the star on the Moroccan flags in the tableau said look, the star of David, this must be about the Israelis beating the Arabs. Thank God (Allah) there was not a Moroccan in earshot or an International Incident would surely have followed.
Heading out of Tangier on a bus to Tetuan reinforces a curious phenomenon. There are certainly hundreds of apartment blocks going up as Tangier marches into the countryside. A taxi driver had said they grow like mushrooms. Some are almost completed and are very elaborate. Some are still dusty holes in the ground. But hardly anyone is working on them: millions of cubic yards of concrete have been poured over millions of concrete blocks which must have called for large shuttering gangs. But all you see is the odd (?) old man perched on a ladder hammering at a bit of concrete sprue with a large and antique hammer. Do they only work at certain times of the year? It seems dry enough in May.
The countryside is slightly surreal. Obviously pretty fertile and cultivated - but no fences except for occasional cactus hedge, large flat leaved cacti about 6 feet high. Donkeys wandering about everywhere, and tethered cattle. sometimes fields full of cattle, but all tethered. It reminds me of the woolmark picture of the flock of sheep standing in the shape of the woolmark logo. The land dotted with houses/farms which are all superficially similar - block-built low sheds with small windows and tin roofs. (everything white painted of course) - but they are all actually quite different in terms of window size, layout, roof type. This seems odd - no one is building to type to keep the costs down. I suspect they must collect up the materials as they go and build accordingly. Quarries dotted about the hills, some quite big - large trucks backed in.
The driver stops the bus a few times and pumps violently on the brakes. I suspect they are duff, as we roar up the hills, and come down gingerly in very low gear. Later a fellow in Tetuan tells me these very old buses are called Babylon buses. I do not understand the exact reference - but it seems apt.
At every cross roads there are knots of policemen, and I am reminded that on the way into Tangier from the airport the taxidriver was flagged down by a policeman who hands some money in through the window. I am astonished, in this kind of country (appalling generalisation) - normally drivers have to pay the policemen. But the driver tells me that he earlier brought some bread out from town for the policepost, and the debt is being paid. I was disappointed not to have discovered a topsy-turvey Alice business.
The crops apart from grass is a loose looking cereal grown in apparently arbitrary patches (following the water courses?). But the corn has self-seeded into the waste and grass so the farmland is strangely amorphous. You can see that there are farms out there, but not where they start and finish.
A chicken suddenly squawks, and behind me a man loudly tells it to be quiet. Eventually the row subsides and I look round to see the bloke looking very embarrassed. Perhaps it is considered a very poor show not to be able to keep one's chickens under control.
Bags: Plastic bags seem to be the universal link wherever Moroccans gather. Rich/poor/town/country; everyone clutches a plastic bag. Mostly bin-liners filled with something squadgy. They must be highly skilled bag carriers for the bags are flimsy and the loads heavy. The old country women (the mountainards (spelling) as the townsmen rather dismissively call the mostly Berber hill-dwellers) use a twisted sheet over their shoulders to carry their loads in. Otherwise plastic is de rigeur. I saw one woman walking along the road 100 miles from the nearest reasonable sized town toting a Principles for Men bag. On the way to Chefchouen I saw a field entirely covered in plastic bags. They were snagged in the long grass and looked very curious - like a crop of black dahlias.
Tetuan is a bonny place. A huge recently rebuilt square (Hassan II Square) and a palace in the corner which the King does not visit for reasons connected with his apparent terror of the Tetuanese. At least that is the reason advanced by the townspeople, who are rather proud of their ability to scare the King - though how they accomplished this feat is something they will only hint at darkly. (Actually the King probably simply doesn't like the place.) The Medina is somewhat amorphous (I think that this is a second outing for this word, though it is apt - honest), the market area sort of blends into the old town.
I am sitting outside a row of shops when a guy says Hello, where are you going. Still conditioned by the guidebooks I am non-committal. He says have you had a bad experience? I say no. He says so why not talk? I apologise. He is the son of the shopowner, 34 years old it turns out later. And we wander off through the medina to visit a friend of his in a Berber market. Bugger, I think, he is on the make all the time. But no. Absolutely no pressure to buy: simply that I have told my new friend that I have a shop in England, and he thinks I will be interested in what sells in Tetuan. We discuss between the three of us, tourists, coach parties and so on. I try to explain the 3Ps concept (pick it up, put it down and piss off), but it loses something in my translation into pigeon French. We part happily, and Raschid and I (Raschid is very pleased to find the common bond of our names, though whether Richard and Raschid are really connected I do not know) then go and have thé a la menthe at a pavement café, and he tells me he is not married and that even in a fairly relaxed Moslem country like Morocco couples after 8pm can be stopped by the police. If they do not have their marriage papers the man will be admonished and the girl may be taken to be checked for virginity (Raschid's words).
Raschid is an excellent English speaker: he studied Mechanical Engineering at Rabat University and then came back to Tetuan to run his father's shop. His brother does the morning shift, and Raschid works from 4pm to 11pm. He has another brother who lives in Birmingham and is an electrician. He is married to an Englishwoman. We discuss inter-religious marriages. He says his parents are relaxed about it but there might well be problems if his brother has children because of a Moslem's duty to see his children are brought up as Moslems. Raschid has been to Birmingham and paid for the trip by smuggling dope in condoms in his stomach. He says this is a very common way for young Moroccans to pay for travel. In Morocco he says carrying 25gm of dope is legal. The village women around Tetuan carry it into town to sell in the market every day. Mind you there is constant talk of police narks who offer to sell visitors vast quantities of dope, and then shop them. Grassing on the grassers (haha).
We pass a delightful hour, and he walks me back to the bus station. I give him an English paperback (Mortimer's Summer Lease - a far cry from condom swallowing smugglers) and we part. He is still convinced that the fact that our names are so similar means our meeting was ordained.
The bus ride on to Chefchouan is pretty spectacular. The hills are real craggy mountains. The valleys are real swooping green chutes between the hills. I really feel that I am travelling somewhere. Chefchouen nestles under a great wall of grey crag which sets off the blindingly white buildings. Actually it looks like an outpost of the Goodenough empire: there is a general abundance of pale blue woodwork. I find a splendid Hotel - the Magou. 130Dr including bathroom, verandah overlooking the street and a great breakfast (the guy insists in reading out a list of what will be offered - fresh orange juice, croissants from the bakery (which the hotel owns) round the corner, and coffee from a huge and venerable expresso machine.
The medina is on a steep hill, many of the lanes are so steep that they have had to be terraced. It is great exercise, the townsmen must have calf muscles like iron. And everywhere you look is a little gem (what an evocative architectural cliché). Even the closed merchants doors in the evening (sort of solid french windows set in the medina walls) are all the same but all different. There seem to be an infinite number of ways of panelling a door, and then there is the incrustation of the centuries of repairs. Robert Franklin would be pleased to see the number of doors panelled diagonally. The shops here, as in every medina, are not the Euro walk-round sort (only in the larger villes nouveaux are they enterable). They are merely very large cupboards straight off the street: in the morning the shopman opens the door, displays his goods all over the pavement - and stands behind his counter in his cupboard.
The central medina square is a shady place: inevitable cafés facing the warm-brown Kasbah, which is partly ruined but retains its rampart walls. In the centre of the Kaspah is a garden - an oasis away from the medina bustle (another cliché, but true). A small museum of local whatnot and a library of books about Andalusia (spelling?) are housed in two of the towers. Why there is a library about a region of Spain, I could not establish. A chap I asked muttered something about why not? Fair enough, I guess. There is also a dungeon tower with neck irons chained to the wall at ground level (beaten mud). The whynot? chap said that during the 1920's some wellknown local personage was held here, though I suspect that these ghastly irons were used even more recently. Actually the neckirons are rather elegantly designed, but are strung onto the chain in such a way that to release one prisoner, all of them would have to be released. This seems odd practise, unless the experience of being chained to the floor so subdued the prisoners that they could cause no trouble.
I walked around the rampart walls, which give a great view over the town to the valley beyond. Also, at one end of the garden is an enormous hole where the ground has fallen away into a ruined cellar. There was a notice: Do Not Fall Into This Hole - or words to that effect in French. I guess that when someone does fall into the hole and lies at the bottom, the whynot? chap can lean over and say we told you not to.
I wandered up the hill out of the medina and found about 20 men chopping down (and manoeuvring around the closely entwined buildings) one very tall tree. The lumberjacks were armed with several hundred yards of what looked like anchor rope, three huge axes (with splendid blades like scimitars but handles like pea sticks) and a lot of shouting. There was a crowd of at least 100 people cluck-clucking and loudly offering suggestions. The tree was roped to nearby buildings and then chopped off at the base. Then it was tipped slightly to one side and five feet chopped off the bottom of the trunk. The restraining ropes were loosened, the trunk lowered a little, and another few feet of trunk hacked off. Thus slowly and painfully the tree was chopped up were it stood and the pieces heaved away for firewood. This all sounds very orderly, but in fact the whole business was pretty disorganised: one fellow would loosen a rope, and another would immediately pull it tight again. An axeman would start to chop at the trunk to be relieved by another who would start another cut a foot away from the first. The tree which was felled was one of a small grove growing on a paved terrace. Presumably its roots were interfering with the building foundations. As I left a suited personage arrived to inspect the work. Everyone fell silent.I have a horrid idea that he was saying they had felled the wrong tree...
Further up river the path came to a sheer cliff wall with a huge letterbox twenty feet up from which the river flowed. Shades of Magritte's(?) train and fireplace. God knows how the water got into the hill in the first place. Someone told me that it never dried up: at the time the water flow was of a cross-section of at least twelve feet wide by three feet deep. The path was obviously a popular promenade since there were at least 50 or 60 people, mostly women, watching the water. Also three Moroccan girls of about 15 years who had climbed over the railing to stand on the edge of, or rather under, the torrent coming out of the cliff to be photographed by admirers. I assume it is like Niagara in miniature.
Here is a thing. Every now and then, in the context of a very open go-more-or-less anywhere country, I am brought up short with the realization that this is not home: I said that the crowd was mostly women. In fact so many of them were women, that I thought that they were all women and that I had blundered into some taboo place (the sacred river-letterbox?) that was secret to women. What obloquy would be my lot? I was relieved when I spotted the occasional fellow in the group.
Eat in Chefchouen Restaurant on couscous and almond cake. The owner is a smiley man who has been to Holland. His restaurant is all low cushions and candles. Swirling patterned curtains and innumerable knickknacks everywhere. The food is pretty good, though on the whole I prefer tagine to couscous. Bought bus ticket to Fez for 1pm tomorrow. Met a fellow - Ali - who runs tourist shop/weaving business. More chat about ghastliness of tourists. He says he is a good Muslim except when I'm having a good drink or a good fuck. I get the impression that neither activity involves his wife. As always we part brothers (his words). He says all Moroccan women in short skirts are prostitutes. I find this hard to believe (having seen a lot of chic leg in Tangier), and think that it is partly wishful thinking on his part. I also think that the cultural differences between city and village is so huge that there is little iconic connection.
Walk around the ville nouveau - naturally a Hassan II Square with a Mohammed V Boulevard running off it. (The only time when there isn't one, is when there is a MVS with a HIIB). Go past what looks like an old Spanish church - which is what I think (couldn't quite understand the lingo) someone later tells me it was - but which is now a community hall. Go in to watch a puppet show. V. funny magician routine. Magician cuts woman in two, who then turns into skeleton which prances around disconcerting magician. Lots of children make up morning-treat audience. I notice that schoolchildren here (and in Tangier and probably everywhere) wear a sort of thin white cotton smock over their clothes. I assume that this is anti-dirt uniform. It makes a crocodile-class look like a crowd of midget barbers.
Buy some bread and cheese for lunch. Bread is 1Dr for round flat 9" diameter loaf. It is apparently subsidised (like the buses?). Clever old king is presumably staving off unrest so long as no one starves. Also, homosexuality has never been frowned on in Morocco (so I am repeatedly told as every second person attempts to sell me himself or his son or his brother - or all three). I am assured that this is partly because the government sees it as a form of birth control. Certainly they need some sort of control: the population is growing relentlessly. There seem to be enormous numbers of under- 21s. And all very fit looking. Only rich old men and women run to fat.
An extraordinary sight. A bundle of rags five feet in diameter with two legs at the bottom has just walked past. It looks like a clumsily wrapped pass-the-parcel, but it wears a foxy grin on its face like Noah before the flood. He (I think it is a he) obviously knows something that everyone else does not. Is the Big Freeze on the way? I sit with the owner of a new hotel for half an hour until the bus comes. He moans about business, and since his hotel looks OK I tear the title page out of the Lonely Planet and told him to get his guests to puff his hotel to the editors. I must say the LP is v. useful. It catches the right mood for a place, even if the information is a bit awry. Though it got Hotel Magou just right: it is excellent.
Oh the bus ride to Fez! Wonderful scenery - starting with the crags and swooping valleys like those I saw riding into Chefchouen, and gradually giving way to softly rounded hills and to the great valley in which Fez sits. I see a fellow ploughing with a large white mule hitched with a diminutive wizened donkey. Is that not some fairy tale, I dimly remember? Further on there is a great ploughed hillside and in the middle a huddle of workers who look up and stare, apparently transfixed, as the bus passes. They are all dressed in startlingly bright, multicoloured clothing - red/green/yellow scarves and cloaks billowing in the breeze. They look like a circus troupe with the Big Top snatched away. How easily we race through others' lives.
The bus ride was four or five dusty hours, and we stopped halfway for kebabs cooked over a fire next to a petrol station. Five or six guys had it all ready as the bus pulled in, and as we left they were winding down to wait the several hours until the next bus.
A couple of times we were stopped by policemen. One of them kept running onto the bus to check a few people and then running out again to snatch a mouthful from his mint-tea-glass which he had perched on a little table under a tree: this stop took a long time. One time the bus was stopped outside a huge orange orchard surrounded by a cactus hedge: yellow cactus flowers against the bright orange fruit on the trees. I remembered the guy who came to CWW who wanted to pick an apple from one of the trees - he had never picked an apple before and relished the sensation. I looked at those oranges and understood his motive.
The bus pulled into a fairly grotty municipal bus station, and I walked along dingy concrete streets to the Hotel Amor, which is pretty crummy. Ah Fez!
Walked down to the Fez el Bali. This is the old-town/medina and is separated from the ville nouveau by a long hot valley. Quite a walk. I had hardly gone through the Babou Jeloud (blue gate) into the medina when I fell in with Mohammed who owned a truly wonderful antique shop. We went upstairs and talked on this and that for half an hour. He showed me some 18th century Jewish woven belts: double sided and double ended so the wearer could exhibit any of four patterns. They seemed genuine enough (according to the books he showed me) and in any event were very beautiful and exceedingly well made. Again, no sales pressure, in fact damned matey. Actually he did get out an old painted chest and show me some jewellery wrapped in old newspaper. I suspect that it might have been possible to have been seduced into thinking the jewellery was old because the newspaper and the chest were! But when I looked at him, he looked at me - and then laughed and shook my hand.
The Fez medina is a real hell's kitchen. I stumbled through a v. small corner of it (300,000 people live here with no street wider than about 10 feet, and most smaller) and could have got completely lost, except that several kids pointed the way back to the Babou Jeloud. Bought a pc from an old fellow who looked like Alan Sernberg in a tarboosh. Very dignified. He said (since he was just about packed up after the day's trading) Allah has brought you to me. It made my small purchase seem very important.
A general point. I see the fellows trucking their wares to their stalls in the early morning - all dirty cardboard boxes, old fertilizer sacks, wrapping sheets and decrepit wheelbarrows. And yet once the old bed springs have been shunted into position on the pavement and covered with a selection of old blankets and plastic sheets, and the goods laid out, the displays look clean, tidy and inviting. How do they do it? I go into some European shops with large stock turnover and all mod cons, and the displays still look tired and musty.
Which reminds me - on a stall in Chefchouen selling second hand rubbish (one perished rubber flipper, a burnt-out washing machine motor, an Italian tour guide to Switzerland - that sort of thing) was a tyre pressure gauge. This was causing enormous interest among a group of chattering Berbers, who probably hadn't a tyre between them. They were passing the gauge from hand to hand: I was not sure if they were wondering what it was, or if they have some mysterious alternative use for broken tyre pressure gauges in the Atlas mountains.
Today spent almost entirely in Fez medina. What can one say? On one level it is absurd: all that rush and bother to sell not much more than would fit into a couple of Tescos. And yet 300000 people live, work and play in this Great Wen, which is what I think Johnson called London: and I suspect Fez medina is probably not unlike London, certainly of Dickens and probably of the 17th/18th century. I see rooms full of small boys entirely black as they metal polish silver trays: the air so thick that you can not tell if they are man or beast. Sometimes they emerge blinking to scurry with the trays to wash them in the muddy river. Men waist deep in vats of stinking sheepskins steeped in lime, men breathing the filthy vapours of bubbling blood-red dye as they twist it from dripping skeins of Berber carpet yarn. A dozen, two dozen, three, god knows, identical shops side by side down an alley five feet wide, and in every door-way a man tap taps copper sheet into cooking pots. Tailors, potters, engravers, grocers, cheesemakers, carpenters, and others whose purpose I can only guess at - each have their district, their souk. They make, they cry their wares, they sell. They pile stuff crazily on unflagging donkeys and send it round the medina. They gossip, drink eternal streams of tea, and pray in their mosques. The sheer activity is awe-inspiring. And everyone seems endlessly keen to share their lives. Of course they want to sell, but they wish also to talk, to laugh, to share.
I take a guide, Abdul, for half a day. He is a tanner who shows me where he works normally, and I think he is not there because my 10Dr beats his usual wages. Later, after Abdul has returned to his work in the tannery, I find the souk where the fell mongers and dyers deal with the fell-wool. Most of it goes for rough Berber carpets, many of which are woven in the High Atlas which I hope to visit later.
I visit the 14th century Medersa (Moslem seminary) which reminds me of the Saxon church in Bradford on Avon which was lost for hundreds of years inside a huddle of later buildings. Here, in the street wall is a gnarled brown door: it looks no different to the thousand others which lead into the gloom of tiny houses. But this one opens (for the customary 10Dr) onto a marble-paved court. Sunlight of centuries has bleached the timber pillars which support galleries like theatre gods, where the monks lived in tiny iron-latticed cells. The walls are covered with brilliant mosaic and studded with flowing Islamic texts carved into stone and wooden panels. Moving from the hustling medina street into the calm of the ancient Medersa courtyard is like walking into a swimming pool on a very hot day.
This has been a tumultuous day, and at its end two things shall suffice to reflect the extraordinary experience which is the Medina at Fez.
One: a butcher bites, carefully, slowly and one by one, the wings from a big basketful of live pigeons so that they can not flap away as he places them on his stall. Blood runs from his mouth as he tweaks and plumps each helpless pigeon on his shelf so that they look enticing for his customers. After a day in the medina, there is no horror here: only an oh look! There is a butcher preparing his stall.
Two: Late into the night I talk for hours to a Koran seller (and bookbinder) - Berrada Abderbahman - who so pleasurably shows me his tiny shop. We discuss (in my appalling French and his appalling English), Books and Life. He gives me some pages from an old Koran and will accept no payment. He talks of Allah's Grand Design. He once spent two months out of Morocco - playing cocktail violin in a Marseilles hotel. He has a friend in the shop who is an army pilot; he writes my name in Arabic. We all swap addresses, and both these fellows kiss me seven times. The bookdealer evokes The Brotherhood of Man. He says le ceour not l'argent is the real force in the medina. I have to believe him, as I would also believe there are others who would sell me the hind leg of their donkeys - and then hack it off and gift-wrap it.
I think the almost terrifying thing about it all is that in India, and places East, where the markets are as dark, they are also truly alien: the people are so different. It is like a Japanese film; I can watch fascinated but can only make contact on my (western) terms: it is a contextual problem. Morocco is as we are, it is in many ways European in style. Dolled up ladies modelled on Angela Rippon read the news on TV, but some of their children work in hell and their shopkeepers bite the wings off pigeons. It is all very disturbing.
I booked into Batha Hotel: right against medina walls and much more convenient for the old town. In the late afternoon I walk right through the medina and visited the Jamai Palace (the guidebook has Jamais Palace, which is rather different) for a drink. This is a very upmarket hotel but somewhat jaded I thought - not a patch on the El Minzha in Tangier. I then walked anti clockwise in a semicircle along the outer medina wall back to the Babou Jeloud. I had supper at a pretty basic place by the gate.
By the by, during the day I visited a carpet warehouse: I was shown where they made the carpets. One hand loom. I suggested that this was fairly unlikely unless the weavers were quite remarkably fast. They insisted they made all their carpets on this one loom. We discussed the finer points of the yarn and the weaving technique and the fact that I was a weaver in England. Every one laughed and they told me about their factory in the Zone Industriale in the ville nouveau. We parted cheerfully. This warehouse was in one of the old merchants houses - a covered courtyard rising three stories with internal verandahs and a glass roof over the whole shebang. Every wall covered with brilliant marble mosaic. These occasional houses are a delightful surprise in the medina. After stumbling through rows of low-roofed shops and stalls off dark alleys where you have to crouch to avoid the over-hanging gables, the doors which open into these light, airy courtyards seem like magic. Lucky old merchants.
Up early (7am) and off for a walk clockwise past the Kasbah and up the hill to the Borg Nord - a fortress which overlooks, and once protected the Fez valley. The views are stunning: a great panorama of quiet-looking stone walls and roofs with a fair sprinkling of mosque minarets which entirely hides the heaving stew which is the medina in the hidden streets. The Borg Nord is an excellent arms museum. V. pleasant girl practised her English on me (she wants to be a teacher) until 8am when she takes my money as the museum opens. A splendid drooping old man with a drooping old French voice shows me round. At one point he points to a great rack of rifles which (I think) he says came from the battlefield of Larache - between the Portuguese and the Spanish. I acted the Europeans throwing down their rifles and running away from each other, while the wily Moroccans coolly collected them. Quite how I managed to convey this concept I can not say, but the old fellow understood well enough and was siezed with a great racking cough-like laughing fit which echoed manically round the fortress. Eventually he sobered up and sloped off to find the other curators to tell them the joke, and it sounds like a herd of braying donkeys in these stone vaults.
There is a very interesting collection of US Winchesters and colts. Cowboy guns the guide says. They seem much cruder made than I had always envisaged. The piece de resistance of the whole museum is a Moroccan cannon near the exit - a 17ft long barrel and weighing 12 tons.
The fort is cruciform in shape and consists of vaulted corridors each of which ends in a window which overlooks some particular part of the valley and through which boiling oil, large stones, lots of bullets could be variously poured, dropped, shot on/at attackers. The whole thing, inside and out, is built of light sandy coloured stone and beautifully preserved. Afterwards I walked on round and down towards the medina through a vast cemetery. A funeral party (?) letting rip in one place: much wailing (and probably gnashing of teeth, but it was too far away to be sure) from 20 or 30 people sitting round some freshly turned earth. Most of the graves are unmarked or have un- cut stones. V. confusing when old Aunt Agatha turns up to look for a loved one.
An old guy is spreading hundreds of wet sheep skins out to dry. In another area wool is drying. I guess the cemeteries which ring the medina are the nearest large spare spaces for such activities. It is nice to see the dead doing their bit for the living.
Breakfast at a street stall and then a visit to the Dar Batha - Moroccan Arts/crafts museum. Some wonderful stuff, especially the ubiquitous Berber carpets and wooden doors and chests. The whole thing is housed in rooms opening off the central courtyard of an old palace. The guide speaks Spanish to me constantly - he can not be persuaded to do otherwise, but everything is reasonably labelled in French which I can puzzle at. The only other visitors are a keen and friendly Spanish/American couple who marvel at it all, particularly since they have just built a 12000 square foot home in Spanish style (as they put it) somewhere in the Southern US, and they make a bid for an ancient roof light with wooden shutters which takes their fancy. The curator is non-committal. The rooflight fanciers give up and go into the garden and take video shots of eachother saying gee isn't this great. A group of assorted sweepers/light turners on and turners off/doormen who are sitting on broken chairs on a shady verandah watch them silently.
Bus to Azrou at 1.00pm. Bus fills up quickly and the conductor produces small fishing-style folding seats for the standing passengers. Several Berber families on bus including one splendid woman who is swathed in the customary towels and sheets and wearing carpet slippers - but all over a pale pink candlewick dressing gown. She is a walking advertisement (albeit a little grubby) for The Belfast.
My neighbour in the seat is a garrulous ticket inspector from another bus company who speaks French worse than I do. We have a somewhat laboured, and very tiring, conversation to Ifrane (about an hour from Fez). Ifrane is v. bizarre. A ski resort full of Swiss alpine lodges owned by rich Moroccans. More or less empty except for gangs of fellows laying new turf everywhere. Do they do it every Spring when the snows have gone? A concrete block/shanty-tin town has grown up around the hill on which Ifrane is perched to house the chars and houseboys of the rich. The town feels quite alien - it reminds me of Port Mierion (spelling?) in the Prisoner. Somehow I can not look at the town, and work out what to expect next. More and more of these alpine lodges are being built, and there is a new airport to which the rich Casablancans fly.
This reminds me, on the outskirts of Fez on the Azrou road there are many new apartment blocks called Residence this or that, with really overblown tinsel-gold front porches. And there are huge numbers of very large, very opulent villas. Either Spanish or vaguely Oriental in style. All different, all naff and what the Welsh would build if they had the opportunity.
Azrou is quite small and compact. High in the mountains, clear air and all that jazz. Several chaps accost me, mostly to say that they have the only genuine Berber market stalls in town, but all the spiel is goodnatured.
Walk up into the wood above the town to book in at the Hotel Panorama. Slightly faded and tweedy, and I expect Miss Marple to bustle from the parlour. Then the twinkling, arm-waving patron pops up from behind the counter and I realise I am in Monsieur Hulot land. Room in shades of faded brown with tiny balcony overlooking green valley. Flower filled hotel garden rings with Italian ebullience from the other guests (three middle aged couples, travelling together as far I can tell).
Walk back to town centre and visit co-operative craft workshop. Large modern building out of the Soviet Regional Buildings plan-book. There is a vertical carpet manufactury. Small carder/spinning line and twisting and dyeing in one wing of the building. 60kg of yarn produced per day with ten people! Everyone stops work and hastens to explain their particular corner once they know I am in the business. In the next room are rows of hand looms (practically but inelegantly made from scaffolding poles welded to the roof trusses), on which bevies of women and girls are weaving carpets from flat, highly patterned (pub-type) ones to shaggy lambskin effect ones. The curious thing is that the whole thing is done with enormous skill - but no design sense whatsoever. The colours are appalling. Not surprisingly they all complain that sales are bad. Down in the market there are carpets woven by Berbers (in their mountain villages on looms cobbled together from bits of ticky-tacky and string) which sing with delight. This co-operative is sinking under the dead hand of state intervention. What it needs is a bit of peace corps design.
In the evening there is a power cut in the whole town. I pass a row of cafés where by flickering candlelight the cooks are stirring galvanised barrels of harira (lentil and vegetable soup) over gas rings on the pavement. Crowds of hungry Berbers mill about waiting for the soup to flow.
Drinks in the hotel bar, (scruffy cane furniture, comfortable old cushions and a Guinness ashtray on the bar - though I don't expect many bottles of the stuff comes to Azrou). Long talk to Swiss businessman in leather shorts who is on the edge of cementing tremendous deal - but (he says) very hushhush so he can not name names. The other drinkers, maybe four or five, are Azrou locals who buck the Moslem reserve and order their bottles of thin Moroccan beer by the half dozen. Their tables look like bottling lines. Still no lights, so dinner candlelit, and served by an old man with large pink gums but no teeth who reminds me of the rather gone-out youth in the New Inn at Coln St Aldwyns. A bottle of the President's Reserve heavy red plonk, the remains of which I take to bed where I write by candlelight at the end of a jolly day. Tomorrow a return visit to the weavers' co-operative and a visit to Le Grand Marché (weekly) outside the town, where, according to a man in a café, all the mountain men come in to buy, sell, drink tea and talk. Sounds like the alfie-normal everyday story of Moroccans.
Wake up this a.m. with a lurgi. After several loo-squats, out comes the trusty immodium and the system is sealed. Two pints of warm water and I can face the day. Judging from the rumblings in the pipework (not to mention in the air) I think others have been similarly struck. Perhaps cooking without electricity, by the light of candles only, meant that some of the finer culinary details were blurred.
I walk down to the market - pitched on a great expanse of waste ground near the huge half-finished mosque which the government is building as the rallying point for Atlas Islam. (There are ten foot trees growing through the concrete courtyard, and someone has built a shanty-house against the main site-gate, so the job is on the customary half-finished long-term stop.)
The market is huge, diverse and orderly in a disorganised sort of way. There are no straight lines of stalls, but each activity is carried out together, so there are clumps of grocers stalls, then clumps of carpet sellers etc. The animals for sale are mostly sheep and donkeys. There is no auction. Each seller stands stolidly around with his stock while potential buyers poke at them underneath and flap their arms in a deprecatory fashion. The flocks varied from one to 50 animals. Single sheep are simply held up by their rear legs as though they are wheel-barrows, groups are immobilised by the complex looking procedure of tying the sheep together in two lines with a string woven round all their necks, and then interlinking the two groups' heads like the teeth of a zipfastener. It's like looking at countless rugby scrums. The sheep seem resigned to this treatment, and look well enough. Donkeys, needless to say, are rendered compliant with periodic whacks with stout sticks.
There is a big wool market - several tons being loaded/unloaded onto/from a motley of donkey carts and beaten-up Toyota pickups. Also a yarn market - innumerable old Berber women sitting under umbrellas with what look, from a distance, like rows of comic-book bombs with short wicks, but are actually large balls of natural black and grey carpet yarn. They cackle and spit and grin their pegs of teeth and reach up to pat my hand as I pass.
The most desirable (to me) product on sale is thick matting made from undyed black wool, sometimes with henna overdyed diamonds tapestry-woven into the black ground, which is apparently used for tent awnings. Most of is second hand and the sellers demonstrate the toughness of the weaving by laying out the pieces on the ground and allowing men, beasts and carts to drive over them. I was sorely tempted by a wonderfully sombre-shaded mat about 5ft by 20ft. I expressed no outward desire to buy it, but the owner reduced the price from the Dirhan equivalent of £60 to £20 in about 30 seconds. Even at this small sum, I could not face lugging a hundredweight of wool, dust and sheep dung across Morocco so I wandered on pursued by the persistent mat-man. Later I do my bit by buying a second-hand Berber shawl, made from shaggy white wool with inlaid tapestry-woven panels. Actually, I did not care for the two or three on the stall, and negotiated to buy the one which the stall-owner was wearing. I expect that I was a victim of a double-bluff sales ploy, but it is a jolly comely piece of weaving.
There is the usual grocer/second-hand clothing/plastic bucket brigade of marketeers, and a number of what I think are fortune tellers/quack medicine men. They seem with their ranting and wailing to be very obviously phony, I simply can not understand why they draw the crowds. It seems to be essential for medicine men to look crazy, so every now and then the fellows scoop up a handful of dust, spit on it, and rub it over their faces. One chap even has a kettle on a gas stove to help make good mud for the purpose. They all have unspeakable objects in bags and boxes which they wave at their audience/crunch between their teeth/scrumble in their fingers. The other extraordinary stalls are the small-junks. Imagine a great drawer which needs sorting out being dumped on a dirty sheet, stamped-on to break anything breakable, and the resulting rubbish painstakingly sorted out by size, composition and colour and offered to the public. Some of these stalls must have two or three hundredweight of assorted keys, prongless forks, broken watches, inkless biros, hairless paintbrushes, torn camera bags, bits of old radio chassis, the insides of mangled calculators... I did not see anyone buying any of it, but I assume they do. I watch one stall-owner patiently explaining the excellence of a broken wardrobe-lock to a potential customer - but she (wisely) decided against its allure.
The buskers/medicine me are generally accompanied by musicians - a violinist and a man playing one of those Arabic wailing oboe things. These instruments are often amplified by appalling PA systems (buggered about car radios mostly) so there is quite a cacophony from the competing entertainers. Other non-produce hucksters are the water sellers. Each one has a goat skin slung bagpipe-like under his arm, and a couple of brass cups on chains in which he offers half a pint rather brackish looking water. In the cities these guys are dolled up in scarlet tunics, with v. shiny brass bits, and tout, like Chelsea Pensioners, to have their photographs taken. Here in hot, dusty Azrou market, their services are essential. Elsewhere in the market there are stalls selling goatskins: the sellers demonstate their water-tightness by blowing them up like balloons with car foot-pumps. The skins are livid and slimy, and look quite revolting.
One odd thing: as I arrived there was a particularly loud spieler. His system was so loud that I thought he must be a market official, perhaps an auctioneer. Eventually I tracked him down: it was one of the smallest stalls, exhibiting a few bars of very old soap in dirty wrappers.
I took tea outside a café while waiting for the bus, and talked to a very urbane man (in djellabah and natty tweed trilby) who said the premier class is always the merchants, government service in Morocco is not well paid, at least at the bottom end. Another thing: when I changed some travellers cheques earlier, the cashier who spoke perfect English (actually that is an exaggeration, but it seemed OK after a week of mangled Franglais), asked why English passports have a French motto under the coats of arms on the covers. A fair question far from home.
Just outside Azrou is a great crag (200 feet high?) rearing up from the generally flat hinterland below the town. It dominates the skyline. On the top is a jumble of sculpture/ironmongery of 15ft high crown and man-high letters making up a naffnaff tribute from the town to mark the 35th anniversary of Hassan II accession to the throne - ten years ago. At one time it was fairy-lit. Now the cables swing limply against the rusting metal. I suggest to my urbane café-friend that this thing is not as pleasant a centrepiece for Azrou as it might be , and he shudders and says what do you expect from a bunch of mountain men? (the fellow is a teacher, and is not an Azrou man.) Bus to Meknes at 2pm. Buses have the habit of sitting silent until ten minutes before leave-time. Then they rhythmically start to honk their horns until zero-hour minus five minutes. Then they start to edge forward in lurches, like giant rabbits. The whole procedure is designed to encourage laggards to hurry to the bus. It also has the effect of driving the punctual passengers, who are already on the bus, into paroxysms of annoyance involving a lot of arm waving and shouting at the conductor. Tempers are frayed further by hordes of children who run on and off the bus hawking cigarettes, chocolates, chickens, extremely second-hand looking cakes...
Arrived at Meknes after 4pm and checked into Hotel Nice - which is OK. Eat at Annexe Restaurant Metropole - which is certainly an annexe. Restaurant Metropole is a café on the main drag, where they employ a team of runners to guide potential diners to the annexe, at least 200 yards away down a maze of side streets. But the food is fine. No one else in until a pair of Frenchies arrive. We talk, and agree that Moroccans must all be football mad. Whenever you see a TV there is football on. They do not seem fussy where it comes from: in the restaurant the waiters are watching Parma playing some team or other in France (I think).
Up and out by 8.00am. Walked from Ville Nouveau across Place de la Resistance and along Boulevard Mohammed V. (I guess the names - but they are probably right) to Bab el Mansour which separates the old Medina from the remains of the Imperial City. Visit the building where the King used to greet foreign ambassadors. Pretty plain (washed out mosaics and plenty of pigeon droppings) and its chief interest nowadays is that underneath is what was a vast grain store, cavernous vaults like endless wine- cellars. There is a ghostly light from the regular narrow (ventilation?) shafts rising to ground level. These pools of light, together with the drip of water seepage and echoing high-pitched Moroccan ramblings from a solitary workman, are very atmospheric.
Then a long dusty walk between the featureless cliff-like sandstone boundary-walls of Hassan II's Palace which line both sides of the road, to see the remains of his ancestors' stables and army barracks. (On the way I pass an entrance to the palace. There are two smart sentry boxes in the sun - with the two sentries asleep under a nearby shady tree.) The stables are quite sensational as Peter King would say. They once housed 12000 horses, the army and their provisions in one enormous arcade of vaulted buildings. Most of the roofs have fallen in, but the scale of the buildings is still mouth-opening. They stretch for hundreds of yards. In one corner, the government have restored a couple of the roof vaults, and two of the wells (twenty feet in diameter?) together with the horse-winches which raised the water. I am reminded of the basement at The Pantheon. I also wonder at the urinal which has been installed for visitors: they must have been seduced by the surroundings into thinking in terms of catering for the Imperial Army - perhaps a hundred pissers could line up side by side, though other facilities (v small ticket booth) looked man enough only for the small gaggles of visitors which I saw.
A curiosity! These stables are a long and dusty walk (half an hour plus) from the Bab el Mansour, even on a tour bus they lie at the end of a fairish drive from anywhere else. Hard by the entrance (not more than thirty feet away) is the stairway leading to a delightful roof garden of great tranquillity and excellent café with a cooling view over the huge reservoir which once served the Imperial Army. Yet there are no signs at all at ground level! I have seen crummy Cocacola stalls which lie like spiders at the centre of a network of garish signs and hucksters shrieking at potential customers. Without trusty Lonely Planet I would not have found this garden café at all.
Plod plod back to medina, pausing to visit tomb of Thingummybob Ishmail who is the Patron Saint in these parts. His tomb lies at the centre of a mosaiced maze and there is a dear old boy who gently hisses at my shoes until I remove them. Beside the tomb, amongst the highly coloured Moroccan clutter of carpets and brass bowls, stand what look like two small English Grandfather clocks. Ah, home!
Medina is smaller and less hellish than that at Fez. Less completely devastating, but also in some ways more interesting. The streets are wider so it is somehow more relaxed. It is easier to perch on a wall and sit and stare without attracting attention (donkeys do not nibble at my knees as they did in Fez). Some very engaging blacksmithery/metal bashing workshops. Most of them are making curlywurly Moroccan window screens out of what looks like concrete reinforcing rods which first they have to straighten out, since the whole lot are distinctly second-hand.
Also numerous musical instrument makers/sellers - though most seemed to specialise in highly decorated (swirly painted motifs) kif pipes. Streams of Moroccans pluck a handful of the wooden pipe-stems from the displays and suck contemplatively though a few until they find one they like. They nod appreciatively and the stall-holder wraps it up in a bit of old newspaper along with a few earthenware pipe-bowls which screw onto the bottom of the pipe-stems.
After a great struggle, passing the same crowd of small boys playing beat-the- littlest-in-a-small-alley several times (and each time pulling the bigger from the littlest), I find Restaurant Zitouna of which I have heard great things. It is a converted merchant's house wedged into a particularly unsavoury part of the medina. It is a truly wonderful oasis - though god knows how enough people find it. No one else was in the restaurant. Once again no electricity so there is the magical flicker of candle against the rich mosaic walls, and wild cornucopiac displays of guns and dead animals and feathers and what not. A waiter rather coyly holds a candle while I negotiate the delights of the usual Moroccan labyrinthine loo. The electricity came on just in time for the staff to be able to sit down to watch Parma against Antwerp (local interest?) on the TV. Pleased to find rice pudding is a Moroccan speciality.Yum yum. No Horns of the Gazelle (horn shaped almond cakes) because the baker was electricityless, so free Macaroon-things instead. Invited to watch football match, but make excuses and leave.
Decided to go straight to Asilah (and look at Roman remains at Lexus) rather than trek out to Volubilis. So I walked to Abdul Kadir railway station and bought a ticket on 4.15pm train to the coast. This left most of day to spend back in the medina, so away in a petit taxi whose owner was wildly amused when, having established that the King had two sons and a daughter by his wife, I asked how many he had by his mistresses. Had a shuftishufti (their word not mine) round the old Jewish mellah. Astonishing butchery row. Watch old man hack up a cow and put the bits on his stall: then meticulously skin the head and finally preen it and primp it with cloth, knife and brush before laying the head carefully in the middle of the meat display. Presumably customers could judge something about the meat from the look of the head. Or maybe he caters for weirdo meat-buyers.
More unnameable bits of animal than I ever saw before. Stringy bits, blobby bits, bits of every colour and texture as well as the more familiar live pigeons (wingless), rabbits, chickens and goat kids all waiting for the chop. Two stalls have automatic chicken pluckers. Customers select chickens on the chicken stalls, which are then brought by runners to the pluckers. A fellow casually cuts each chicken's throat and tosses it into a vat of hot water. Another shoves the sodden carcasses (I assume they are now dead) into the plucking machine, while a third cuts off any stringy bits and feet and hands it back to the runner who returns it to the customer. It is all very messy, the air is filled with blood and feathers - but very slick. I am impressed with one of the throat-slitters who, while I am watching, dispatches twenty or thirty birds without once interrupting a violent argument he is having with another man. He waves his hands in anger at the man, slits a chicken throat, waves his hands in anger at the man, slits a chicken throat... If I was the man, I would worry that the chicken slayer might get things wrong...
Revisited textile souk which is light and airy and spacious, just right for a sit-down. Fell into conversation with a couple of fellows, one of whom spoke fair English (degree from Rabat University). He is a soft-faced fellow in a black poloneck with a mustard pullover and ditto trousers: rather more chic than the average shopkeep, who generally varies from the multi-layed raggamuffin look to the wellworn shiny grey suit, tarboosh and clipped moustache look. (Actually many of the shopmen wear djellabahs, but I am talking style here rather than content!) The other is a tough wiry character who, it is reported to me, understands not a word, but just loves to hear English spoken. This chap - Bouayad Abdellatif - was particularly impressed that I could take my holiday separately from Jane. I bought a couple of things from these guys' shops, including a djellabah in brown undyed (and by the smell, unwashed) Berber wool. They then insist on closing up, pausing so that I can take their photograph, and driving me in their car to the railway station. What jolly types.
I ask an-official-with-an-official's-hat is this the train to Tangier? He says yes, so on I hop. For twenty five minutes I watch a couple of greasy lads playing loud cards, until a ticket inspector comes along. He is horrified that I am sitting in a second class compartment. I say I only have a second class ticket. He says that is nothing to do with it, and insists on escorting me to an an empty first class compartment. He settles me down, and says and anyway, you are going the wrong way. This train is going to Fez. Bugger. I have visions of getting to Fez just in time to miss the last train back to the coast, and all arrangements will be set awry. Never mind, says the inspector, I will fix it all. He goes away.
The train system is single track working: every now and then there is a layby to allow oncoming trains to pass. We clatter into such a layby. The inspector bustles back and says come, come. He hustles me to a door, and then hurries away - as I find out after a minute or two, to stop our train. Then he is back and jumping down to the track with his torch, for a train is coming down the main track in the opposite direction. The Inspector waves his torch and stops it! Off jumps its ticket inspector and the two confer. Right, Mr Martin, says my man, this inspector will escort you to a compartment and make sure you get off in Sidi Slimane, where you can catch the through express from Casablanca for Asilah. As the new inspector picks up my bag, I offer my saviour a couple of notes. Certainly not, he says, it is my duty. What can one say? Other passengers are staring down from both trains. Their expressions are neither Good God they've stopped these trains for the convenience of one bloody foreigner, nor Quick quick, I'll be late for my appointment. Merely interested curiosity - if a chap gets on the wrong train, naturally things must be arranged to rectify the mistake. What a splendid country.
In the new compartment is a gorgeous girl (25?) - Amal - who works in Fez as a programme announcer on a local radio station. She is thoroughly modern, but admits that even for her it would be difficult to move out of her parents' home until she gets married. But she says things are changing, for when her mother had been 25 she would not have travelled alone let alone talked to a strange man, and a foreigner, in a railway carriage. At Meknes she got out and a frightful prig got in.
He spends the entire way to Sidi Slimane telling me how important it is that I renounce Catholicism (he simply could not accept that I could be nothing, so wrung from me the details of my baptism), and embrace Islam - which he said many English people were now doing. I told him that was news to me. Cat Stevens was mentioned, and after a pause the bigot changed tack and started on the Demon Drink. He told me how every night he had to implore his father and brother to stop drinking and how it would be the ruin of us all on Judgement Day. Frankly, I thought his father must be an OK cove that he had not evicted this priggish son. I showed him the pages from the Koran that the guy in Fez had given me. Abdulla (the bigot) translates one of the stories, which is about Moses in the bullrushes. Then he says that I, an infidel, have no right to have this sacred text, and threatens to keep the pages. I threaten to send my gunboat: he rather ostentatiously kisses the pages and returns them to me. We turn to other matters.
If Salman Rushdie was in the compartment, Abdulla would not actually kill him himself because it was against Moroccan law, but if someone else dug a dagger into the Hyena Rushdie, Abdulla would sleep easier. Also, the reason Moroccans could not get visas to visit England was not because most them waddle in weighed down with condoms full of dope, but because the wicked Christian authorities fear that the supine English would en masse be converted to Islam. Actually Abdulla was rather sweet in a blood-thirsty way, and became very embarrassed when he was forced to admit that his zealous lifestyle was financed by selling rubbishy craft tat to infidels in a Fez hotel foyer.
Sidi Slimane station is in darkness. No electricity. A yoghurt seller has a gas lantern, and a saucepan of mint tea is bubbling on a charcoal stove. There are huddled groups squatting on the platform. Murmuring voices, occasional clangs from the signals changing and rumbling trucks screech over the level-crossing outside the station. There is no connection with anywhere else, these people are polite, but we are only passing by. It is dark, I am a stranger.
Eventually the train comes - and I share a compartment with two absolutely delightful thugs. They turn out to be cousins, but they are quite dissimilar, and since one speaks only Arabic with a few words of French, and the other Arabic, Spanish and a very few words of English, I feel that cousins must be a flexible feast. We talk about Grandfathers and who married who, but it is still a bit vague. They are sellers of this and that on the streets of Tangier and have been on a day trip to Casablanca to buy stock. One of them is completely dumbfounded to find that I do not need an identity card in England. How do the police keep a check on you? is his question - obviously heartfelt. The other guy, who looks Spanish (honours are evenish, with them saying (to me) you look Musselman, and I saying one of them looks Spanish and the other Turkish) has looked at a map of Britain and can not get over the fact that there is so much beach. He seems to be part of a syndicate smuggling sub-Saharan Africans in open boats via Tangier to lonely spots on the Spanish coast, and has extrapolated...
The train gets to Asilah after midnight, and as I get off these two guys open the window and wave and whoop. It has been a gas all the way down the line, and their warmth has dispelled the dismal mood of Sidi Slimane. Actually, there is no problem with this: it is the one mood following the other which makes the travel worthwhile.
I jump over the station wall to avoid the long walk round by the ticket office, and set off on the mile or two into town. I turn into the first hotel I come to. It is the Hotel El Khaima. It appears to be a package resort hotel: this is a new experience. I check in, and wander into the bar to see if I can get a chocolate bar and a beer to make up for no supper. I run into my first Englishman for more than a week. He is drunk, slumped on a stool and mildly abusing the bar man. What have I come to? I have a few beers, and go to bed to consider things in the morning.
Sitting in hotel dining room having breakfast. No more croissants et pain de chocolate with café noir (in a little glass) thick enough to hold up the proverbial spoon, and afterwards a glass of water to wash the coffee scum down my throat: and all for 6Dr at a pavement café. Rather OK rolls and weak coffee in pyrex cups for 30Dr! The hotel looks OK: bright clean and cheerful and full of people from Glasgow. It makes me feel very smug. Actually, coming to these shiny new surroundings reveal my trousers to be very dirty: they also smell!
For no particular reason I am reminded of an odd thing about Moroccan banks.Every shopkeeper in Morocco from bijou antiquery to scruff-fagstall smiles and salaams welcome for competition is fierce and the customer is there to be charmed/seduced/serviced. Except in the banks, where dourness, obfuscation and bloodymindedness reign. (Apart from Mr Charm who asked about mottoes in Chefchouen). I notice bank staff only smile at each other. In India the banks work slowly - but I suspect that is simply endemic and unconscious Indian babu bureaucracy, and anyway the entire bank shares one calculator and two biros. In Morocco the banks are modern and they are computerised, they have the tackle, but they seem capriciously to run slowly and with tiresome officiousness. I have mentioned this to several people who all agree that banks are a pain . I thought it might be because bank staff are a snotty lot who lord it over the humbler customers. But a couple of fellows say that it is the opposite. Bank staff are badly paid and resent the scruffy merchant-types with wads of notes in their djellabah pockets. I do notice (perhaps this is part of a titfortat routine) that fellows draw out a great deck of small denomination notes, watch the cashier count it out, pick it up, count it themselves - and tell the cashier he has counted wrong. The cashier counts it again, confirms the original figure, and, the game over, the customer shrugs and departs.
Ohmygod, Asilah is pretty phony place. The government has piled in with fancy pavement/outdoor wacky sculpture of a daring 6th form standard, and have built an International Conference Centre(!), which exhibits quite the most banal collection of pictures (apart from one or two small prints) to delight visitors. (I use the word advisedly - there is a notice on the door tellling visitors that they will be delighted by the pictures inside: so there.) The medina has been cleaned up, and many of the houses are now owned by rich Casablancans and Italians/Spaniards. And hustlehustlehustle all the time: and not even for proper goods or service (guiding etc). Once I tell these chaps that I do not want kif or girls/boys (or any combination thereof) they simply ask for 10Dr to depart. I give one particularly insistent brat his 10Dr, which served for my contribution to the town unemployment fund.
An aside: lining the Moroccan streets in everytown there are the silent beggars, slumped against the shop-fronts, palms outstretched. They are quite separate from the hustling youths, and I, like most Moroccans with a jangling pocket, have a cache of very small coins to share amongst them. I admit there is a feelgood element in being able to help so easily: the Moslems, somewhat ponderously, cloak the feeling with religious significance of course.
I escaped to the beach (just across the road from the hotel), to sample the sun: escape, escape? am I joking? No sooner am I shirtless sandwards, when I am set upon by various kif and body-sellers. I shake them off, and they are replaced by a tubby archeological student who has been sponsored by the Moroccan government to sail about the world digging things up. (London/SE Asia/S America...) Little does the government know that he spends his non-digging hours denouncing all governments as dictatorial swine (and that goes for oppositions and all other people in authority too). He begins to dribble with rage, I call him an anarchist, which pleases him very much, and I leave for calmer waters.
There are three camels on the beach (100s of miles from camel country) for tourists to photograph: their minder is a pushy yob who has a tame German so spaced out on kif that he lies comatose in a filthy hollow in the sand. The pushy yob says that the tame German has exhausted his money, so he has sold his passport to pay for more kif. The yob says that the German rings his family in Germany to send him money, but they refuse. The yob is distraught because he is relying on being able to sell, at vast price, the passport back to the tame German. I study the tame German, and decide that even if he were not completely gone out on kif, he looks as if we would still be thoroughly unpleasant. I suggest to the yob that he would do better to ask the family for money not to sell the passport back. The yob is horrified: even though he is a completely unscrupulous bastard and quite happy to hold a tame German hostage, he is also Islamic, and can not believe that a family would not help its own.
There is a lively little port with piles of concrete things, like 8ft high concrete jacks with which the jetty is being extended. Needless to say, the rusty cranes and the piles of very old looking Moroccan turd in the shadow of every concrete jack (which I can concur does make an exceedingly good crapper, Mr Kipling) suggests that things are proceeding at the usual African pace. I have lunch at a café and speak to my first non- drunk Englishman, who had just arrived in Morocco via the Spain/Tangier ferry and a bus down to Asilah. He is not impressed with Morocco. I suggest Asilah is not typical. He cheers up. We walk through the medina and look over the bay from the ramparts. It is very pretty. We pass the Rassoulli Palace where some petty despot (Rassoulli) lived. He had a private terrace from which he liked to hurl enemies onto the rocks below. This is a pukka tale, which I had heard several times, and I envisaged a medieval castle. Actually the Palace is a pleasant villa, and these hurlings-off took place around 1920! walk back to hotel.
Sit in hotel garden all morning watching Scottish men and women at play. They are a jolly crew, and mostly very large. I am spoken to by an elderly scotch gent from Glasgow, Wally, who is here for 4 weeks. He has been all over, Yugoslavia (in the old days), Spain, Bulgaria, but finds the El Khaima best value. He has been here several times but never sets foot outside Asilah. I must say that the hotel garden is very pleasant. Walked downtown to lunch in café (full of Spaniards trying too hard to look cool - particularly taken with girl in dark glasses, which she takes off to reveal drop- dead eyes, and a natty beaded pillbox hat on cropped blonde hair) for salad and grilled rouget (red mullet). Notice that Moroccan boys walk openly here hand in hand with girls: whatever next!
Evening: walked up small hill adjacent to hotel. Crop of second homes springing up one flank (the seaward). Away over the top is the sprawl of Asilah's beyond-the-tracks district, literally so for the railway runs along the bottom edge of the hill. There is a semi-built estate - terraced ranks of municipal concrete block-and-tin-roof housing. Each unit would fit five times into the second homes on the polite side of the hill. The curious thing is that the Euro-aimed (I suspect to Frogs and Dagos) second homes are picture book versions of desert-town adobe huts: verandahs, deep windows and intricate grills. Low-key, beautiful, very house and garden. On the way into town is another estate of second home villas belonging to The Casablancan Fatcats. They are grotesque, vaguely oriental, flamboyantly different, way over the top: minarets, pinnacles, battlements. All hideously clashing and vulgar to my cool N European eye.. so maybe more fool me!
Outside my hotel window, some workmen are constructing a new reservoir for the garden. They have dug and concrete walled the pit, maybe 20ft x 10ft and 6ft deep. Now they are building the formwork into which they will pour the concrete roof. Two men have spent three days hammering/sawing/measuring (Arabs read rt to lt - ha) about one fifth of the formwork. At this rate it will take another two or three weeks to finish the job. It is v. smart formwork: an amazing motley of new timber, old timber, scraps of corrugated tin, reused nails, stones, bits of palm trees... In Meknes I watched a carpenter making plasterers' floats. He was cutting 2x1 for the handles which he cut using a huge saw tensioned with toggle and string. Perversely he did not cut onto the bench, but off the edge, as though he was sawing logs. He had therefore to cut with extreme slowness and care, to avoid splitting the timber. I think he made one float (4 small pieces of wood nailed together) in the half hour I watched him. He seems a happy chap, though. When I passed him the next day, he was sitting on his counter, and gave me a cheery wave.
I eat dinner in the Hotel restaurant. Service excellent - crockery, cutlery, nappery ditto. But food pretty ordinary. Admittedly it was about 10.00pm (chucking-out time) but although the hotel owner is Moroccan, his wife is (I am told) English. I suspect there is something of the old seaside landlady in her. Tinnedish tomato soup, chicken leg, gravy and chips (called tagine on the menu: but where is that fragrant goulash of meat and herby tomato in its distinctive conical earthenware pot?) followed by violent- green icecream.
Lurk about the place for most of the day. Sloped into town for lunch. Did this day happen? Much animated talk in hotel: a) is walking into town safe b) how much did everyone else pay for their package holiday? c) who is going on trips (into Tangier/camel riding/to beach for Sun n'Sangria Nite (wrong country?). Wally, the retired Scotch bus foreman deeply immersed in plans to get waiter in café in town to organise donkey owner to provide donkey upon which Wally can be photographed by waiter while he, Wally, wears tie given to him, Wally, by grandson before he, the grandson, emigrates with his, grandson's, parents to Edmonton, Canada. Wally thinks that: a) grandson will relish the photograph, b) the entire exploit can be negotiated with despatch and for a somewhat paltry 5Dr (apparently this is the sum mentioned by the waiter to whom Wally unbuttoned his plan yesterday). I can not comment on a), but I have grave reservations about b).
See Wally wallowing on sunbed this a.m. The donkey business is on hold: the earmarked waiter did not show, but he will try again today. Wally tells me that while he was sitting in the caféa awaiting the waiter, a boy had walked up and down winking at him. Wally had winked and waved back, and the boy had smiled and beckoned. Wally had smiled some more but stayed at his table. In the end the boy had wandered off. Wally says the boy had been very polite but asks me why had he been so insistently welcoming? I suggest that the boy had been offering himself, and that he had been misled by Wally's smiles and waves. Wally is silent: this did not happen on the Glasgow buses.
Walk away from the sea over the ridge to see idyllic wide valley sliding away to the distant hills. No hedges - patchwork fields, a muddy reedy lazy river in the valley bottom and a small square white farmstead beyond with three or four handkerchief- fields being ploughed by a team of man, horse and bullock. Walk down slope to river and along into Asilah from landward. Eat at café on more salad and rouget. Back to hotel to shower and change and into bar for a drink. I ask barman how is your tooth? (yesterday his cheek was swollen with tooth-agony). He says do you speak French? I say a little. He then quite wordlessly mimes someone pulling out the offending molar, and then smiles recovery. I ask him which bit is in French? and he laughs. I ask him if it is always so hot at this time of year: it seems much hotter than the guidebooks suggest. He says, in French, yes and no. If it's not French, it's Double Dutch. I spy old Times under chair, and riffle through it. There is an article extolling the pleasures of Morocco. I am not surprised. Near Europe, beaches, cheap building costs, relative political stability, Euro languages spoken, cheery population: what more to the package-developers need before ripping in? And moderate Islam allows booze and shorts (unlike in nearby strait-laced Algeria for instance).
7.30pm. In bar guzzling beer. Since I have been in hotel, I have noticed mother and daughter. Mother 65 and sandy. Maiden daughter 35 and (tightly) attractive. Everytime they see me, they scuttle off in the opposite direction. Why? How have they guessed what a ghastly fellow I am?
Here's fun. Dinner was billed for 8.00pm (rather than the usual 7.30). I don't know why, though I heard bread supplies late tonight bandied about. Anyway, the high-tea merchants were stamping about and mooing gently at 7.25, and at 7.30, despite protesting arm-flapping by the Maitre D', they all stampeded into the dining room and sat down. And there they waited until 8.00pm when the incoming waiters put on the lights and began proceedings. Absolutely marvellous. Actually there is a nightly frisson about dinner, since the menu is in French and pinned in advance on the door frame. Guests peer at it unhappily. It is rather odd, because all the food is cooked in plain English. Walk back to town for supper.
Asilah is much larger than I thought. Beyond the medina/Kaspah is an unexpected ville nouveau with maybe 70 or 80 shops. A load of boys are skinning fish on the pavement with v. blunt knives by watery and erratic streetlight. Then I see a group of older guys overseeing the distribution of the catch as it arrives in wooden tubs and is slithered into heaps onto old polypropylene sacks laid on the ground. V small boys carry the fish to the bigger ones who hack off skin and tear out guts as customers make their selection. It is all frenetic and loud with argument. But sitting in the shadows against the Kaspah walls is a silent knot of tarbooshed sages to whom all money is handed,and with whom no one argues. What first looks like a group of boys making a quick and informal bob or two, is really a complex multilayed business.
I remember the fish market in Fez medina, and think that there the whole place was so vast and overwhelming that it had been impossible to gauge how it had worked. Is this an illustration of the Buddhist (?) tenet about there being as much to see, and as much to learn, in your own backyard as in the crystal metropolis?
But in both places there sure are some weird-looking fish!
Damned hot and sheltering in a shopfront (closed for lunch midday to 4.30pm!) just inside Tangier medina, off Grand Socco, thinking how well one of those old hole-in-a- corner City pubs would do here!
I have paid up at the El Khaima and bussed back to Tangier. Decided to stay at the Tangier Flangia (spelling?) Hotel (somewhat over-flash, but conveniently near the bus- station) for this last night, so checked in and then wandered (via breakfast at Boulangerie) down to the medina. I see a dozen workmen sitting by the gate waiting for trade. Each man has his toolbox and a display which identifies his speciality. Electricians have towers made from rolls of cable and switches, decorators have hedgehogs of brushes. Plumbers really go to town: they have elaborate trees constructed of pipes and taps about three or four feet high. Whether they use all these bits or keep the assemblies as permanent advertisements, I can not tell. But either way, Carl André - eat your heart out. From their somewhat downcast expressions and the nests of litter and belongings surrounding each man, I suspect that they have been waiting unwanted since early morning.
Something I was trying to forget (I think I thought ink's permanence would prolong the agony... a pointless precaution since fate did anyway). As the anarchist in Asilah began to talk at me, I was had just taken my shirt off preliminary to suncream smearing and an hour's hedonistic sun-fun. His angry denunciation seduced me from my path, and I lay back and listened, creamless. Result? Red weals like the skin of a blushing zebra, which turned to burns and agony. Particularly in the mornings. Why would that be? It has been damned annoying, and has decided me not to talk to strange anarchist archeologists.
Dress: most of the old guys wear djellabahs, many wear embroidered slippers and some (particularly Berbers) wear turbans - mostly twisted from what look like a strip of grandmother's curtains. The young fellows wear jeans/trousers and shirts (not I am happy to say those skin-tight nylon numbers beloved by trendy young Indians). I have asked several people whether the old fellows are the last generation to wear djellabahs, or whether all Moroccans at some age feel the urge to dress more traditionally. I can not get a clear answer (the question is not that clear), but I think that it is the latter. One day the snappiest dude with the rudest T shirt will slip into something long and hooded and throw off those reeboks for little pointed numbers in pink and gold leather. The situation for women is more complicated by Islamic notions about female modesty: I seem to remember writing about this elsewhere.
There are also differences between Arab and Berber dress, but I can only as yet tell very Berber Berbers (slightly Asiatic looking) from very Arab Arabs (finefeatured thoroughbred). The range of Moroccan physiognomy is v. broad. I guess there has been centuries of French, Spanish, African breeding with Arab/Berber stock?
A bread cart is going by, pulled a boy. 300 round patty-style loaves being dried out by the sun - as always. The Moroccans insist on seeing what they are being offered for sale and the display must be good. If the boy covered the loaves to protect them from the sun, I suspect he would sell nothing. On every street there are hawkers with trays of cakes or sweets which they carry aloft like waiters: I tried a cake from such a seller. It was rock hard from the sun, and quite inedible. On the olive stalls there are always half a dozen ( and up to twenty or thirty) different types displayed in enamel bowls about two ft in diameter. The heaps are always perfectly conical rising two ft to a single olive at the top - whatever the time of day. How do they manage this I think? And then I see that a metal cone is put in the bowl and a single layer of olives is built up around it. In the back of the cone (the sellers side) is a hole: and inside, in the bowl, are the loose olives which are actually sold. Ingenious, though time consuming to operate - but excellent display is what, in this service orientated economy with so many similar shops in every market, the customer demands/expects - and gets.
Between Petit Socco and the Kaspah is a row of cafés. Facing each other across the alley are Sandwich, Pourquoi Pas? which seems to ask the right question, and Café Colon which seems to be cutting out the middlemen (throat/stomach etc). presumably it means something different in Arabic/French. Perhaps it means what it says, and only Islamic prudishness (hypocrisy?) prevents the whole hog of Café Bladder. Ha ha!
I have one or two Euro-longhairs - English/French 60s grannyglasses and kaftan, but pretty faded, lowkey. But suddenly... two true English exotics: she in flowing grey Kaftan and chiffon veils of colour, he in white trousers, white leather thigh boots and blue floor-length silk gown. They are drifting along salaaming starers. I suspect they were probably Art Students In Tangier in the '50s and have come back to re-live, but between he has made a packet in advertising (remember Peter Goudge?). In the '50s I guess they kipped along side Burroughs in some low-town stew, now I hope they have a villa overlooking the bay alongside Old Man Forbes. Lucky buggers.
And now... presents for the ladies. I tool into a few shops and buy a cedar-wood box for Eleanor, and a badge with a mint-teapot on it. The badge costs a couple of bob, but I am served by a distinguished old chap with the grave seriousness of a High Court judge in a black handkerchief: as he hands over the tin badge I feel that I should make a speech of thanks, or at least agree to run the ruffians out of town.
I pass a shop selling 10Dr tarbooshes and junk, but also some interesting cloth remnants which appear to be bits of old embroidered shawls. I go in, and wade through piles of dusty junk: wormeaten books, broken pottery, verdigrised brass (Birmingham?) samovars... I ask the price of a piece of faded cloth and the old fellow at the desk names some impossible figure. I moo slightly, and he says don't buy it then. I say OK. And we sit and talk. He is a knowledgeable chap and he tells me about the different craft traditions in Morocco, about how different the desert (Berber) jewellery from the South is from that made on the Northern coast. He whips a Sothebys Catalogue (for a recent sale of African Art in London) from under the counter, and turns to a silver bracelet, which was estimated at £20,000. I went over and bought that he says. I can not help looking round his somewhat tatty shop. He watches me and says I have clients in Switzerland and Austria, as well as Casablanca for the better stuff. The point is that here in Tangier medina, a seller is a seller: he does not have to put on a show. He can sell bob-a-time felt tarbooshes and jet off to London to buy expensive silver jewellery. Business is business and is indivisible.
Then I meet a chap outside a carpet shop in the medina who says come in for a chat. So I do.
We sit upstairs with three of his mates and I share their lunch and thé a la menthe. V. matey. These fellows jointly operate the shop as a co-operative. The Moroccan government supports a lot of these Artisan Initiatives, and seems genuinely keen to stem the flow of tourist crap, which was becoming the norm. The boss complains the English are rascist. He says that when he speaks to English people they ignore him.I say that of course there are rascists in England, but suggest that Frenchman (who in my experience are at least as anti-black as Englishmen) who are accosted by pushy carpet salesmen will turn round and swear and cuss, or throw rocks, which is at least forming some sort of relationship: and all very Moroccan. English people faced with the same situation will silently hurry on. I tell the chap he should not confuse the apparent coldness that comes from an Englishman's embarrassment at being talked to, with rascism. He accepted this analysis (I also told him I would fight him for my country's honour if he did not). Actually one of his mates agreed with me, and said he liked English people. So there!
Most of the carpets in the warehouse/showroom are hand made - either knotted or tapestry/Berber-style and v. covetable. One pile is rather different. Machine woven in synthetic silk: pub-style vomit-hiding patterns. I say what are these? The boss shuffles his feet, and says: the English like those, we import them from Belgium! Apparently the English like their fineness, bright colours and straight edges. I explain (again having to defend Dear Old Blighty) that for most of the Brits which he sees, Morocco is a cheapish package destination, an alternative to the Costa del Watneys. For French and Spanish people, Morocco is on their heritage trail - so they tend to wear National Trust (or the equivalent) ties and know a good hand woven carpet when they see it. I don't think the carpet seller buys this explanation - he just thinks the Brits have no taste. I have to admit that in Asilah I have seen some pretty rum things being bought in the name of ethnic souvenir by the good burghers of Glasgow.
Turning from these mundane cultural topics, one of the other blokes said he could not see how we could manage with only one wife. How could she keep up with a full night's jiggyjig? (a common Moroccan euphemism). In Morocco, several wives is commonish - indeed it seems principally to be the high cost of dowries and ceremonies which stops men having more. I decided that I had done enough to defend our good old English ways, so I made my excuses and left...
I had watched handweavers in Fez weaving fine cloth on tickytacky (remarkable conglomerations of bits-of-wood-and-string) looms, and they told me where in Tangier I would find the shop which would have the best selection of their work. The shop is small and dark and the shelves laden with cut Djebbelah-lengths beguilingly wrapped in old wallpaper. It reminds me of the vestment store in Stonyhurst school chapel. I spend an hour choosing two lengths. I am taken with the neppy, hand spun yarn used in some of them: it is called couscous yarn, presumably because it has the same granular appearance as the grain. I also like the fact that the weavers do not discriminate between natural and synthetic yarn: if they like the effect, they use the yarn. This is a design route which is only just being taken in Europe.
A street-fellow, grasping hand outstretched, had attached himself as I left the El Minzha bar, and followed me to the cloth shop. The shop owner's son shouted a strongly worded page of advice at him, and the aggressive beggar left. I said that I was quite pleased he had gone, but I hadn't really minded his hastles because, after all, Morocco est un pays libre. The shopmen thought I was mad. Actually that is a little priggish, Richard: we all welcome a bit of pays libre for ourselves - not the other buggers.
I am now back in the El Minzha courtyard bar, by a cool marble fountain: 9.30pm and wondering where to have supper. And I am reminded of my last evening in Asilah: I had supper in the Café sur le Pont (though the café was on the sea front - so there is no bridge). Le patron was a student at Meknes U (reading history). We chatted, and he joined me for some pre-prandial noggin. His is planning a trip to England in August. He intends to stay with relatives and friends, so his itinerary is a little strained: Streatham, Devon, Hull...I suggested that he could call with us as he criss-crossed the country. I hope he does, he seemed an amiable chap.
Now 10.30 and sitting in The Grenouille Restaurant. I got here by a circuitous route. I tried several shady troughs but was beaten back by various smells of damp, chip fat, last week's socks. I then bought a bottle of Sidi Hazaram (the local water) at a stall and said to the very fat man running it, you look like you like your nosh; where would you eat? He seemed happy to discuss food, even someone else's, and he pointed me to The Frog(?). The waiter speaks excellent English - and sits down to discuss wine. He opens me a bottle of Ksar white; dryish but a little heavy in a musty sort of way. (Why is crud red generally better than crud white?) I asked him if Morocco was producing any new-style wine, as is now happening in Spain,since the reds are very heavy and rioja-oakish. He showed me a bottle of Maroc Nouveau, with a label showing a bowl of summer fruit, which I take to indicate a beaujolais-style. Every country is now on this jag - sell it young to glugglugglug. The problem is that Morocco has hardly any home trade (Islamic) so there is no home market to get things moving. However, I can get drunk on Moroccan wine as easily as on any other. So cheers!
As well as drinking in restaurants, I have been in a few bars. These are generally cheerless places, a bit like bookies in England - and for the same reason. The authorities do not wish to encourage drinking. I suspect there are rules about having lousy chairs, general dankness and leaving the slops on the counters! All Moroccan cafés (which are immaculately run) spill out onto the pavement - but only a very few bars do, and the bar-staff do not allow bottles outside. I have to pour the beer into a glass inside the bar, before finding a pavement table. Presumably the more officious Mullahs (who might take offence at the Demon Drink) can be fooled into thinking that the beer in the glass is innocuous thé a la menthe.
Another odd thing: Spanish, French, Welsh, whatever pretty always sound foreign. You hear some gabble and you know they are foreigners. Sometimes I think I hear Ken Maunders behind me with his guttural mumbling rising in pitch and volume towards a cackled evening, Sir. Sometimes I hear Ron Slater's cheery-chappie watcha ol' son. But I turn round and it is an Arab buying bread or whatever. It is very disconcerting. I wonder what watcha ol' son (Arabic) actually means in English?
An OK meal, macaroni cheese, Goulash, ratatouille, mixed salad, but as always the vegetables are overcooked and a creme caramel is more or less thrust upon me. About the vegetables: I ask the waiter do Moroccans always overcook them? He says no, and accepts the criticism gracefully, but says he has never heard an Englishman complain about this. Another slight on the Old Country.
I have written a lot today - I guess it must be because Home Tomorrow. Memo to chaps visiting Morocco: bring lightweight crushable cotton jacket. There is a certain casual formality about Arabs, and it is easier to mingle in the evenings wearing a jacket. I see lurex shorted, bum-bagged, kissmequick-hatted lumpen Euros on the streets, with the Arab hordes parting before them as the Red Sea before Moses. But it is not out of deference nor out of offence: the Arabs simply can not find a point of contact, other than to touch them for cash. I have no doubt that I have been as unthinkingly crass anyone else, but I do feel that I have made contact here and there - such as one can in a few days flitting about.
Another memo: Moroccan Arabs are mostly shortish, not at all like the stately chaps in Henty novels.
At the airport. Flight at 12.15. The information clerk, when asked what time does check-in begin? answers: two hours before take-off. It is 11.00 at the time, and the check-in desk is deserted. C'est la vie.
Taxi ride out to airport was interesting. Passed huge new concrete complex nearing completion. Taxi driver proudly proclaims this to be the new Tangier University. I don't think that the city had one before, and it has rankled that Fez, Rabat, Tetuan and Casablanca did. Every second person seems to have a university education, though I have no idea what standards are like. Most of the waiters and whatnot are graduates. It is all part of the Morocco Problem - a very rapidly expanding population (about 25m now and 50m anticipated by the year 2000).
The waiter in The Grenouille last night (a graduate, by the by) said that when he was a boy in the early '60s, Tangier had a population of under 160k (now 600k plus) and that the whole of Morocco only had a population of 5m. It indicates an astonishing resolution of national purpose and social cohesion that this growth and its attendant problems have been so peacefully assimilated. Perhaps the inflexibility (or, more constructively, the discipline) of Islam has something to do with it? As I sat, earlier today, on the Tangier pavement eating my breakfast, I was asked three times if I wanted my shoes cleaned, twice asked if I wanted to buy dope, offered a tour of the medina for 10Dr, asked by a yob for 20Dr to go away and asked by a beggar for my coffee sugar-lumps. Apart from the last request, I said no to them all. None of them complained, all shrugged and moved on. God knows how, but the system which embraces a King who seems reasonably popular, rich merchants, wideboys, poor farmers and beggars seems to work, copes with its own problems, and has welcomed me.
Flight 914 to Heathrow is being called: goodbye and thank you Morocco - a bientôt.
Richard Martin, Cotswold Woollen Weavers © 1994
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