Morocco

Leaving London on the 19th, Heidi and I caught a short flight from Heathrow to Malaga in southern Spain. We had a 1 night stopover in Algeciras then arranged a fast ferry crossing to Tangiers the next morning. The weather was a bit dark so the crossing on the ferry was very bumpy, lots of people got sick, especially the people sitting at the front of the ferry, I'm not sure if they realized that was the worst spot to be. I was fine but Heids turned a nice pale shade of green, it’s a good thing it’s a fast ferry.

Stepping of the ferry in Tangiers wasn't what I expected it to be. I'd been to Tangiers before, almost 4 years ago, and when we had unloaded in the past we had been swamped by 'faux guides' or people pretending to be customs officials just in order to get at our passports or tell us we had contraband and then offer us to bribe them. This time tough it was really painless, no one hassled us and we were through the customs line very quickly, they've cleaned up the port a lot. Still, the city is an armpit. A 16th Century English writer once called Tangier the 'excrescence of the earth', and really, not much has changed since then apart from a brief hay-day in the 60's when Tangier was a destination for people who wanted cheap drugs. We were able to make our way fairly effortlessly to the bus station and buy a ticket for Chefchaouen, a little old town in the north of Morocco set in the Atlas Mountains.

The bus ride was fine, the good thing about travelling at this time of year is that there are always free seats and we don't have to pre-book anything. When we arrived in Chefchaouen we walked through the old town centre, which is called a Medina, and found our hostel. It was a beautiful old riad boarding house which had been refurbished not long ago. Chefchaouen is famous for the blue color that all the houses in the Medina are painted. Some locals say it’s to keep away mosquitoes, another theory that I’ve heard was that the in the old days the Jewish population painted their houses blue (the Berbers painted their houses a light green) to identify the different parts of the city, and even though the Jews have long since departed, people liked the color and still paint their houses different shades of blue. Either way, it looks great when you walk along all the little crooked streets. The backdrop to the little city is the snowcapped Atlas Mountains which are right on the doorstep. We went for a walk up through the mountains one day to an old abandoned mosque ruin and got a really good view of the 'blue town'.

The streets of Chefchaouen are filled with all kinds of vendors selling everything from stuffed olives, fruit and bread through to knock off iPods, phones and watches (Heidi was in trinket heaven). The streets are also full of people that are trying to rip you off , one way or another, which is a shame because if anyone approaches you with genuine friendship in mind, you're automatically trying to ignore them anyway. There is a small 'Berber mill' in the middle of the city which still produces woven goods in the same style as hundreds of years ago, apparently lots of tourists go to see this. Or so we were told by dodgy looking guys trying too hard to get us to come and see their 'family Berber shop'. It must be one really huge family in Chefchaouen because every person on the street has a 'sick dad who works in the Berber mill so he can pay for their crippled grandson’s medicine' blah blah blah, they'll say anything to make you spend a buck. It's kind of funny, because the harder they try to make you go, the less likely I'm actually going to feel comfortable enough to go along. If they didn't try so hard I probably would have gone and spent some money. It would usually start with them trying to be my best friend, then when they realized I wasn't biting they'd eventually resort to asking if I was Jewish because I wouldn't spend any of my money - that made me laugh (clearly I didn't have time to explain that I wasn't Jewish but in fact had Scottish ancestry, historically famous tight arses. That, and I have no money anyway.). But I suppose you have to take the bad with the good, and overall Chefchaouen is great, you just need a thick skin when travelling in Morocco. We had some amazing meals there too, on the first night there we sat in front of an open fire and ordered the works: mint teas, Moroccan soups, salads, cous cous, tagines, and we just about ate ourselves to death. Fantastic.

Next stop after Chefchaouen was Fes. The fairly simple 4 hour bus ride turned into a nightmarish 6 hour ride after I felt sick as I stepped on the bus. It didn't get any better and pretty soon I was praying for fresh air, I must have got some kind of food poisoning or something. One of those dodgy Chefchaouen street vendors got their own back on me for not spending enough money. This struck me as kind of strange, because usually I have the kind of stomach that could take a grenade and not complain. I've often thought that if I had a superpower, it would be that I could eat anything and be fine: expired milk, moldy cheese, nuclear bombs all no problem. Must have been some super-biological kebab. Anyway, eventually we arrived in Fes, checked in to our hostel (which was perfect: right in the middle of the Fes Medina, and even better than the riad in Chefchaouen) and then I passed out. The next day I woke up feeling like death warmed up, those dodgy vendors really did a good number on me. I spent a good part of the day in bed while Heidi was exploring one of the coolest places ever, 15km of little winding streets to wander and thousands of market stalls to see. I must have slept for ages, the next thing I clearly remember was the morning and that I was feeling a bit better. Heids and I set out walking and explored a good part of the medina that was around our hostel. Heidi had made friends with the owners of a restaurant so we kept going back there every few hours to sit in the terrace and drink mint tea and watch the world go by on the market streets. That night we had dinner at a restaurant that I remembered from the last time I was in Fes. I was feeling much better so I ordered a large beef cous cous. Maybe the guys that ran this restaurant in Fes had wise-guy cousins in Chefchaouen, or maybe I was just unlucky, but the meal was bad. But it was a subtle kind of bad - the kind of bad that you don't really realize how bad it is until after you finish the meal, and then something in your mind says 'soon I will be violently sick'. And I was. And so that’s how I got food poisoning...again. So much for my superpower. I might start trying to fly. At one point during the night I heard the sound of rolling thunder in the distance and woke up, only to realize it was my stomach protesting my culinary decisions, it was very funny, I've never had hilarious food poisoning before.

After a fairly sleepless night I felt tired, but at least I was alive. The next day we spent exploring the Fes streets a little deeper and got ourselves hopelessly lost in the maze of markets, walkways, bridges, steps, people, cats, carts and donkeys. Donkeys are the new 'whispering death', they don’t make much noise as they come past, and if you don't get out of the way very quickly you're likely to be trampled beneath a tone of gas bottles, tanned hides and bottled water. They don't care who is in front of them, and I don't blame them really. We took a short tour of the tannery which Fes is quite famous for, and saw some leather products being made. To borrow a quote from Kenny, "there is a smell down there that will out live religion", and I'm sure it will. Long after people have left earth (one way or another), the smell of the Fes tannery will still baffle the odd alien tourist who will wonder why people soaked their clothes in such a pungent perfume. Its quite astonishing to see people working knee deep in pigeon excrement mixed with dog, bovine and goat urine. The ammonia in these products is used to tan the leather hides and make them supple, so think about that the next time you put on your leather jacket of fish around your leather handbag for your keys. Of course Heidi had to buy a few little leather items, but they're so 'fresh' that they need to travel in their own separate plastic bag until they lose their smell.

So, Fes, you'll forgive me if I have a few mixed feelings about you. I love the markets and sense of activity of the city, but your food can get stuffed. Fortunately, we had a trip to Marrakesh to look forward to and I was particularly eager to let this new city remind me how much I liked Moroccan food. A few people we talked to said they preferred the laid back feeling of Fes to the bustling Marrakesh, but I think I disagree. The main attraction of Marrakesh from my point of view is the 'Djeema El Fna' (spelling is probably way off). By night the square is packed with food markets, and by day the same area is full of snake charmers, wandering minstrels, henna tattooists and monkeys. The phantom food market is my favorite thing about Morocco so far, by 6pm every night there are a hundred or so small stalls set up in the middle of the square giving you the Moroccan equivalent of fast food. You take a seat, and within seconds your meal is served, the only difficult thing about the process is trying not to eat too much at any one spot so that you can sample as much as possible. The sounds of snake charmers and the smoke from the cooking fires all add to the magical illusion. Even though the El Fna square is huge, it gets filled with thousands of locals every night to eat, drink tea and listen to Berber storytellers under the stars.

I was surprised to see that in the morning, all that’s left of the market is a couple of council cleaners sweeping up rubbish - the markets had completely vanished and had been replaced by other merchants or performers trying to make some cash from foreign visitors. Leading off from the markets are several streets that take you through markets and merchants, everything is the same - leather goods, sandals, wood and metal workers, trinkets and souvenirs - if you've been to the markets elsewhere, it 99% the same, but still fun to wander through and spend a day of two buying small useless things that you know will just take up room in your bag. Heidi visited a hamman (a local kind of Turkish baths) I visited some snake charmers and came face to face with a huge cobra (it could stand up at almost my waist height!).After spending a couple of days exploring the city, we'd seen most of the tourist sites, so the next few days were spent mainly relaxing on the rooftop terraces in the sun, drinking tea and reading books, watching and listening to the world go by.

Overall we had such a great time in Morocco, even with a little bit of dodgy food and shady characters it is still worth the effort to explore. Our time in Morocco was running out so we took an overnight train from Marrakesh to Tangier, then a ferry and connecting bus ride to Algeciras, then a bus to Malaga before finally getting another bus to Granada. It took about 30hrs of travelling to get to Granada, but we thought it better to get all the travelling out of the way in one hit so we could relax. For the last couple of days we've been exploring the streets and Tapas bars of Granada, but more about Spain later!