Marrakech

Marrakech does exotic well. This place has all the elements. 100m from our hotel is a wide tiled square. It is perpetually filled with fruit and spice vendors, performing monkeys and their owners, live cobras posing with their charmer unprotected from the passing crowds. Jungle rhythms from bands of drummers, Celtic traditions (weirdly) from bands of African stringed instruments, and the classic wail of the Arabian pipe (not sure of its name) rise up above the activity. The massed crowd is a mix of po-faced tourists, entrepreneurial Moroccans and local townsfolk, crisscrossed by scooters, motorcycles, hand drawn and donkey drawn carts. Over all this a low smoke from the many incense burners and a large barrel fire create a heady atmosphere. From our rooftop terrace I can see the tower of Marrakech’s largest mosque, surrounded by a stand of palm trees, and can hear from the narrow street three stories below all the activities of the innumerable tiny stalls, passing tourists and the scooters moving dangerously fast through them. Not bad, almost makes up for the violent diarrhoea I’ve been stricken with over the last couple of days, I suspect from a suspect kofte tagine. I’ve been recuperating basically, recovering from the illness and from the riding, which Matt and I have concluded is taking more out of us than we suspected.
Morocco has been great though, it’s feeling like travel proper, the occasional dirt road, navigating with Arabic signs (not going well) and of course the insane traffic. Riding from Tangier to Casablanca I lived out the one image I had coming into this whole trip, that of riding along a coastal highway with a raging sea on one side and the swirling sands of the Sahara sweeping across the road surface. Morocco’s really green at the moment, it’s probably the time of year, but most of our riding thus far has been through very green fields. Land that looks very productive, but we can’t work out what they’re growing. It looks like clover, like they’re keeping the fields fallow. Maybe it’s part of the sowing cycle.
We stayed in Casablanca for a couple of days, quite an interesting place. I’ve been told previously that the city is a bit of a hole, and I guess that’s accurate. It has an old town which is extremely authentic, a seething mess of alleyways and ramshackle buildings. It would be, and I guess is where tourists go but it certainly has an edge to it. The rest of the city is rundown, the modern centre wouldn’t look out of place in a French regional town except for its uniform dilapidation.
Tomorrow we prepare to leave Marrakech for road north to Fez. We’ve made plans now to circumvent Algeria. We weren’t getting a lot of good reports from the place, the border issue with Morocco was annoying, and more pertinently we haven’t yet got visas for the place. So now the plan is ferries from Spain to Italy and then to Tunisia. Should be good.