Saturday, November 7th, 2009
We left Casablanca on an early train. It’s about an hour to Rabat. It was a relief to leave Casa and a relief to arrive in Rabat; Rabat was much cleaner and quieter and less crowded. The French used Rabat as their capital, and after independence, it remained so. We walked past the parliament buildings, past the building that was the seat of French power (it’s been empty since 1956), past the post office, and down to the medina.
It was still quite early, so the market was still waking up, but it was nice to wander through without any crowds, watch the owners opening their shops and stalls. This medina was a nice mix, modern cell phones, electronics, plastic kitchen tools mixed with more traditional slippers and soaps and spices. Speaking of soaps, we had our first encounter with the goopy Argan soap, in various colours. And it was my first encounter with the beautifully artistic way the Moroccans display their wares.
There were spices in colourful, fragrant mounds that we could smell all the way through the market. There were stalls selling dates and figs, apricots and raisins, other selling the crafts and trinkets we were becoming familiar with: jewellery, slippers, djellabas, teapots, ornate hanging lamps in a variety of shapes and sizes. There were stray cats everywhere, a fact which is actually true of the whole of Morocco. Parts of the market were open to the air, other parts covered with a kind of twig rattan, and still other sections with an arched wrought iron and glass enclosure that reminded me of a Victorian rail station. Little alleyways branched off the main ‘street’ we were walking along, and we began our photographic obsession with doors that lasted the whole first half of our tour. 
Doors in Morocco are beautiful, ornate, in different sizes and shapes and colours, with intricate knockers and sometimes with metal studs or banding.
We walked straight through the souq – no time for shopping this time – and since it was early there were no aggressive sellers, just smiles and hellos.
From the souq, we walked to the kasbah, which is a fortified town built by the Berbers. It is on a cliff over the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Bou Regreg river. And it’s beautiful. There are keyhole doorways and lush gardens, narrow streets and a cafe overlooking the ocean. We sat in the latter for a while, warm and relaxed in the sun, drinking mint tea with almond cookies. I looked around at the view, the beautiful tiles, the old walls of the kasbah and thought: this is the Morocco I wanted to find.
From the terrace, we headed up through more narrow streets. The bottom half of many of the walls were painted a bright blue – apparently the Moroccans believe it keeps the flies away. Every door we passed was fascinating, every alleyway was mysterious and charming. We finally arrived at the top, where there was a lookout over the ocean and the coastline. We could see the big waves of the Atlantic Ocean pounding the shore, people surfing between the breakwaters, kids playing football in grids delineated by lines scraped in wet sand, and, further down the coast, cemeteries, their white stones visible even from a distance. To our right as we were gazing out, the sister town of Sale was visible on the far side of the river mouth. New Sale, they call it, despite its being hundreds of years old, because it’s newer than the ancient Rabat.
We drank in the view, then headed down the through the kasbah and out for a short walk along the riverside, and then up to the mausoleum. There were two guards in full regalia sitting on horses at the gates into the square. The square has a minaret at one end, and columns in various states of disrepair. Originally, the minaret and the columns and the wall surrounding the square were the beginnings of a mosque, but partway through the building process, either the king who commissioned it or the architect who was designing it died, and work was stopped out of respect. The Lisbon earthquake in 1755 also did some damage. There is now a newer mosque on one side of the square, so people can still come here to pray.
Inside, the mausoleum is completely tiled in intricate designs. There is a kind of balcony that runs around the inside wall, so you can look down into the central area, one floor down, where King Mohammed V’s tomb is, and the tombs of his two sons, King Hassan II and Abdul.
The mausoleum was our last stop in Rabat. From there we piled into taxis and headed back to the train station for lunch and then the two-and-a-half hour journey from Rabat to Meknes.
This train was not nearly as modern as the fancy commuter train we had taken in the morning. It had compartments with bench seating and it was much more crowded. The crowd thinned a bit after one or two stops and in the end we were all able to find seats. J, R and I ended up in the same compartment, and we spent part of the trip trying to chat with our fellow passengers. The man opposite me spoke Arabic and a little French. The man next to me spoke Arabic, French and a little English. J spoke English and a little French. I speak English and French and essentially no Arabic whatsoever. It took some work, but we were able to hold a conversation with much translating back and forth. They told us a bit about their lives, and wanted to know where we were from and what we did and why we were travelling.
We arrived in Meknes, but didn’t stay. We immediately hopped into a couple of Grand Taxis for the 45-minute drive up winding roads into the hills to Moulay Idriss. We passed a lot of donkey traffic on the roads – some people riding, some people leading laden donkeys. We also passed quite a few groups of people sitting by the side of the road, waiting for a Grand Taxi with room in it to take them up or down the hills.
We followed a couple of switchbacks up into the hills, then through an archway and into Moulay Idriss, jostling for roadspace with pedestrians, donkeys, pushcarts and other vehicles. We didn’t go far before hitting the point where motorized traffic ends, and from there we strapped on our packs for the short walk up a narrow climbing street to the door of our guest house.
The guest house was a family home that has been converted to receive guests. The family still live there and run the place. It was riad-style, meaning there was a central courtyard and the two stories above had balconies that overlooked it. There was a glass skylight over the opening in the roof, however – it lets the light in, but keeps the rain out.
As soon as we arrived, we were escorted up to the roof-top terrace, where we had mint tea and almont biscuits while looking out over almost the entire town. The guest house was near the top of one hill, and the roofs of the town spread down into the valley and up the hill on the other side. Peering directly down over the edge of the roof, I could see little boys playing soccer in the narrow street three storeys below us.
Done with our tea, our host Mohammed took us on a tour of the town. He explained that every street had five things: a bakery, a hammam, a quranic school, a fountain and… a mosque? I think. He showed us the room next to the hammam where the wood was stacked almost to the ceiling, ready for burning to heat the water. We saw the tiled fountain (although it wasn’t flowing) and the bakery.
And when I say bakery, I don’t mean pastry shop. It’s more like a communal oven. First thing in the morning, women will bring their loaves of bread to the bakery to be baked, and then the children pick them up on their way home from school at lunch time. Thirty years ago, the system was a little different. There were men whose job it was to go around the houses and pick up the dough loaves and bring them to be baked, and then bring the cooked bread back to the houses. The women would pay him for this service not in money but in bread. They would give him part of their loaf and he would take this down to the mosque to sell to the men who didn’t have wives to cook for them, or else to give it to the poor. Fancy baking, such as cakes or cookies, could also be done at the bakery, usually in the afternoon when the ovens were cooler.
Our guide then brought us to the holy site in Moulay Idriss. Or, rather, to the edge of it. As with most holy places in Morocco, non-Muslims are not allowed to enter. Moulay Idriss is a pilgrimmage site, named after the holy figure of Moulay Idriss, whose tomb is located here. He was the great-grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, descended through Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, and he came here after persecution drove him out of Mecca. People who are unable, for whatever reason, to go to Mecca can come here instead. A certain number of pilgrimmages to Moulay Idriss (5 or 7, I can’t remember) is equivalent to one trip to Mecca.
From the holy site, we headed up and up and up. 150 steps up a narrow, winding street to a lookout point. We could see practically the whole town from the opposite hill this time, with the sunset in the background. The clouds that had been hovering low all day magically disappeared to give us some stunning views.
Back down through the town, all of us craning our heads to look down alleyways and into open doorways. Tiny rooms off these narrow streets were in fact little shops, occupied by men sewing away. Every so often a kiosk would stick out with its brightly coloured modern wares. There are very, very few foreign tourists who come here. We got some stares, but almost everyone smiled and said ‘bonjour,’ although there is very little French spoken here. Donkeys and the occasional scooter are the main modes of transportation; the streets are too narrow and too steep for cars. Some of the streets are open to the sky, although the houses are high to either side. Other streets are covered over, with the ‘roof’ above being the floor of someone else’s house. The doors and window shutters are almost all ornate. It’s a beautiful, magical place.
We came down to a big, lively square. It was nearly dark, but the place was lit by all the stalls; cook stands selling delicious-smelling foods, for the most part. It was lively, and full of people. The boys of the group stayed here to sit and have a cup of tea and soak up the atmosphere. The other girls and I, with great trepidation, took the bag containing our towels and headed for the local hammam. None of us were sure what to expect.
The guide dropped us at the door to the hammam with promises to pick us up later. We headed down a flight of steps into what was essentially a three-room stone grotto. The first room was a change room. It wasn’t busy, but there were several other women there, in various states of undress. The bath attendants pointed us to an area of the room where we could strip down. They spoke no French and we spoke no Arabic, so all communication was charades-based. They indicated we should take everything off except our underwear, which we did, and then followed them through an unused room into the bath room.
The bath room was a big stone room with a tap in one wall. No benches, nothing fancy. They indicated that we should hang our towels on the peg and sit on the floor. The bath attendants sat by a tap in the wall (on the other side of which, I assume, was the wood we had seen earlier, now burning merrily) and filled a series of blue buckets with hot water. There were a couple of other women in there, bathing, and one woman was scrubbing down her little girl. They all seemed friendly, but we had no common language to chat in. We sat on the warm, wet, tiled floor with our backs against the warm wall and waited our turn.
We were first soaped with the goopy Argan soap and washed. There were two ladies doing this for the four of us. Then we went one at a time to the main bath attendant who washed our hair for us. She wielded a mean plastic brush, I have to say. After each step we were rinsed down with many bowlfuls of warm water from the plastic buckets. Once our hair was done, we were summoned, one at a time, to be scrubbed. The bath attendant had a scrubbing mitt on her hand, and we were manhandled this way and that as she scrubbed practically every inch of us. When we were all done, we were each rinsed one last time, to get the sweat off, then we were pointed to our towels. We headed back to the change room, comparing notes.
We all ended up heading home commando-style, because, of course, our underwear was now soaking wet, and we hadn’t been warned to bring a fresh pair. Our guide brought us back down to the main square and we were offered a chance to look around. I wish we could have, but we none of us had any underwear on, we were damp, with wet hair, and it was getting chilly. And it somehow felt immodest to be so obviously just out of the bath. Or maybe that was the lack of underwear talking. Regardless, we all voted to go back to the guest house to dry off, change clothes and get ready for dinner.
We were allowed to step into the kitchen to get a demonstration of how to cook couscous. The real stuff that takes hours to cook, not the instant kind we mostly have here in Canada. And then we all sat down to dinner. It was, bar none, the most delicious meal I had during my entire time in Morocco. Nothing fancy, but so, so good. We had Moroccan salad, which is diced tomato, cucumber, onion and green pepper with an oil and vinegar dressing. Then harira, which is a thick Moroccan soup. It has a complicated and subtle blend of spices without being spicy hot. Then there was couscous with vegetables and a kefta (kind of a Moroccan meatball) tagine, which were truly delicious. And then grapes for dessert. Best. Meal. Ever.
While we were eating, the children of the house passed in and out of the room. there was a little girl in a pink headscarf, and a sparkly pink traditional dress. It seemed like she was dressed like a princess, and I wondered if that was everyday wear, or special because there were visitors. There was also a little boy, maybe seven years old, who played games on the computer. He was a handful, you could tell just by looking at him. I couldn’t understand what his father was telling him, but he had a look on his face that clearly said “you just told me not to do this, but I’m going to do it anyway, so what are you going to do about that?”
After dinner we were given a lesson on how to make Moroccan mint tea. Two of the men on our trip were called up to participate in the demonstration. It was the end of a very long day by this point, and there were a couple of unfortunate and unintentional double entendres, and by the end we were all crying with laughter. I felt a little bad for our hosts, because the jokes just didn’t translate, but it was a wonderful way to end the day.
And yes, all that was one day. This was why I loved the Intrepid trip. Nothing felt rushed, nothing felt missed, but we got to do so much, and see so much, it was wonderful.
kithika