Volubilis, Meknes and Fez, Morocco

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

We got up early and left Moulay Idriss to travel to Volubilis. On donkeys. I was particularly excited about this, since riding a donkey along narrow winding passes had been a part of my crazy romantic image of Morocco. The reality was… painfully disappointing. The ‘saddle’, for lack of a better word was made of a couple of bits of wood with some plastic bags and blankets stretched over them. Perfectly functional, and had the bits of wood not been making repeated, bruising contact with the bones in my bum, I would have been much happier. There also weren’t any stirrups, so my legs kind of had no where to be and just hung down to either side, pulling painfully on my hip joints. And all this would have been fine if I had been riding with the rest of the group, chatting and laughing. But my donkey was old, and tired and was not having any of it. I was at least a dozen metres behind everyone else for the entire ride. By the time we hit the steep hill leading up to Volubilis and the driver was basically behind the donkey pushing him up it, I was done with the whole experience, too.

Volubilis, however, was well worth the journey. It was not disappointing in the least.It was a beautiful sunny morning by the time we arrived, and we were the first ones there, so we got some amazing photos with no other tourists in them.

Volubilis was a Roman town, and the ruins are quite amazing. Our guide was wonderful and incredibly knowledgable. I wish I could remember even a portion of what he told us. But walking through the ruins with him, it was possible to picture what the town must have been like. There were remains of arches and aquaducts, shops and homes and bath houses and whore houses, sewer systems and olive presses. There were an assortment of stunning mosaics still amazingly intact after nearly 2000 years. They were just beautiful. And seeing them in situ, rather than reassembled in some museum, was such a treat.

From Volubilis, we got into grand taxis and headed back to Meknes for the afternoon. Our first stop was the granaries. Meknes is a fortified town, and the granaries were intended to store food in case of a seige. Part of each harvest was taxed and stored. It was specifically built to keep a constant temperature inside. They kept enough food for a year, and had ten wells within it for water. If the grain wasn’t used by the time the next harvest rolled around, it was given to the poor. Not a bad system.

They also had attached stables capable of holding twelve thousand horses. The roof was held up by many, many arches which were arranged so you could see across the space on the perpendicular and on the diagonal, so the horses could be monitored by fewer guards.

We walked past one of the king’s palaces (which looked like a lot of high walls with some very pretty arched doors) and into the medina. We visited a craft shop where the specialty involves hammering silver threads into etched iron pots and bowls. It’s beautiful and unique to the area, and I wish I could remember what it was called.

Lunch was one of my more adventurous ones. We went for camel burgers. We visited the cook stall, but there wasn’t room for all of us, so the man took us back to his home, where we sat in his living room and he brought the food to us. The camel burger came on a bun with some tomato, and had spices in it that reminded me of a falafel. It was actually really tasty, if I didn’t think too hard about what I was eating.

From there, we wandered to another part of the medina where we had about half an hour to wander around and pick up some treats for our train trip to Fez. We wandered through the parts of the markets with live rabbits and chickens, not-so-live goat’s heads on display, and just about everything in between. We finished up by the candies and cakes, all delightfully displayed, and had a ball putting together a package to share.

Another fairly crowded train, but three of us managed to sit together, squashed into a compartment with several old ladies. We shared out our treats and made sure a portion got to our friends in the other compartments.

The train station in Fez was… insane. Crowded, under construction, middle of rush hour, you name it. Thank god for Jamal, our guide, who got us through the throng and into taxis to our hotel. We had a little time to relax before dinner – I spent it washing socks and underwear in the sink.

The others wanted alcohol with their dinners, so Jamal took us around the corner to a restaurant with a bar. We had excellent tagines, Casablanca beer and some wine. No one was impressed with either the beer or the wine, but it’s a mostly dry country, so what do you expect.

We stopped at a little kiosk to buy bottled water and little cakes for dessert, then sat up in the lobby for a while with our snacks, chatting. We didn’t stay up too late, though. It was the end of another busy day. Tomorrow: Fez!