Fezelas
By the end of the trip, I am sure the Brazil to Morocco move will be one of the strangest taken. My head spun for a week afterward wanting to be on a beach in Brazil and having difficulty making the adjustment to the ancient medina of Fez. It has 9000 alleys none of which can honestly be called a street and 800,000 residents. I don’t recall seeing any alleys wider than 5 meters, but I certainly did not see all 9000. Many were less than a meter wide in places. There are few instances where the alleys ran straight for more than a few meters and there are many locations where you cannot look up and see the sky. The medina was supposedly designed… designed to protect the residents and confuse the attackers. Damn… the place is sounding better to me just reading this! Unfortunately, add in the hordes of people (mainly locals), the vendors and their overflowing wares, the beggars, the million sickly cats, the smoke and all the smelly waste left behind and you have what I “affectionately” (not) call The Rat Trap.
Fez is probably a better place than I found, but it is probably not the best place to start a Morocco trip. I would have preferred being eased into Morocco via Marrakech before seeing the real thing. My problem being further compounded by all the openness of Brazil being replaced with a very constricted place filled with people wearing a lot of clothes. One issue I had with Fez is that it is the first place where I was quite concerned with getting lost. So, I stuck with the guided group tour. Getting lost in the bowels of Fez could be a real problem and one that I was not ready to try. Normally, a confusing place has reference points and I have a good enough sense of direction to recover from any lost moments. At least for this first-time rat trap visitor, this is not true. Of course, there were very interesting things to see in Fez albeit in groupie mode and we stayed in a very nice dar or riad just outside of the medina. I am pretty sure that if I was to go back to Fez now that I have my Morocco legs and I was to do a visit outside the groupie tour then I would probably like it much more.
I found quite a few similarities between the Fez medina and Brazil’s favelas even though they are worlds apart. In many ways I like the favelas more than the medina. Mainly, the medina is flat and suffocating whereas the favelas are on steep hills with wonderful views. The favelas are full of medieval city-like “streets”, but they are vertical rather than flat. Other than some main streets, the favelas do not support cars, bikes or donkey carts. Fez and even more-so in Marrakech have all kinds of motorized and manual vehicles racing around belching out fumes (inorganic and organic) and terrifying the walkers. (Marrakech, by the way, is the only clearly pedestrian place I have ever been that allows anything to drive the streets at anytime and at ridiculous speeds. I am not sure why they allow this and I consider it the biggest negative for Marrakech and the reason why the air pollution there is off the charts.)
The vertical nature of the favelas has one great advantage beside making them open and providing great views. As the old adage goes “the shit flows downhill”. The medina has no such benefit from its flatness and this is evident with the smell of sewage, the poorly flowing drains on the ground floors and the garbage that collects and rots. In favelas, the garbage is tossed off the hills into areas that are then picked up. These garbage locations are also where people find and recycle all kinds of matter. Sure, the favelas are not the cleanest place on earth, but I have seen a lot worse. Fez on the other hand is full of rotting matter that almost seems to just get absorbed by the adobe walls. The stink in Fez is never going away and the lack of fresh air in the rat trap just compounds the problem. The favelas of Rio and Salvador always have a nice breeze so even where there is garbage you can breathe freely.
Fez was supposedly designed. It makes a great example of how not to design an urban area. The favelas were never planned. Brazil tried to ignore its poor and they squatted on open spaces that the wealthier had no intentions of using – hillsides. When their squatter rights kicked in after five years, living in the favela was legitimized. Those in control decided to ignore the problem and decided to never provide the normal services and infrastructure that they enjoyed in their neighborhoods such as sewage, streets, electricity, police and fire protection, garbage removal, etc. Eventually, this came to a head when the good lands were all taken and the problems associated with having 20% or one million residents in favelas (Rio) started to affect the rest of the population. Namely, under-educated people, gang violence, “eyesores” in view of the wealthy homes and their shit is pouring into the harbor ruining the beaches. All I can say is that the well-to-do in Brazil created the favelas, they now have to live with them doing what they can to fix the problems and I have not thought of them as eyesores at all. Ironically, the drugs that are trafficked are sold in the favela to the well-to-do Brazilians who live outside the favelas and drive into them to get their supply… leaves my head shaking.
Randy and I did a group tour into two favelas including the largest called Rocinha. On the way in, the guide told us that the favelas are like Africa. (Note: Latin Americans like many people always discuss Africa as the worst place on earth yet their only view on Africa is the worst of it.) I looked out my window and saw nothing resembling Africa’s slums. Brazilians always seem to see and speak about the worst of their country totally out of context to the way things are around the world. If I was ever to promote Brazil, I would never hire a Brazilian to do the marketing! Between this groupie tour and a walking tour Randy and I did from our hotel into the favela behind it (we paid a friend of the hotel employees to guide us – the hotel employs many people from that neighborhood), we discovered that favelas are a decent place to live and they are full of good people. Of course, they have problems, but most of those are not significant except the issue of the drug gangs that use the favelas as their hiding places and the police who attempt to take on the favela gangs.
The kids in the favelas are the best kite fliers I have ever seen. They can get a twelve inch square piece of paper attached to two sticks and string into the air in seconds. Kite flying is a real tradition in the favelas. The drug gangs used to use them for communication. Now they use cellphones. Because a favela is vertical with only one or two entrances at the base of the neighborhood, it is basically impossible for the police to enter the favela without the cellphones (or kites) announcing it to all of the favela. We had just finished an amazingly good hamburger served from a cargo container on the streets of the favela behind the hotel near Copacabana when we were told that we had to wait. We were not told why, but then they wanted to stuff us in a taxi and drive us out. A few locals got in and we went downhill passing a policeman or two. Presumably, they decided that it was too dangerous to have us there with police in the area! The day we went on the groupie tour, I saw a young man by a building with the largest automatic weapon I have ever seen. This was no AK-47 or M-16. He looked ridiculous (and scary) since it was longer than he was tall. It was the only outwardly visible sign of the reality of the violence in the favelas. By the way, we were told multiple times that as tourists we would never be hurt intentionally in the favelas whereas a resident of one favela venturing into another risked being killed. This is due to the problem of drug gangs battling for ownership of favelas. They are at war with each other and the residents are caught in the middle with the police only making matters worse with their incursions.
Overall, I enjoyed my trips into the favelas and once again learned that poverty does not mean bad people. We met many very nice and friendly people who seemed generally happy to meet us and have us wandering through their hood. Many of the homes in the favelas are middle class level and almost all of them have million dollar views. The craziest situation that we saw was a small favela that sits on the cliffside in Salvador right over the very ritzy yacht club. Fabulous locale!!! If you go to Rio, do not be afraid of the favelas, forget what Brazilians want you to believe about them and at least do a groupie tour into them so you can learn the real truth and meet some great locals.
I’d like to give Fez another try sometime in the future. I’m sure after Cairo, I will be ready for anything that the Arab world wants to throw at me. I’d like to see Fez by myself or just a guide to help me get out. After meeting more Moroccans after Fez, I now understand the beauty of this culture and I am sure I would appreciate the people living in the rat trap a lot more. I doubt I will ever like the smells and eyesores, but those can be ignored when you see and smell all of the positive aspects. Given the two very different places, I would take a stay in a favela any day over Fez, but that is mainly because of those great views and the Brazilian culture just lends itself to being liked a lot quicker than the Moroccan culture.
Tags: Africa, brazil, Morocco, south america, Travel
vagabondrick
hi rick, i read all your mail, very interesting, I CAN’T IMAGINE YOU GOING THROUGH ALL THOSE COUNTRYS, YOU MUST HAVE A COMPUTER FOR A BRAIN. JUST THINK YOU CAN ALWAYS LOOK BACK WHEN YOU GET MY AGE AND ENJOY THE TRIP ALL OVER AGAIN. TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF, WE’LL SEE YOU ONE OF THESE DAYS. RANDY IS STILL EXISTING, HOPE THIS GETS OVER SOON. ENJOY AND BE CAREFUL
LOVE VERA