/travel/Morocco
On Wednesday, I got back from Morocco. It was a short trip, just 4 days. A terrible abuse of the necessary flying. We flew into Marrakech via London Gatwick, uneventfully.
Marrakesh was pretty cool. There was a large square with lots of little
stalls, and snake charmers and story tellers and musicians. It was very
much a part of the local life, it seemed; the stories were in Arabic, and
only a small amount of what went on seemed particularly targetted at
tourists.
Nearby there was a large area of tiny, windy streets filled with people and mopeds and donkeys and the occasional car creeping slowly through. There were shops of all kinds: clothes, cloth, food, mirrors, dishes, etc. The haggling was friendly but intensive, and not surprisingly they were much better at it than I was.
The country was poor, but things seemed to be fairly functional. While it's much lower on the Human Development Index than Ukraine (124 vs 78), things seemed less broken, perhaps simply because there wasn't the obvious contrast of how things "might have been" or "nearly were". The people seemed honest: willing to take your money, but not trying to scam you out of it. I was much more edgy about being scammed than I needed to be, I think.
Given the short time (Clare and the two friends we were with stayed on for a total of a week, so they're just back today) we took a ready-made trip to the near Sahara. It was about 6 or 7 hours of driving, with a few stops along the way. Our minibus had us, two slightly overwhelmed Americans, and a pack of six gap year (between high school and uni, so about 18) Australian gals. They were fun, if slightly loud.
We arrived to Zagora just around sunset, and then rode camels for about an hour and a half into the desert, in three lines of four camels, each lead by a Berber. Luckily, unlike horses, it turns out I'm not allergic to camels. We camped in a traditional Berber tent, each on a thin foam pad.
The desert is a desperate, rugged place. We weren't really into the Sahara...the sand dunes were small, and there was parched gravel ground that they flowed on top -- it wasn't "sand all the way down" as it is deep in the Sahara. It's dry and oppressive in a way that's hard to convey. On the drive, some of the landscape was completely barren, and lots of it was barren but for a few rugged, wispy shrubs clinging to the earth. I couldn't get the notion of dying of thirst out of my head. It's an expression we use lightly, but it seemed all to real there. One of the camels was acting up (we guessed he was too young to be carrying people) and so I opted to walk for the last half hour or so, partly to see what it was like. I drank a lot of water, and felt funny later, presumably due to lack of salts.
The food was alright, but veggie options were not always available, and they were virtually always fairly plain couscous or stewed veg dishes, so I had a few meat meals, which were more tasty. Constantly being paranoid about food ("peel it, bake it or boil it") is a bit tiring.
The country is a former French colony, so my french was very handy. It was nice to give it some exercise. They seemed to understand me fairly well, and only a few of them spoke better English than French.
Every few hours (starting at just after 5am) there was a wailing call to prayer, no matter where you were. Both male and female tourists are admonished to cover knees and shoulders (and everything in between, of course). There was no alcohol to be had, at least easily, since drinking in public places is illegal. I kinda liked the lack of alcohol. It was replaced with simple mint tea (made with fresh mint leaves and a healthy dose of sugar), which they drank morning, noon and night. And when you checked into a hotel. And pretty much any other time. In the mornings, there were mopeds stacked with giant mounts of tea leaves cruising around, making deliveries. Others were loaded up with giant wicker baskets full of who-knows. In the countryside, women were seen carrying big loads of branches and stuff on their head, presumably to keep warm in the cool desert nights, or perhaps just to make a roof. Kids would run up to us, certainly to ask for money (often in exchange for "gifts" of small folded-grass animals), but it seemed also just to see us and say hello. Again, most of them were very friendly, though a couple seemed a bit aggressive (which I can't blame them for, really.)
I've very nearly finished reading The State of Africa, which is an excellent, eye-opening perspective on Africa. It changed most of what I think about the source and solution to the problems that Africa faces. I hope to review it more properly soon, but who knows if I'll find time. It was good to have read so much of it before stepping foot on that continent.
