Advertisement
Published: January 21st 2008
Fes Medina
The Fes medina with its ancient walls and the green roofs of the main mosque in the distanceFounded as a imperial capital in 800 AD, Fes's primary attraction is its ancient medina, a walled city with a millenium of history that's famous for it's rug and antiquities merchants, leather and other handicraft workshops, and a thousand-year old Islamic university that is still in operation, a point of pride that will be mentioned to you by all the Fassis you meet. The Fes medina is also notorious for swallowing tourists alive in its labrynthine depths, and during a couple of days of exploration we certainly got lost our own share of the time. (Recognizing this, the official map issued by the tourist authorities in Fes now outlines color-coded walking routes, a Disneyesque touch that produces clots of tourists craning their necks to identify the similarly-colored emblems marking important intersections.)
Having arrived by bus on Christmas Day - a "holiday" that passed by us with barely a ripple - we settled ourselves at the Hotel Splendid in the ville nouvelle (French-built) section of Fes and spent a day taking care of business like trips to the post office, buying a mobile phone, and getting a haircut. We were abley assisted in the last two endeavors by "Nano", a young
Haircut in Fes
An excellent job performed by Nano's personal barber. Moroccan university student with decent English skills, wraparound shades and a shaved head - lending him the look of a young Cuba Gooding Jr. - who snagged Kate in the stamps line at the P.O. Nano took us to the "mobile souk", a scabby warren of electronics shops in the ground floor of a downtown office building, and negotiated on our behalf for an unlocked LG phone with Bluetooth and a Maroc Telecom SIM card for about sixty bucks. With appropriate SIMs we'll be able to use this phone most anywhere in the world. The haircut was another adventure, with a trek across town to Nano's personal barber (did we mention his shaved head?) who actually gave me an excellent cut.
During all this "town business" we couldn't help noticing how modern, cosmopolitan, and "European" Fes appeared, which countered our preconceptions of this ancient place. The modern buildings were not just decrepit French leftovers but newly built and maintained; the traffic lights were not only operational but actually receiving acknowledgement from motorists; the McDonald's occupying a prime downtown corner was not catering to tourists but thronged with locals. And, for the first time in Morocco we saw women not
only without headscarves, but with tight jeans and even the occasional pair of Spanish-style spike-heeled leather boots!
On subsequent mornings we hoofed it across town to the medina, and by way of a goal we half-followed the Lonely Planet and official walking tours trying to take in a few museums, including the well-done exhibits at the Nejarine Museum, dedicated to traditional woodcrafts and housed in the fabulous restored "funduq" (a guesthouse for traveling merchants) and a private collection of art and historical artifacts housed in the Belghazi Museum, a 17th century palace still held by the original family that was even more spectacular than its collection. Both these places had great views over the medina from their roof terraces, which gave us an unwarranted sense of directional orientation, an impression totally obliterated as soon as we descended back to street level and found ourselves spun around in the maze of alleyways and covered walkways that serve as the medina's streets. One day, in just such a state of disorientation and low blood sugar, we gratefully let ourselves be led by a tout to one of Fes' cavernous "palace" restaurants (which we now recognize from our short excursion to Tangier)
Fes Tannery
Leather processing done the old-fashioned way, with pigeon poop, cow pee, and bare arms and legs. where we had a surprisingly good lunch surrounded by a couple of dozen other tourists.
We also made the obligatory tourist stop in the tannery district of the medina, where workers in shorts process sheep, goat, cow and camel hides the old-fashioned way, scraping and agitating them with their bare arms and legs through a putrid circuit of open-air lye and dye baths (important dye components include pigeon shit and cow pee) while, for 10 dirham, tourists with telephoto lenses on the surrounding rooftops attempt to recreate the famously polychromatic images they've seen on the postcards and in every guidebook. Not content with the 250mm view, I coughed up an extra 20 to get some shots down in the dyeing area itself, and almost got a free dye job for my money (in Thursday's color, red) when my steel SPD cleats slipped as my guide and I leapfrogged from the rim of one mucky concrete tub to another. I resolved to buy some tennis shoes as soon as possible.
Another day, our conversation with a Morrocan/New York antiques dealer was interrupted by a ring on his mobile calling him home to lunch, and rather than abandon us he
invited us along. The venue for the meal turned out to be his wife's nearby carpet enterprise housed in a palatial 19th century riad, and we sat around a huge communal platter under the great central dome, sharing bites of the most succulent chicken cous cous with the her and ladies who worked in her business. Afterwards, along with the requisite cups of mint tea we got the gentlest of carpet sales pitches, and in that state of post-prandial satisfaction I almost succumbed when I found out the saleman would throw in the DHL door-to-door shipping for free. (By way of proving his trustworthiness he opened his order book and said "look, we have customers all over the world, probably your neighbors are in there", and sure enough we saw a recent order being shipped to our friends Ian and Carolyn who live not a mile from us in Boulder!)
Another serendipitous medina experience occurred when after a wrong turn down a blind alley we were hailed in English with guidance back to the main thoroughfare - for once not biased towards a route past a carpet or leather shop - and we got to chatting with our benefactor,
Shadowed women, Fes medina
It's easy to get lost as the alleys, twist, turn, and tunnel under buildings Ali, a young man who with his English wife Alice was in the process of totally renovating a small house nearby. At our expression of interest he gave us the grand tour of his project as well as a sense of what a monumental task it would be to bring these crumbling old rooms into a state of elegant, Morrocan-style livability. (While we were there a tile craftsman working on the dining room floor pointed proudly to the one-half that was finished - work that had already consumed an entire month.) Ali also directed us across the medina to the newly-opened Cafe Clock - an instant must-visit for all tourists and expats - run by the indefatigable Mike, an Englishman who had decided liquidate all his property in London to "make a go of it" as a cafe and guesthouse owner in Morocco.
Overall, our experience in the Fes medina was not the chaotic, full-on social and sensory assault we'd been expecting (because one quiet day was the Friday sabbath? because the authorities have "cleaned up"? or have we become acclimatized?) and after 4 days in Fes we packed up the bikes to head west for the next 60km
run to Meknes. (One upset upon reclaiming our bikes from the other hotel where they'd been parked was discovering that our tubes, tire irons and patch kits had been pilfered, a loss that would take alot of subsequent browsing in bike shops to replace.)
We knew more or less what to expect from the ride to Meknes, since we'd ridden the oposite direction on the bus, but with a bit of a tailwind and only Sunday traffic it was an even more enjoyable flat cruise through citrus and olive groves than we remembered, and we arrived in Meknes in time for lunch, quickly locating the Hotel Majestic, our base for the next few days.
Like Fes in the 7th century, Meknes was also a royal capital of Morocco beginning in the 17th century, and has its own complement of palaces, fortress bastions and medina walls, as well the elaborate tomb of Moulay Ismail, the ruthless 18th century ruler who really put Meknes on the map. While the Lonely Planet called Meknes "the Versailles of Morocco" in an uncharacteristically florid turn of phrase (that we've been repeating ironically ever since), we found it somewhat less compelling, an interesting place
Ruins of Volubilis
The highlight of our trip to Meknes to spend a few days but by no means a holy pilgrimage.
Before either Fes or Meknes was a capital city, the Romans established the imperial outpost of Volubilis (named for the morning glory flower) which was a center of wine and olive oil production. We took a half-day to visit the ruins of Volubilis, just outside Meknes, shepherded by an excellent on-site guide, and the obvious fertility of the surrounding countryside made it easy to see why the Romans chose this spot to establish a rich agricultural and merchant city of elaborate, Roman villas and elegant collonaded streets. The ancient floor mosaics, many preserved in-situ, are especially evocative of the richness of this ancient city.
One of the most interesting sites in Meknes itself is the Place el Hedim, a large open plaza of perhaps 30 acres unlike anything in the other cramped and claustrophobic medinas that we've visited. (The Djemma el-Fna square in Marrakech is - justifiably - a much more famous analogue of this place.) Quiet in the morning and humming in the afternoon, ringed with cafes, foodstalls and cheap toy vendors, the Place el Hedim really amps up near sundown, when throngs of ordinary
Evening at Place El Hedim, Meknes
Throngs gather in this huge plaza every night around sunet. Meknesians fill the plaza in wide circles to watch the street musicians and acrobats, to stroll with their children and to see and be seen. The plaza is bordered on one side by the solid medina walls which house a covered market boasting some of the most elaborately architectural displays of olives, spices, fruits, cakes and candies that we've seen yet in Morocco.
After the requisite visits to Meknes' various tombs, monuments, minarets and medrasas - including a surprising wrong turn that led us into the "Royal Golf Club", a nine-hole public course housed entirely within the towering walls of the medieval palace - we quit the Hotel Majestic and lit out for Rabat, two days ride farther west on the Atlantic. After reaching our goal of half the 130km distance to Rabat by early afternoon, we decided to push on another 20 klicks to the next reported accomodations, which instead turned out to be an additional 35km, resulting in our longest day on the road at nearly 100km. We pulled into the Hotel Moghane - a large, well-appointed and mysteriously empty hotel inexplicably located in the middle of nowhere - well after sunset, exhausted and extremely relieved to
Place El Hedim, Meknes
The food stalls really amp up at dinner time. find a top-notch hotel in such an unlikely place.
Our next day's quick ride into the capital city of Rabat was uneventful, though it was clear from the morning traffic that we were entering the largest city we'd yet seen in Morocco. The approach to town, winding along the Bou Regreg River that separates Rabat from its ancient twin city of Sale, is quite picturesque, and the city planners have maximized the appeal of this waterfront with a brand new corniche, revamped piers for the water taxis to Sale, and a big new marina with companion condos that appears to be aimed at the European yachting crowd. We were glad to arrive without much directional confusion, and we prepared to hunker down at (yet another) Hotel Splendid ahead of the rain that was predicted to inundate this section of the Moroccan coast for the next few days.
Check our expanded gallery of travel photos at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/steve_hoge/collections/72157613626339376 And visit our home page at:
http://web.mac.com/steve_hoge
Advertisement
Tot: 0.065s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.028s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Nano - Massari
non-member comment
Welcome
Hi Steve & Hoge, really i was very happy that we meet, that was a very nice moment, that we spanded together. we miss you, and welcom fon an other time. you are a very nices freinds, and all my fes's freinds give you kiss. you have a very interessing web-site.continue we love you Nano