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The Snake Charmer
A 'typical' Marrakech snake charmer, shortly before his mate wrapped a serpent around my neck, plonked a straw hat on my head, and then demanded a heap of cash for the pleasure
Tom Griffith
In the Djemaa El Fna So. The clock is now ticking. Thanks to the Mauritanian Consulate, we now have 22 days to get from Marrakech to Senegal. Which means the next three weeks is going to be a mad headlong rush through perhaps the driest, hottest, least-serviced-by-public-transport part of Africa there is. We can't wait.
We left Fes, and returned to Casablanca on one of Morocco's relatively speedy and comfortable trains (2nd class is more than sufficient, but nobody gets a reserved seat, so it's every person for him or herself). Suze hadn't seen Casa before, so we did a quick loop of the medina and returned to the still-massive Hassan II mosque. Our real reason for being in Casa, though, was to equip ourselves with visas for our next destination - sandy, arid and thinly populated Mauritania. Obtaining the necessary documents is pretty straightforward - two passport photos, photocopy of passport, plus 200 Moroccan dirham (about 20 euro). You have to get your application in by about 9am, and then come back to join the scrum of Moroccan businessmen waiting for their visas at 2.30pm. A surly cop kept ordering people about, shouting and enjoying his power trip, and he made sure he
Marra mural
A mural in Marrakech - perhaps making a political statement about Moroccan gender politics? grabbed Suze roughly around the arm when she went in to collect our passports. We got the visas no problem, except for the fact thaat they kicked in immediately, and are valid for only 25 days. Apparently extensions are a hassle to get, so to all intents and purposes we have to get our skates on and make like the Marrakech Express across the Sahara, so we can arrive at the Senegalese border by June 6th. All I can ask is - wish us luck...
The train trip from Casa to here saw a real change in the landscape. The lush and fertile Mediterranean north of Morocco finally gave way to the arid, rocky south, and all of a sudden it felt more African than before. The heat ratcheted up a notch, too, from a cool and breezy 25 on the coast, to a more intolerably Saharan 35.
Marrakech is known as the Red City, as pretty much every piece of architecture here is built in a terracotta tone of pink, red, orange or brown. The city has long been billed as the most 'Morrocan' of Morocco, and, for that reason, has always been popular with travellers. Thirty
Yummy!
A delicious bowl of snails. You can even see their little feelers, bless 'em years ago, they were of the long-haired, dope-smoking variety, but now it is pretty much all respectable Europeans in their 50s, on package tours and carrying enough Euros to buy every last tacky ceramic bowl and jar of saffron on sale in the souks. The city has a real buzz to it, but it feels a little like the buzz is manufactured: the Moroccan experience as demanded by tourists.
The heart of the city is a massive square in the medina called the Djemaa El Fna, which is full of action at all times of the day, but especially at night. Then, the centre of the plaza becomes host to a heap of hastily-set up food stalls, where smoke pours off the shish kebabs cooking on the BBQs, and touts rush at you with menus decorated with pictures of Jamie Oliver, trying to entice you into their establishment. All around, acrobats, snake-charmers, dancers, musicians, and guys with monkeys on leashes, do their best to separate the befuddled tourists from their money. I made the mistake of photographing one of the snake-charmers, and ended up with a snake wrapped around my neck, while one of the guys grabbed my camera
Spicy tea man
A tea vendor in the Djemaa El Fna, selling glasses of interesting-tasting spiced tea and started taking snaps. There's not much you can do when you're struggling to hold tightly onto the throat of the snake that is coiled around you. Then they guy asked for a small fee - 150 dirham, or almost 25 bucks. A heated argument ensued, and we settled for 20, but I had learnt my lesson, and stayed well away whenever a man toting a a serpent came close to me.
Eating in the Djemaa night markets is billed in the Lonely Planet as 'one of the great African dining experiences', but I would beg to differ with that esteemed publication. I was feeling a little adventurous, so started with an entree of boiled snails - long, slippery, and with their feelers still disconcertingly visible. Then I tried
tanzhiyya, a local speciality, which turned out to be a mixture of skin, gristle and offal floating in oil. Yesterday I paid the price for not being gastronomically cautious, and had no appetite and some weird lethargic illness which, happily, seems to have gone today.
The souks of Marrakech are somehow livelier and more impressive than those of Fes, with more on sale than you could imagine. Just like
A lotta dried fruit
One of the many fruit 'n' nut stalls lining the Djemaa El Fna, the huge square in the medina of Marrakech the markets up north, the shopkeepers use all and any tricks they can to get your custom. A favourite one here is to stick a cage full of chameleons outside the front of the shop, so curious foreigners pop over to watch them change colour. Then, before you know it, you are inside the store, looking at perfumes. Ingenious.
We could probably stay longer in Marra, and soak up the ambience (artificial or not, it's still quite cool), but the aforementioned visa situation forces us onward, ever onward. The plan is to pop down to the nearby Atlas Mountains (you can see the snowy peak of Jebel Toubkal, North Africa's highest peak, from here), and hopefully do a quick trek. We'll let you know how it goes...
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Raymundo
non-member comment
This is a sympathy comment since no one has contributed anything for the past couple of days. p.s. need to include something more dangerous/adventurous in your next blogs in order to captivate the reading audience...eating half cooked snails just won't cut it...refer to the harry potter series for some ideas.....ahahha just kidding tommo ;)