And my head
is spinning! We’ll hear more about why later, but let’s run back a few days,
where we find our intrepid travelers once more walking down the street dragging
their wheelie luggage, with backpacks and laptops slung across their shoulders.
This time, though, the street is smooth, no cobblestones! Oh, and it’s dark…
It’s about
an hour before sunrise, and we are heading to the bus station in Essaouira, a
five-minute walk (10, with luggage). The bus leaves for Marrakech at 6:45, and
we have reserved what we expect to be the primo seats on the bus, right behind
the driver with a fine view out that giant windshield. Right on time (which is
to say, no more than 10 minutes late), the bus pulls out and we are soon
climbing out of the coastal plain into the surrounding forest.
And finding
our primo seat is not so great after all. The solid wall between us and the
driver means we have no place to put our feet (the people in the seat behind us
can stick their feet under our seat); the windshield – and all the windows in
the bus, for that matter –is fogged up, and the defroster is blasting cold air
on us. Then, the driver turns on the radio. Top Forty, in Arabic! Although I
don’t understand a word, the format, the tones of voice, musical interludes –
all very familiar. So we move through the foggy dawn, cramped, cold, and
blasted by carefully scripted careless banter between the co-hosts of the
morning show, punctuated with pointless laughter (just like American AM radio).
After about
an hour we arrive at the scheduled rest stop, get our coffee and toilet visit,
and are soon back on the bus, only in different seats. By now the fog has
lifted, the driver has turned on the heat, our feet are happily extended, and
we are not so close to the blasting radio. Ah!
We arrive in
Marrakesh with no further incidents, and make our way to the train station
(conveniently located adjacent to the Supratours bus station), where we are
soon settled in our train compartment, and on our way north to Casablanca.
 |
| Seats for eight in Second Class |
 |
| A plush First Class ride for six |
The
countryside is rather arid, and not particularly interesting, so I check out
the train. This is NOT the “Marrakech Express;” it is a fully modern train. We
are riding First Class, which differs from Second Class only in the number of
seats in each compartment: Second Class
has eight, two rows of four facing each other. We have only six, so each person
gets a couple of extra inches of seat space. (And, it should be pointed out,
First is less popular than Second Class; there were never more than four people
in our compartment the whole day, whereas most Second compartments are full.)
The bathrooms, at the ends of each car, are decidedly Third Class all around.
Some don’t have water in the sink; some don’t have water to flush. Probably the
less said about it the better. It is a reminder, however, that in the US we
have very high standards for plumbing.
 |
| Flat and arid... |
After Casablanca
the train follows the coast to Rabat, then turns inland towards Meknes and Fez.
Now we pass green fields, orchards, rolling hills. Meknes, an hour from Fez,
looked particularly interesting in the fading daylight, with its steep hills
and modern buildings.
 |
| Cactus. And a house. |
 |
| Green fields and a village |
During the latter half of our train journey a man sat next to me and engaged us in conversation in his excellent English, explaining that he ran a service in Fez and would be taking people to the desert the next day. I was a bit interested, since we were considering a similar trip. During the conversation Paula made it clear we would be staying in a house in Fez, and were being met at the train station. After a bit, the man pulled out his cell phone and left the compartment to make a call. And never returned.
Paula nodded
to me, and pointed out he was one of the guys we’d read about in a guide book:
personable, pleasant, good English, happy to offer his services, just happens
to know an excellent guest house / guide service / fine restaurant. No! I said,
not him! Yes, she said. Him. Oh…
The next
fellow was younger, and spoke effusively about his upcoming internship with
Goldman-Sacks in San Francisco. He, too, left for a phone call. And never
returned.
Soon enough
another new arrival took the seat next to me, and explained he was a
quality-control expert for a leather tannery. Ah, tanneries in Morocco are a
real hot-spot, and there seems to be many tales of tourist scams surrounding
them. Before long, he too left. Paula looked at me and said, Well, that makes
three.
 |
| Fez train Station, By Davide Cesare Veniani Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1598516 |
By the time
we arrived in Fes it was after sunset and fully dark; appropriate, since we’d
started the journey before dawn. There had been no further new arrivals in our
compartment; we left the train and hurried along the platform with about a
zillion other people. We exited the station, looking for the driver, Youssef,
we had engaged to take us to the riad*
(traditional Moroccan house) where we would be staying. We asked the first
fellow who came up to us, Are you Youssef? To which he replied, Yes!
(naturally). His buddy was quick to add, We are all Youssef! We veered off to
the right to avoid this pointlessness, thus missing the real Youssef. After a
few minutes of wandering around, and a phone call, we were settled in “our”
taxi (with “our” Youssef!) and on the way to the medina, where we were met by
the house manager (His name was NOT Youssef!). He led us down the main street,
with its confusion and bustle, and to the front door of our new home.
*Strictly
speaking, a dar is a traditional
house; a riad is a dar with a fruit tree in the central courtyard.
With no fruit tree, our house is technically a dar. Just to set the record straight...
The House
Before I get
started on our house in the medina, the original part of this ancient city, I
want to quote someone who has been here much longer than we have, someone who
says it much better than I can. This is from the introduction to a cook book of
food served at the Clock Café, a meeting place and multi-cultural center here
in Fez (of which we shall be hearing more).
From Clock Book: recipes from a modern Moroccan
kitchen by Tara Stevens:
“Arriving in the old medina of Fez for the
first time is much like stepping back in time. By about 1000 years. Once you
cross the threshold of the Bab Boujloud a whole new universe unfolds. Live
chickens cluck from behind the doors of their wire cages before a customer
looking for the contents of a tangine seals their fate. Next door a man skins
rabbits, and offers hedgehogs as a key ingredient for a fabled soup to cure
head colds. Farmers down from the middle Atlas sell plump white mulberries once
a week, and arbuces – a soft red
berry fruit the color of garnets – the next; baskets of spiky wild artichokes
and rose petals from the Dades Valley jostle up against barrows filled with
eggs and heaps of hand-rolled couscous. Modern supermarkets suddenly seem very
far away. And all this takes place to a daily theater of folk dressed in
djellabas and Gnawa musicians spinning their heads and rattling tin krakab (a forerunner to the Spanish
Castanet), all woven between the ancient and mysterious sounding calls to
prayer of the muezzin. Here is a place where people still believe in magic and
that, inshallah, whatever happens will happen because that is the way it is
meant to be. So when people tell you that in Morocco you don’t find a house, it
finds you, it rings completely true.”
And that’s
pretty much what happened: a house found us. Oh, Paula put in the work, of
course (you always have to do the work!), but what are the chances that a riad
in the Fez medina would be available for the same two months we would be here?
Whatever, here we are…
The place
where we are staying is a 400-year old traditional Moroccan house, built around
a courtyard open to the sky (although these days riads have some kind of cover to keep the rain out; ours can be
rolled back to let the sun and air in). The main room is around 16 feet on a
side (5x5 meters), with other rooms opening off it. The main side room can be
closed off with massive wooden doors, 3.3 meters (nearly 11 feet) high
(although I’d be afraid to close them; the hinges are likewise massive, but 400
years old). There are two upstairs bedrooms, both with windows onto the main room
on the ground floor, all of it topped by a comfortable terrace that occupies
the roof.
 |
| Panoramic view from the rooftop terrace |
 |
| The main room with fountain |
 |
| The modern kitchen. Not many right angles in this house... |
We are not
quite on the main street, but rather on a narrow lane (and here we’re talking
narrow for foot traffic; the only wheeled vehicles we see in the medina are
hand carts, and the occasional motor scooter being pushed by a teenager). There
is a main shopping street about a two-minute walk away, and it is here we find
the bustle and press of the ancient city. Here the narrow street is lined with
an incredible variety of tiny shops, wares spilling into the passage way: jewelry,
housewares (both practical and decorative), robes, slippers, leather bags,
brassware, modern luggage. Further up the street things get even more compressed,
with the bird market selling chickens and turkeys, both live and recently
deceased (with the occasional goat’s head), and fresh produce, oranges and
fresh juice, meats of all kinds* both fried and served on bread or ready to be
sliced off the carcass.
*OK, but never pork in this Muslim
country
One thing we
don’t see too many of are tourists. Yes, hard to believe but as we meander
through the medina, 10 or 15 minutes can go by, in the throng and press of
people, without seeing anybody who doesn’t appear to live here, either selling,
shopping for daily needs, or hurrying about their business. Sooner or later
someone with a high-priced camera will appear, looking stunned and bemused, but
for the most part these shops, this street, is for the people who live here.
Visitors such as ourselves are not rare, just vastly outnumbered by the
residents.
OK, we're just getting stated here, I'm still figuring out how to take a photo in the medina that will be anywhere near effective! We'll have more photos of the house and the city later, but we'll end with this self portrait taken at the Clock Cafe.
up next: probably something about Fez...
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