Morocco Part 2 - Tea in the Sahara

'There are three girls from the mountains, from a place near Marhnia's bled, and they are called Outka, Mimouna and Aïcha...They go to seek their fortune in the M'Zab. Most girls from the mountains go to Alger, Tunis, here to earn money, but these girls want one thing more than everything else. The want to drink tea in the Sahara...'

Before we went to Morocco I read Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, from which the above excerpt derives, on recommendation from Kat. I was told -- I'm not sure by whom, Kat denies that it was her -- that it was about Morocco, and even that it was the best novel ever written about Morocco.

It is a great novel, but it happens to be set in Algeria and Sudan, not Morocco, and the plot is roughly this: a woman goes to North Africa with her husband and his friend, her husband dies of typhoid, and she has a nervous breakdown, wanders into the desert, and become the sex slave of a travelling camel driver. In fact, the above excerpt is from a story told by a prostitute to the husband character, just before she tries to steal his wallet and her brothers try to chase him down and kill him. It wasn't quite the best reading in preparation for a trip to North Africa, but one thing it made us want was Tea in the Sahara.

The closest we were gonna get to the Sahara was Marakech, which is technically in the High Atlas but is pretty desert-like. We had tea, anyway.

We stayed in a riad, a converted old palatial arabic house with an atrium surrounded by loungelike chambers with luxurious couches where one could lounge and smoke hookah if one wanted to. Kat, who is an expert on Islamic architecture, told me that these first-floor rooms are 'summer rooms' and that the women were confined to second-floor rooms, like the one where we stayed, which is important because it is sexist. Against women. Here's our room...



We went exploring our first day (and got lost, of course) and ended up on a long road filled with mechanics' shops that served only to repair Soviet-era Peugeot motorbikes. They were filled with DONKIES hauling various loads of scrap metal...






We then made our way to the souks, which are the colorful, incredibly busy markets like the ones in the Disney movie Alladin ('Sugar dates! Sugar dates and pistachios! A pretty necklace for a prrrretty lady!...') The souks were incredibly colorful.

They had fruits and veggies...





Spices...



Bath salts, salves, and lotions...



Fish (which was curious because Marakesh is nowhere near any body of water)...



Dyes and musks...



Pretty ladies...



Rugs...



Copperware, bronzeware, and lamps...



Little turtles that you put in your garden to eat bugs, and a falcon (bottom cage)...



Iguanas...



And the souks opened up onto a big plaza called the Jemaa al-Fna, which had millions of carts selling fresh-squeezed orange juice and other assorted merchants...





We sat at one of the cafés infested with colonialist tourists just like ourselves called 'Café Paris' or 'Café Glacier' or something like that and had an arabic coke.



Then we saw the old mosque...



And the tombs of the Saadians, a dynasty of imams who ruled, um, 8 centuries ago? (somebody google that for me...). Here are the tombs themselves...



And the big mausoleum...





I struck a distinctly sufi-like pose under the mihrab...



Later that night we had dinner on a rooftop café overlooking the Jemaa al-fna...



We ate tajine, a delicious stew of brisket simmering with dried figs (are dried figs prunes? anyone?) and couscous with veggies...



While Kat and I were having our tea for dessert and playing chess, some huge arab guy with a bullneck came in and started a loud argument with our waiter in Arabic that may or may not have been about the girl he had with him. What ended up happening was basically a huge brawl where the huge guy beat the living crap out of our waiter and left hime bleeding and crumpled in a doorway. We tried to help as much as possible, then got the hell out of there.

Down below in the Jemaa al-fna, the plaza was alive with musicians and storytellers, and these guys, who sit around on mats drinking tea and smoking hash and thrusting these happy fellows at passers-by...



Yeah, that's right. Snake charmers.



Because of the vicious fight I had just witnessed, I was kind of rattled (get it?). No, seriously. So much so that I'm actually kind of terrified in this picture. Also, one of the snakes they had was a cobra. And I'm pretty sure they didn't have insurance...



That's all for Tea in the Sahara.

Stay tuned for Fez, city of silly hats, and the hippy backpacker junction of Chefchaouen, which may have been my favorite part of the trip.

Cheers,
Robbie