A Moroccan Holiday

Evelyn and I spent eighteen day in November on a short vacation, a mix of visiting old and dear friends, business for Evelyn and cultural pilgrimage to Bilbao in Spain and, to cap it all, Fes in Morocco. Our first stop was London. We spent two days in North London with our friend from Libyan days. Sharron and Chris are wonderful people we like sharing life experiences with. The memorable event of our time with them was attending a performance of Tennessee Williams’ Glass menagerie, an excellent play superbly presented. We visited Hempstead Heath, the famous park which has been a favourite of British writers for centuries. The Kenwood House Art Gallery is located in the park and houses a superb collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century art. Then we moved to Gravesend just south of London to stay for two more days with Evelyn’s childhood friend Anne and her husband Phillip, both academics of great distinction. They are the type of people with whom you leave the personal problems behind and argue about the serious issues facing the world. In between the heated debates we visited Darwin’s home and the garden which gives a good idea of the life of this great scientist who used the luxury of leisure permitted by inherited wealth to work on theories which changed the way we think. We also looked around the home of Charles Dickens which is now a private school and watched the Memorial Day parade from the upper floor window of their home.

Next step was Bilbao in Northern Spain where Evelyn was giving a seminar on Human Lactation. Bilbao was relatively uneventful partly because it rained most of the time on all five days we were there. Old town of Bilbao is much like the medieval towns elsewhere in Europe, narrow streets with four to six storey buildings on both sides – shops at the street level and apartments on upper floors. There were not many customers in the day time and only establishments doing brisk business were lottery ticket stalls. It was a different story in the evening though. Streets were crowded with people although shops did not seem to be overly busy. The church of Saint Santiago was impressive from outside as well as inside with beautiful stained glass windows and intricate woodwork. The structure of Guggenheim museum, designed by Frank Gehry, is shaped like ships in a harbour to celebrate the naval traditions of the town. There were several outdoor sculptures including one by Anish Kapoor, renowned Indo-British sculptor. The modern art is not something I have learnt to appreciate and the exhibits in the museum left me confused. The imported exhibit of Dutch masters from Stadler museum in Frankfurt was more interesting to both of us.

Journey from Bilbao to Fes was unnecessarily long and stressful. First we travelled two hundred miles south west on a high speed train to connect with a sleeper, then north east to Paris retracing a quarter of our journey. We made our way from train station to Orly South Airport, to board a plain to Fes four hours after our arrival. For almost half of it flight the plain flew over the region we had covered on train. We landed in Fes exactly twenty four hours after the train left Bilbao Station. Perhaps our travel agent will have an easy explanation for this inconvenience and wasted time.

Half an hour of taxi ride in a Mercedes Diesel much older and smellier than the one I used to own, took us to a point from which we could walk to the hotel located well inside the Medina – old town. We followed a young man who pushed our luggage in a small cart through narrow lanes to the hotel which is built around two splendid courtyards. It is an architectural gem with comfortable rooms and excellent service. Our room was on the roof. It had attractive Moroccan décor and a large comfortable bed with a temperamental shower and shaky blinds. I woke up on our first morning to see a beautiful sunrise and have a bird’s eye view of Medina – the old town. This is the oldest preserved medina in the world – a UNESCO World Heritage site, going back to ninth century. 93,000 people live and work here in cramped buildings on each side of approximately 12,000 narrow lanes. Donkey and humans transport all goods and vehicles, even bicycles and scooters are rare. Most activity is a variety of crafts and of course manning the shops, female shopkeepers are rare. We spent four hours in the medina and I was reminded of a friend’s comment about CanLit. There were more shopkeepers even though only half of the shops were open than the customers just as there are more writers than readers on Canadian literary scene. It was here in a “Widow carpet makers’ Cooperative” that we were the victims of a vicious sales performance by a Moroccan carpet seller who would have put much admired carpetbaggers of New York to shame. Two lessons from this experience I would share with you. First, do not accept tea from a shopkeeper unless you have time and patience for a long sales spiel and the skill to counter it. Second, your guide, all appearances to the contrary, is working for the stores, not for you although you are paying him good money. During this walk we enjoyed a visit to tannery where they were preparing skins and separating the wool from leather. There were scores of huge vats for colouring the wool but were not in use. Again, there was pressure to buy handbags, jackets, belts etc in all colours and sizes. This time we were successful in resisting the temptation. We visited a spice shop with an enormous variety on display and a herbologist doing an excellent sales job. Evelyn had an interesting discussion with him on what he prescribed for various diseases and acquired a large sampling of his wares which will provide many excellent dinners for us and our guests.

One of Evelyn`s patients had suggested a call to her aunt in Mecnes, 40 minutes by train from Fes. She invited us to visit them and we spent a pleasant few hours there. Abdul, the man of the house, picked us up from the station and after a ceremonial drink of mint tea we headed for medina. It was smaller, but lanes were less narrow and busier than in Fes. The entry to medina is through a huge square with stores on one side, hammam – the public bath – on the other. Most evenings musicians and dancers perform in the plaza. The city of Mecnes is surrounded by a wall built by the founder Moulay Idriss in twelfth century. After a sumptuous lunch of lamb tagine and beef on skewers we headed for the train. On the station we met our first of may be four niqabs (scarf covering the face except a narrow slit for the eyes) we saw during our stay in Morocco. The women in Morocco seem to be far more advanced than in other Arab countries. They are out and about everywhere in jeans and hijab (Scarf covering the hair) is worn by less than half of the women. Two daughters of our hosts have high professional ambitions – one wants to be a physician and the other a teacher.

On the way back the petit taxi not only charged three times the going rate but also dropped us at the wrong point for our hotel. After some panic we found an English speaking young man who guided us to the hotel by a long half an hour track and persuaded us to go later to his uncle’s restaurant for dinner. He picked us up a couple of hours later. The meal was indeed pleasant although we could not do justice to it after the big lunch in Mecnes. After dinner we walked up sixty three ninth century steps to the roof for an unparalleled view of the medina. The young man earned his fifty dirhan, six dollars, tip by his guidance to the hotel and explaining various sites from the roof. We did find the next morning that he could have led us back to the hotel in less than five minutes but for a much smaller tip and not enough time to do the sales job for his uncle.

We had a pleasant day trip by car to nearby towns with a very talkative driver who turned out to be a reasonable guide. We went to Sefrou which is the oldest town in Morocco but has been mostly rebuilt. Drive to one of the two water falls in Morocco was more interesting than the fall itself which can’t be called majestic by any stretch of imagination. A visit to a cave home 143 steps up in Bihlal was interesting more due to the cave owner guide who spoke fair English and told jokes mostly in praise of himself. There are sixty cave homes in the area but his is the only one tourists are allowed to visit. The tips have made him a wealthy man and he is not shy to admit it. We also visited Ifrane, a small town built by French in 1929, often called the Switzerland of Morocco, Azrou cedar forest with monkeys and some other villages of minor interest.

On our way out of the old part of Fes we passed through ‘New Fes” with its broad avenues and the beautiful office buildings and luxury apartment blocks. There is enormous amount of commercial construction with money from oil rich states and new schools and colleges, highways and public housing projects are being financed by the government. Although people we came in contact with are not a reliable source, we felt there was growing optimism among the population. New Fes has broad tree lined avenues with multilane one way streets with heavy car and truck traffic to make up for narrow lanes and loaded donkeys of Medina. Another impressive sight was of confident, often proud, women with or without hijab usually in tight jeans, walking everywhere although rarely driving a vehicle. A few women policemen were on duty, something you do not expect in an Islamic country.

The next day we visited the Jewish area of old town called Mella. There were 65,000 Jews in Fes in 1967. Most of them left for greener pastures after the June war that year and current Jewish population is down to 534, only 200 of them women. The guide was lamenting that the Jewish young men go abroad to find wives and it is no easier for his two daughters to find husbands. The quarter is run down. It may have been burnt down during the protests in Arab – Israel wars. Most of the current residents are Muslims and reconstruction of Jewish sites depends upon help from American, and possibly European, Jews. He showed us the cemetery, Rabbi’s old collapsed house with just one exterior wall still standing, Jewish hammam but not the synagogue. Rest of the morning was a disappointment – Only Muslims are allowed to enter a Moroccan mosque; much to our surprise because we have visited much grander mosques all over Africa and Asia. Much of Fes seems to be open for view only from outside, Royal Palace, its grounds, major parks and historic mausoleums are all closed to visitors. In view of great emphasis on promoting tourism these restrictions are strange.

On our last day we visited the museum which was within a stone’s throw of our hotel yet quite hard to find. The items on display included many interesting antique doors, textiles, armours, pottery and old Qurans with splendid calligraphy. The courtyard of the museum building, a nineteenth century palace converted into museum, is a splendid garden with a variety of birds which were heard but not seen and a myrtle tree which I do not remember ever seeing before. There were several orange trees loaded with juicy fruit which nobody seemed to want. After the museum we had lunch in a genuine Fes restaurant in the Medina which served better food than our hotel at one quarter of the price. We had a long walk in the Medina to find famous mosques. We found two; they did not look any different from outside either from each other or from other mosques in Fes. The walk back to the hotel was a steep uphill and we were quite proud of ourselves to have done it with only a little huffing.

Of all the great Islamic cities we have visited, I found Fes to be the least attractive from a tourist’s perspective. The situation is made worse by poor maps, hardly any directions, hard to find and often dishonest cabs and almost total ignorance of English among general population. Then there is the smell – that of putrid waste in the Medina and diesel fumes from antique cars everywhere. Environmentalists should be complaining about pollution in this holy city rather than wasting their breath in the West.

We flew to Paris in the evening. Our flight got there around ten. We had a long wait for the shuttle and it took an hour and a half to get to the Holiday Inn. Evelyn ordered hot milk in the café and she was served a small cup of sour cold milk. She complained and was served a small hot glass of sour milk. I do not remember ever having been served milk in a restaurant that had gone off. But then French do have their own way of doing things. We had a lot of hassle the next morning to get to Charles De Gaulle airport from Orly airport because the bus got caught in a traffic jam. Fortunately we had anticipated problems and had allowed plenty of time and made the flight to London easily. However, we had to make a mad dash in London through miles of corridor and inevitable security check to reach the gate for the final lag of the journey in the nick of time. Our luck turned at last. The plane had several empty seats and Evelyn slept through the flight stretched over three seats wrapped in two blankets while I slept a little, read a little and did nothing mostly, the only thing I am good at.

We were happy to be home, even happier when we learnt that we had missed the cold spell of -30 degrees by a day.