Moroccan trip
So I spent the last week of October in Morocco - a few days in Marrakech but the bulk of the week in the desert near the Algerian border. It was seriously, seriously fabulous.
Marrakech itself was one of the most fascinating places I have ever been, utterly foreign and exotic, and you really did get a strong sense of it as a genuine crossroads, full of the most exotically beautiful people, the streets teaming with cars, motorbikes, and donkey carts, and everything bathed in colour and sunlight. That being said, it was also quite a frenetic place. Our hotel was right off the main square of Djemm el Fna, full of snake charmers, bellydancers (not female, Marrakech is too conservative for that! Men dressed in long, modest women's clothing and veils do the performances in lieu of real women), food stalls (roast sheep's head soup, anyone?) and musicians. It was wonderful to sit on the roof terrace in the evening cool, listen to the music and the buzz, smell the roasting meat, and watch the lights and throngs of humanity. But the drumming lasted long into the night and the days were hot and crowded and really the two days we had in Marrakech were more or less enough (ok, one more might not have gone amiss! I would like more chance to explore the souk properly)
We had a 12 hour journey through the Atlas mountains to M'Hamid, near the end of the paved road heading towards Algeria. It was a long drive but there was always something amazing to look at. The mountain scenery was as breathtaking as one could hope, and we made many short stops for mint tea and snacks.
We arrived at Dar Sidi Bounou, our desert home for the week, after dark. But even so we could see it was a magical place. Run by a fascinating couple, a Canadian/British artist and her Berber husband, they have enlarged his family home and built a small sort of compound round it of traditional mud n'wala huts and tents, including a large tent for workshops, all set in the most beautiful palm garden (all softly lit up in the dark with tea lights and lanterns)
That's my tent, the black roof in the middle lefthand side of the photo, as seen from the roof terrace of the main house. When I woke up and stumbled out of the tent in the morning, this was the view that greeted me:
So the impression of paradise more than held up in the daylight, and by the end of the first day I felt like coming back to live.
We had a full programme of drumming and dance workshops, excursions, and evening performances from local bands. And Dar Sidi Bounou was bloody marvellous. A fantastic, Bohemian kind of place where the food was cooked by local village women, then served by Berber boys so beautiful you could cry, where mad musicians appeared in the middle of the night seemingly at random, where when I said to the owner "I don't want to leave" she looked at me in all seriousness and said "So why go then?". It was the most beautiful, laidback, Bohemian, creative kind of place I have ever been, and I loved it. Ever since I got back I have been plotting how to go back and stay for a month or two.
The organiser of this trip was a Berber artist and musician who now lives in the Scottish Borders, and I can honestly say he did the best job planning this I have ever seen, and his attention to detail was second to none. He arranged everything from the itinerary to the food, and from what I could see kept two points uppermost in his mind at all times: keeping his customers happy, and giving them an authentic experience. So thanks to him, I got a chance to see and do things I never would have done otherwise. The excursions included not just the obligatory camel trek (given a twist by setting out before dawn so we could watch the sunrise and have a breakfast picnic in the dunes) and walk to the local casbah (a UNESCO heritage site) but also a visit to a proper weekly local market where we were, as far as I could see, the only white people, and one could buy everything from plastic buckets to donkeys. He had helped plan the menus at Dar Sidi Bounou so we got a wide selection of Moroccan and Berber specialties that one would never get in a "proper" hotel or restaurant, and basically anything we asked for, he broke his back to arrange for us.
I could write pages about the trip, so will try and condense some of the highlights, basically at random. When we walked round the nearby casbah, we got into the bit where people still live and were joined by a young girl and her friend, who came along with us, chatting to the guides, playing catch and turning cartwheels in the sand to amuse us, holding hands with various members of the group - it was what I started calling a "National Geographic moment", one felt a bit like Bob Geldof. And as we left the village, a wizened old woman came out of her tiny mud hut and begged us - there were about a dozen all told - to come in for tea and bread. We politely declined but I was amazed, having heard so many stories of cultures where people are so generous they will give you whatever they have, even if they live in abject poverty. This was the first time I have ever seen proof. We stopped for a breakfast picnic, and a shepherd wandered up and chatted to our guides. Later our guide told us he is a very powerful local holy man. I'd asked about getting someone in to do henna, so one afternoon a young local girl turned up with her sister and mother as chaperones and we took it in turns to get hands and feet decorated. We were very lucky to have a Moroccan lady join us as a guest, so she acted as translator and allowed us to chat to these girls as we relaxed and let the henna dry. She was also a great help to me on the last day when I visited the kitchen. Thanks to her translation, I was able to sit for a couple of hours chatting to the ladies who did the cooking, and they were really amazing. One of them could tell I am American just by looking at me, and we chatted about things like poverty in our two countries and how it is dealt with, our hopes for Obama, the role of Moroccan women, etc. They invited me to come back and work in the kitchen with them, a chance to supplement my meagre Arabic and learn traditional Moroccan cooking. And the local market was pretty amazing - stalls and stalls of spices and fruit and veg, an entire courtyard that served as the date market where no one sold anything but dates and there were mountains of the fruit piled up in huge hillocks. Best of all was on our way out when we came across a nomad who had just set up a tiny stall selling things he had come across in the desert. He had everything from meteorites to antique tent pegs, coins, beads, medicine boxes, etc. All of it beautiful, some of if museum quality. I picked up a couple of pieces for ridiculously cheap, one item an antique desert contract for a land purchase, Arabic script stained onto a short length of olive wood, and such a special thing that I felt a little guilty buying it. Another thing I will always remember was being quite earnestly courted by a ridiculously handsome young Berber, who is planning to open his own guest house and wanted me to come to Morocco and run it with him. He was very sweet, but I had to explain that one man in Scotland is more than enough for me! And last of all, one final "national Geographic moment" I will carry with me was on the day we drove back across the mountains. I had developed the dreaded tummy bug which had hit most people at some point, and our guide stopped at a cafe in the mountains for tea. He had a word with the owner, and quickly one of his staff was dispatched into the hills and soon returned with a bunch of mountain herbs which were brewed up into a tea especially for me as it's meant to settle tummies. And I'm not saying it worked or didn't, but I loved the idea of someone just gathering in the herbs on demand and I was well enough to manage a little bit of bland food at dinner so you never know.
(by the way, that's me and the organiser on the camel trip, not my prospective husband!)
And speaking of food, we all know I am a teensy bit obsessed so let me say a few words devoted entirely to that subject. I'm a great fan of Anthony Bourdain, and loved his book A Cook's Tour, where he goes round the world in search of the perfect food. Until he gets out into the desert with the Tuareg, he isn't overly impressed with Morocco. He has been told that you don't get great Moroccan food in restaurants, only in people's homes. And I can say the food in Marrakech was, whilst pleasant enough, nothing spectacular (aside from one tremendous chili sauce we had the first night). But Dar Sidi Bounou was something else again. The food was fantastic, and it was obvious that this was proper home cooking style food (in fact Dar Sidi Bounou advertises itself as offering "Beldi", or country style, cooking). We tried various tagines, salads, brochette, couscous, and one amazing festival dish usually served for the birth of a baby that involved an aromatic mince and lentil sauce served over shredded pastry, which I have been dreaming about ever since. The vegetarians were catered for beautifully (apparently in Marrakech the veggie food is pretty dire, consisting almost entirely of overcooked and unseasoned root veg slopped over couscous), the pomegranates we were often given for afters arrived at the table already prepared, as a plate of rubies with a spoon! And if you sat for more than about 15 minutes, one of the boys would appear with mint tea, biscuits, or sometimes freshly baked bread. So again I say, I was in heaven. The restaurant itself was also wonderful, an open air terrace lined with traditional banquettes and low tables with a view across the compound towards the palmerie and cats sleeping on the walls. And it doubled as a bit of a chill out zone, as you can see.
So now, if you have bothered to read all that, comes temptation - the guy who organised this trip so well fancies doing another Moroccan trip in February to visit some big festivals that run that month. He's challenged me to find 8 people who would be up for it. Anyone here fancy it? I don't know costs or dates yet as this is all prospective but am seeing him Monday so can pass on questions if folk have them. I can absolutely vouch for him as an organiser and feel 100% confident that whatever he comes up with will be fantastic. Would be great to get a small group of sympathetic folk to travel with so please do let me know if you think you might be interested in principle (to give some kind of ballpark, this last trip cost £475 for the week, including all room and board in the desert, B&B in Marrakech, 4.5 hours of workshops a day in the desert, and all transfers to and from airport and desert. Extra expenses were flights which should be available for £2-300, excursions which ranged from about a fiver to about £20 and of which there were three available, lunch and dinners in Marrakech and of course any spending money)
Marrakech itself was one of the most fascinating places I have ever been, utterly foreign and exotic, and you really did get a strong sense of it as a genuine crossroads, full of the most exotically beautiful people, the streets teaming with cars, motorbikes, and donkey carts, and everything bathed in colour and sunlight. That being said, it was also quite a frenetic place. Our hotel was right off the main square of Djemm el Fna, full of snake charmers, bellydancers (not female, Marrakech is too conservative for that! Men dressed in long, modest women's clothing and veils do the performances in lieu of real women), food stalls (roast sheep's head soup, anyone?) and musicians. It was wonderful to sit on the roof terrace in the evening cool, listen to the music and the buzz, smell the roasting meat, and watch the lights and throngs of humanity. But the drumming lasted long into the night and the days were hot and crowded and really the two days we had in Marrakech were more or less enough (ok, one more might not have gone amiss! I would like more chance to explore the souk properly)
We had a 12 hour journey through the Atlas mountains to M'Hamid, near the end of the paved road heading towards Algeria. It was a long drive but there was always something amazing to look at. The mountain scenery was as breathtaking as one could hope, and we made many short stops for mint tea and snacks.
We arrived at Dar Sidi Bounou, our desert home for the week, after dark. But even so we could see it was a magical place. Run by a fascinating couple, a Canadian/British artist and her Berber husband, they have enlarged his family home and built a small sort of compound round it of traditional mud n'wala huts and tents, including a large tent for workshops, all set in the most beautiful palm garden (all softly lit up in the dark with tea lights and lanterns)
That's my tent, the black roof in the middle lefthand side of the photo, as seen from the roof terrace of the main house. When I woke up and stumbled out of the tent in the morning, this was the view that greeted me:
So the impression of paradise more than held up in the daylight, and by the end of the first day I felt like coming back to live.
We had a full programme of drumming and dance workshops, excursions, and evening performances from local bands. And Dar Sidi Bounou was bloody marvellous. A fantastic, Bohemian kind of place where the food was cooked by local village women, then served by Berber boys so beautiful you could cry, where mad musicians appeared in the middle of the night seemingly at random, where when I said to the owner "I don't want to leave" she looked at me in all seriousness and said "So why go then?". It was the most beautiful, laidback, Bohemian, creative kind of place I have ever been, and I loved it. Ever since I got back I have been plotting how to go back and stay for a month or two.
The organiser of this trip was a Berber artist and musician who now lives in the Scottish Borders, and I can honestly say he did the best job planning this I have ever seen, and his attention to detail was second to none. He arranged everything from the itinerary to the food, and from what I could see kept two points uppermost in his mind at all times: keeping his customers happy, and giving them an authentic experience. So thanks to him, I got a chance to see and do things I never would have done otherwise. The excursions included not just the obligatory camel trek (given a twist by setting out before dawn so we could watch the sunrise and have a breakfast picnic in the dunes) and walk to the local casbah (a UNESCO heritage site) but also a visit to a proper weekly local market where we were, as far as I could see, the only white people, and one could buy everything from plastic buckets to donkeys. He had helped plan the menus at Dar Sidi Bounou so we got a wide selection of Moroccan and Berber specialties that one would never get in a "proper" hotel or restaurant, and basically anything we asked for, he broke his back to arrange for us.
I could write pages about the trip, so will try and condense some of the highlights, basically at random. When we walked round the nearby casbah, we got into the bit where people still live and were joined by a young girl and her friend, who came along with us, chatting to the guides, playing catch and turning cartwheels in the sand to amuse us, holding hands with various members of the group - it was what I started calling a "National Geographic moment", one felt a bit like Bob Geldof. And as we left the village, a wizened old woman came out of her tiny mud hut and begged us - there were about a dozen all told - to come in for tea and bread. We politely declined but I was amazed, having heard so many stories of cultures where people are so generous they will give you whatever they have, even if they live in abject poverty. This was the first time I have ever seen proof. We stopped for a breakfast picnic, and a shepherd wandered up and chatted to our guides. Later our guide told us he is a very powerful local holy man. I'd asked about getting someone in to do henna, so one afternoon a young local girl turned up with her sister and mother as chaperones and we took it in turns to get hands and feet decorated. We were very lucky to have a Moroccan lady join us as a guest, so she acted as translator and allowed us to chat to these girls as we relaxed and let the henna dry. She was also a great help to me on the last day when I visited the kitchen. Thanks to her translation, I was able to sit for a couple of hours chatting to the ladies who did the cooking, and they were really amazing. One of them could tell I am American just by looking at me, and we chatted about things like poverty in our two countries and how it is dealt with, our hopes for Obama, the role of Moroccan women, etc. They invited me to come back and work in the kitchen with them, a chance to supplement my meagre Arabic and learn traditional Moroccan cooking. And the local market was pretty amazing - stalls and stalls of spices and fruit and veg, an entire courtyard that served as the date market where no one sold anything but dates and there were mountains of the fruit piled up in huge hillocks. Best of all was on our way out when we came across a nomad who had just set up a tiny stall selling things he had come across in the desert. He had everything from meteorites to antique tent pegs, coins, beads, medicine boxes, etc. All of it beautiful, some of if museum quality. I picked up a couple of pieces for ridiculously cheap, one item an antique desert contract for a land purchase, Arabic script stained onto a short length of olive wood, and such a special thing that I felt a little guilty buying it. Another thing I will always remember was being quite earnestly courted by a ridiculously handsome young Berber, who is planning to open his own guest house and wanted me to come to Morocco and run it with him. He was very sweet, but I had to explain that one man in Scotland is more than enough for me! And last of all, one final "national Geographic moment" I will carry with me was on the day we drove back across the mountains. I had developed the dreaded tummy bug which had hit most people at some point, and our guide stopped at a cafe in the mountains for tea. He had a word with the owner, and quickly one of his staff was dispatched into the hills and soon returned with a bunch of mountain herbs which were brewed up into a tea especially for me as it's meant to settle tummies. And I'm not saying it worked or didn't, but I loved the idea of someone just gathering in the herbs on demand and I was well enough to manage a little bit of bland food at dinner so you never know.
(by the way, that's me and the organiser on the camel trip, not my prospective husband!)
And speaking of food, we all know I am a teensy bit obsessed so let me say a few words devoted entirely to that subject. I'm a great fan of Anthony Bourdain, and loved his book A Cook's Tour, where he goes round the world in search of the perfect food. Until he gets out into the desert with the Tuareg, he isn't overly impressed with Morocco. He has been told that you don't get great Moroccan food in restaurants, only in people's homes. And I can say the food in Marrakech was, whilst pleasant enough, nothing spectacular (aside from one tremendous chili sauce we had the first night). But Dar Sidi Bounou was something else again. The food was fantastic, and it was obvious that this was proper home cooking style food (in fact Dar Sidi Bounou advertises itself as offering "Beldi", or country style, cooking). We tried various tagines, salads, brochette, couscous, and one amazing festival dish usually served for the birth of a baby that involved an aromatic mince and lentil sauce served over shredded pastry, which I have been dreaming about ever since. The vegetarians were catered for beautifully (apparently in Marrakech the veggie food is pretty dire, consisting almost entirely of overcooked and unseasoned root veg slopped over couscous), the pomegranates we were often given for afters arrived at the table already prepared, as a plate of rubies with a spoon! And if you sat for more than about 15 minutes, one of the boys would appear with mint tea, biscuits, or sometimes freshly baked bread. So again I say, I was in heaven. The restaurant itself was also wonderful, an open air terrace lined with traditional banquettes and low tables with a view across the compound towards the palmerie and cats sleeping on the walls. And it doubled as a bit of a chill out zone, as you can see.
So now, if you have bothered to read all that, comes temptation - the guy who organised this trip so well fancies doing another Moroccan trip in February to visit some big festivals that run that month. He's challenged me to find 8 people who would be up for it. Anyone here fancy it? I don't know costs or dates yet as this is all prospective but am seeing him Monday so can pass on questions if folk have them. I can absolutely vouch for him as an organiser and feel 100% confident that whatever he comes up with will be fantastic. Would be great to get a small group of sympathetic folk to travel with so please do let me know if you think you might be interested in principle (to give some kind of ballpark, this last trip cost £475 for the week, including all room and board in the desert, B&B in Marrakech, 4.5 hours of workshops a day in the desert, and all transfers to and from airport and desert. Extra expenses were flights which should be available for £2-300, excursions which ranged from about a fiver to about £20 and of which there were three available, lunch and dinners in Marrakech and of course any spending money)