My Moroccan Diary – Day13 to Day 15
The morning of Day 13 dawned and I was up with the lark and out to the boulangerie in the semi-darkness at 7.30am with the Medina coming to life, I bought three petit pain au chocolat, one baguette and three round breads for 6.5 dirhams about 60 cents and one litre of milk for 7 dirhams about 70 cents. All basic foodstuffs are cheap. All bought at small dirty but friendly shops, not a supermarket within 100 miles or more likely 200Kms. The only one we know of is in Marrakesh. It is really like going back to my childhood in not too salubrious Longsight in Manchester, where corner shops littered the rows of terraced houses and you were always being asked to run errands by your mam. Our diet then was not the best, very staple but everything bought at a little shop. So living in Essaouira is like going back at least 50 years if not more and the kings of the castle who make everything work are the carossiers. The men with carts of very different scales of quality, from little carts with buckled bike wheels and cardboard floor and sides, through car tyres and wooden sides and bottom, to motor bikes pulling high steel sided carts. Nothing in this town moves without a carossier moving it and all for 20-30 dirhams a trip. Motor vehicles except for the two main boulevards are banned and then only official council and police vehicles are allowed. The odd large delivery van bringing in stuff too large for the carts is allowed in but only with permission. Plenty try but the main roads are well policed.
Every morning the rubbish build up from the previous day including all household waste which is just tipped into the warren of narrow streets is collected by an army of council men and loaded into a chassis cab van with a 6yd skip clamped on the back. The men have no tools only a brush and when the waste is gathered in heaps, they shovel the detrita up with pieces of cardboard they scavenge from the rubbish. Wherever you look small power tools are almost non-existent, holes are dug by hand, demolition is all done by hand, scaffolding for what it’s worth has no handrails or toe-boards and the scaffold boards, creak under a man’s weight and must have been first used 50 years ago. The council at the moment are re-rendering the outside wall of the Medina which was built in the late 18th century, it must be at least four miles long and everything is done by hand, there are no scabbling tools, just small hammers hacking away, all day, every day, followed by bricklayers laying a smooth outer skin of thin bricks to give the wall a straight outer face as the original wall after the old render is knocked off is totally uneven, a determined person could climb up it. The renderers then come along and finish the wall to a smooth profile. Everything including the lifting, mixing and rubbish removal is done by hand. All carried out under the auspices of Unesco, who in 2001 put the Medina onto its World Heritage Site list.
Later that day we had a marvellous lamb tagine washed down with wine from the local blob shop and then to bed early at 9.15pm, followed by a lazy 12 hour sleep and made ready for our last full day with the hammers of the masons on the far side of our garden wall thudding in pour ears.The Medina wall forms the back wall of our garden. It is time to think of breakfast, bread and a cup of coffee will suit.
Good news coming in from Portugal is that the bin men are on strike due to unfair austerity measures by the government, so the public, God bless their little cotton socks, are dumping their household rubbish at the doors of the nearest bank. We should do it in every country while these bastards in suits and ties get away with their excesses. It is a basic question that every decent human being should be asking, why should we all suffer for the blatant madness of the few dickheads who are not suffering.
Sadly we are preparing to leave this place tomorrow, gathering up the last of our dirhams, putting sweaty used clothes into the bowels of our suitcases, thinking of where to have our farewell meal tonight. We have just bartered down our local friendly taxi driver who will take four of us to Agadir tomorrow in his brand new 4×4 for 700 dirhams. We will leave early to see the country on the long trip back. Incidentally if ever you find yourself in Essaouira and in need of a taxi ask for Fassi and you will not go wrong, he is a man from the Sahara and will only do right by you. His phone number is 06 64 96 38 39 and his e-mail address is fassitaxi@gmail.com. A good honest man.
In the meantime after lunch of lamb attacked by the usual 5lb axe, it was back to the riad whilst the ladies and kids went shopping, me to read, think and write, over a well-earned digestif, about my recent experiences.
Essaouira is not for the fainthearted, it is a dirty, filthy city, most houses having no water or wcs, public wcs abound, looked after and kept very clean by attendants. There are little hatches in walls where you can fill up your water canisters for free. Smells surround your senses, urine, shite, sweat, spices, herbs and perfumes, it is an olfactory explosion, but saying all that, it has colour, excitement, hard labour and intenseness. This morning I went to the fowl souk, a five minute walk through thousands of people and I bought a dozen eggs, saw three chickens killed in front of me and three hefty cockerels with beaks like eagles bartered between two men, the cockerels licking their lips at the idea of this different harem that their new owner was taking them to. Even at that time, 8.00am, the streets were alive with people. They only buy for the meal in front of them, at this time it was mainly bread and eggs, some were more forward thinking and buying for lunch.
To do any good and not be ripped off by 50% of the shopkeepers, you need a modicum of French. A form of Arabic is widely spoken, with French the second language, Spanish is the next most common but mainly in the north, English is spoken by about 10%, but Arabic in all its nuances is top dog. If you are brave enough and have only English, you can just about get by but you could get pillaged for a few dirhams on every purchase. However the experience of the deal makes up for all that and the majority of people are as honest as you would expect. We have met some really lovely people and they are the intelligent ones who realise that you will go back to them time after time.
It is not really a place for small babies and toddlers whose digestive tracts are still unformed, we had problems with the kids this week, but they recover quickly and do not seem scarred by the experience. For my part a small touch of the squitters one morning and I ate and drank everything in sight. It would be nice for all people to experience the place before it, like the rest of the world disappears into the 21st century. From beggars to millionaires, all lend themselves to the experience, all give something to the air of chaos that is abundant.
And so here I am in the garden of the riad, at 3.00pm in the afternoon, in brilliant sunshine, looking over the small pool, everybody out and only the riad birds for company. It is an oasis of greenery and solitude, interwoven by outside Medina noises and seagulls. I am totally wrapped up in my delight for the place, this Riad des Palmiers, with its tortoises, birds, greenery and water and most importantly sunshine on this 3rd day of January 2014. My only fear is that I have put on weight after all my hard work. The high carb diet makes the women go in and out in all the right places and they are highly praised for their roundness of contour, the men who eat little and work hard are like laths. January for me will be Spartan, my diet awaits but this time with no alcohol or yoghurt I hope, the lbs will shed, the greyhound within me awaits.
On our last night out we went to a Moroccan restaurant on the corner of the Bab Marrakesh. It was just a covered alleyway with a 3 metre square kitchen. We heard the food was good and they played Arab blues with their resident musician whose instrument was a cross between a guitar and a set of drums, he was excellent.
The front of house lady, a French woman from Lyons, gave us the bad news first, that because it was Friday, Prayer Day, in muslim land, there would be no wine served. This news upset certain members of our party but then the front of house lady said after our second bottle of water that perhaps in this instance because we were not of the faith and because it was our last night and because we were looking downcast, perhaps wine might be permitted but she could only get red wine and it would have to be served in clay mugs. We jumped at the opportunity, we would have drunk the bloody stuff out of a sweaty clog by this time, but then she started serving all manner of wine to other diners. One last little conundrum to match the million we had experienced over our two week stay. The food when it came was fantastic. I had a tagine of stuffed calamari which was absolutely delicious.
Then home, a glass of wine and bed. Up at 7.00am on Day 15 to put the last few thoughts in my diary, before packing and taking our 4×4 to Agadir, driven by our friendly Saharan taxi man, Fassi, who had told Katy, my daughter, that he would look after her mother and father as though we were his mother and father, a kind remark from one of a kind people. He is picking us up at Place Moulay Hassan at 12.00noon in four hours time, just enough time for breakfast, last minute shopping for some and to organise a carossier to take our bags across the Medina.
Well Fassi loaded the four of us and our luggage into an eight seat vehicle, very plush. He was not going to drive us but introduced us to his driver, a smiling young man and then asked us for his money before we set off. He must have thought his driver or we would do a runner. The driver shrugged his shoulders and said “Il est le patron”. Three hours of a drive to Agadir airport whilst we passed millions of Argon trees and millions of goats with women following the goats picking up the dissolved nuts. The land is best described as arid and except for the argon trees there was no other cultivation except in small pockets as you neared Agadir. Dried up river beds, rocks and sand were the only features, every now and then square boxes of houses in poor condition but every house had a satellite dish. About 25 miles from Agadir we hit the Atlantic, it really did look like surfers paradfise. Agadir traffic was manic with an everyman for himself philosophy and free use of the indicator. There were no rules just go where you want and when you want with the indicator telling everybody which lane you were going to go into one second before you made that manoeuvre.
The airport was packed with French, Germans and Dutch returning after their Christmas holiday but it soon quietened down. We were three hours early and in that time there were six flights to France, two to Germany, one Swiss, four to Casablanca, three Dutch, One Danish, One to London, One to Belgium and then our own to Dublin. It really is a European destination. After the first flush left, the airport settled down and what a remarkable airport it was, the ambience superb. I was never more relaxed, security was totally relaxed and we just flowed through the few hours of a wait.
Nicely settled in our Aer Lingus seats, one of the ground crew came rushing on board and into the cockpit, the two pilots rushed out and ten minutes later one of them came back and on the intercom said that the ground crew had found bits hanging off the engine, the pilot assured us that the bits were not important and he had instructed the ground crew to cut them off and he would then be happy to take the flight to Dublin. I liked his WW1 bravado and settled down. The plane left an hour later and on top of that it encountered 180mph headwinds so that the three and half hour flight turned into five hours. We eventually got into Dublin at 2.30am, found our car in the massive acreage of the long-stay red car-park and eventually got home at 5.00am. Hungry and parched, I settled down to a large G&T the first time I had ever had one at that time of day and then to bed dreaming of a full Irish breakfast when I awoke.
Adieu Essaouira it was lovely meeting you, it was great learning your ways and eating your food but as they always say, there is nothing nicer than your own bed.
