Morocco 2024: Medinas and Desert

I joined an Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) tour of Morocco with 11 fellow travelers from all over the US.  My first visit to Morocco was in 1963.  A classmate from my boarding school in India, whose father happened to be India’s ambassador to Morocco, had invited me.  My girlfriend and I hitchhiked from London through France and Spain and took a ferry from Seville to Tangiers.  I don’t remember much about what we saw in Morocco.  We were in Tangiers for a few days, spent some time at a beach, and then took a train to Rabat to stay with my friend.  After a few days, we traveled with his family to Casablanca where we were comped at a fancy boutique hotel with a pool because we were traveling with the Ambassador.  I still have a photo of my girlfriend by the pool.  I recall that all the main arterial roads in cities were named Hassan II, the reigning monarch, or Mohammad V, his father.

I was drawn to Morocco by the movie “Casablanca” and by the high jinks of the heiress Barbara Hutton in Tangiers, which were in the news.  William Burrow wrote his famous novel “Naked Lunch” there.  Most of all though was the attraction of Fes and Marrakech, where the hippies congregated.  Sadly, we never made it there.  Missing those legendary cities left a sense of incompleteness that has lingered for decades which I sought to quench with this visit.

Morocco was a different country in 1963.  It had disengaged from France’s colonial rule of 44 years just 7 years before our visit and was ruled by a monarch, Hassan II.  It had a population of around 13 million and a per capita income of just $208.  It was a poor country. In 2024, Morocco has 38 million inhabitants and a per capita income of $3,500, making it a middle-income country.  It has also become a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary.  Its roads are excellent as are the rest stops which have restaurants, convenience stores, and clean toilets.  These facilitate tourism, the second largest foreign exchange earner after phosphate exports.

Because of its strategic location at the confluence of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, the Morocco area has been populated since antiquity.  It had Phoenician settlements and later became a part of the Carthaginian empire.  The earliest Moroccan state was a Berber kingdom that was annexed by Rome in 44 AD.  As evidence of Rome’s presence, we visited Volubilis where there are remains of a Roman city situated among rolling hills planted with olives and dotted with Cypress trees, much like an Italian landscape.  The well-preserved mosaics are impressive and the arched Roman gate at one end was reminiscent of so many in Italy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Berbers are the indigenous people of the area and thought to be related to the Saami of Scandinavia.  In the 7^th Century, Arabs started streaming in and changed the demography and religion and are now most of the population. Added to the mix are people from Sudan and West Africa who were brought as slaves and soldiers by the chieftains through the centuries.  These cultures seem to have melded in a way that no racial discrimination is apparent. In their heyday, from the 8^th Century, people from the Morocco area dominated the Iberian Peninsula for several hundred years and created the Andalusian civilization.  Now, people speak Moroccan Arabic, a Berber language, and have also assimilated French from the short period of its colonial rule.

It’s hard to generalize about a culture from a two-week visit, but I have impressions.  For a Sunni-Islamic country, Morocco feels more accepting of other ways of life, although the status of women and their dress code is still evolving.  OAT organizes meetings to expose its travelers to local culture.  In the middle-class family we met, the mother worked in human resources and wore a hijab, but her elder daughter, a doctor, did not and was dressed in trousers and a shirt in a photograph.  The younger daughter, an optometrist, chose to wear a hijab.  Within the family, these choices were not an issue.

It was more problematic in poorer, less educated families.  A young lady we were introduced to told us of her struggles to break free from tradition, get an education, and move into the modern world.  Another young woman, our tour guide in Meknes, also related her effort to become the first female in that role.  For the two nomadic Berber families we met, the choices made by the parents for their children will affect dramatically their lives.  In one case, in a shepherd family, the mother left her children with her family who had a fixed home to enable them to attend school.  She did not want them to have her life.  In another nomad family, they decided to keep the children as nomads and not send them to school because the children of different ages wanted to stay together and not be separated.

A brickmaker’s family we met had traditional roles with the man making the bricks and tending the farm and the women looking after the small, clean house and cooking. They served us bread stuffed with spicy vegetables with the ubiquitous green mint tea in their adjoining farm by a stream followed by a couscous lunch indoors.  Later that afternoon we met a women’s organization in that village which was partially funded by our tour company.  It gave women a place to meet by themselves and learn skills such as baking and henna painting.

In other ways too, the Moroccan practice of Islam seemed tolerant.  Christian churches stood close to mosques and Jewish temples thrived in medinas (bazar) before most Jews migrated to Israel after it became a nation.  They were traders in salt, sugar, and gold.  Many migrated here when they were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition.  The rulers of Morocco harbored them at that time and also protected Jews from the Nazis during WW II.  Several Jews rose to prominence as advisors to rulers.

Conveniently for tourists, alcohol can be consumed openly.  But other stringent laws remain on the books.  Homosexuality is illegal and pre-marital sex is a crime.  It is also illegal to proselytize for any religion other than Islam and defame the monarchy in any way.  As a visitor, I have no idea how rigidly these laws are enforced.

Most of us flew into Casablanca and were transferred by bus to Rabat, the capital chosen by French colonists over Fes.  On the way, I noticed many modern housing developments, especially on the shoreside of the highway, a sure sign of a middle-income economy.  We stayed there for a couple of days, walked through the Kasbah (fortress), and drove through the Royal Palace and the modern part of the capital built by the French that had elegant shops and cafes with outdoor seating. We stopped to visit a modern Islamic mausoleum for the present king’s grandfather, Mohammed V.  Nearby there was a striking El Burj-like tower named Mohammed VI designed by Rafael de la Hoz, a Spanish architect, and an elegant opera house designed by Zaha Hadid, the famous architect from Iraq.

Leaving Rabat, our tour route took a wide circle moving east and over the Atlas Mountains to Fes, then south to the Sahara and back up taking a western route over the mountains to Marrakech and ending in Casablanca. En route to Fes, we saw undulating hills planted with wheat and barley, but soon the landscape became barren, just shrubs struggling out of hard-scabble rock and that ended at the desert where there was no vegetation at all.

That may be an exaggeration.  The government is making an effort to “green” arid areas by providing incentives and infrastructure to farmers.  We drove through townships that looked completely new and had clusters of date farms.  Generally, villages had simple brick and cement or mud-covered small houses or huts, and the villagers walking around were distinctly poorer than in the northern cities.   Between villages, now and again, an isolated date farm fed by water from artesian wells would come into view. We visited one in the Sahara where the farmer also planted herbs and vegetables.

Most of Morocco’s agriculture is in the north by the ocean and sea, employs about 40 percent of its labor force, and provides most of the country’s food except for cereals, which are imported.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fes, Meknes and Marrakech

Fes and Marrakech, my missed destinations from 60 years ago, and Meknes were the capitals of earlier Moroccan kingdoms.  Fes and Marrakech remain big, populous cities, still important for tourism.  Each has modern sections, but our lodgings were in the medinas, the main attraction. Growing up in India, I am used to bazaars, crowds, noise, snake charmers, performing monkeys, music, and dance. But the bazaars of Fes and Marrakech are huge, on a different scale than in my memory of India, and parts date back to the 9^th century.  Miles of narrow winding alleys with small shops on both sides neatly displaying their goods.  Sections of the bazaar were divided by type of product—clothes, food, spices, perfumes, woodwork, brass, etc.  Although it was crowded in the alleys, especially with scooters and motorbikes inching their way through, I didn’t feel pressed, people were polite and motorbikes somehow managed not to injure anyone. As shopkeepers outnumbered customers and seemed to be sitting around all day looking at their phones, chatting with each other, or simply looking bored, we wondered how so many shops plying similar goods survived.

Madrassas, synagogues, mausoleums, gardens, Karaouine mosque and university, and the Bahia palace were embedded in this maze of alleys. Except for the synagogue, which was decorated simply, but had an ancient Torah, the other buildings were covered from floor to ceiling in colorful tiles, cursive and symmetric calligraphy, painted cedarwood ceilings, and decorated heavy wood doors.  This artistry was the core of the Andalusian civilization, which in turn influenced Morocco when Spain expelled the Moors and they resettled here.  Indeed, some rectangular gardens with pathways and places to sit and admire the profusion of colorful citrus fruit and absorb its aroma, are called Andalusian.  As busy as the medinas were during the day and especially at night when small bands played local music and some people danced, by the morning, the entire area was deserted, just stray cats (mainly) and dogs scavenging for food and small delivery trucks resupplying restaurants and shops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sahara

Leaving Fes, our route took us over the mid-Atlas Mountains covered with Pine and Cedar trees. Suddenly, we found ourselves in Ifrane, a replicated Swiss town, that was littered with chalets with red tile roofs.  It has an upscale university, but we just stopped for a short break in the main square.  Our long drive down through arid hills ended in Erfoud. We overnighted there before our two-day excursion into the Sahara in four-wheel drive Toyota Land Cruisers sliding through the desert sands to a comfortable OAT tent camp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aside from the scenic beauty of the desert, we got a tourist camel ride for which getting on and off was hazardous, but in between the experience was unusual. Added to camel and Toyota tracks, there were sand-boarding tracks as well, a sport I did not know existed.  For me, the highlight was listening to Gnaoua music in the nearby village of Khamila.  Many of us had listened to a “60 Minutes” segment about this music created by African slaves who used their metal shackles as castanets.  African American musicians have come to Morocco to participate in this music and publicize it.  We did a group dance at the end of the performance.  Tourist kitsch but fun.  Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate for us to view either a desert sunrise or sunset.

 

On the way back up North we stopped in Tinejdad, a village with a Berber museum.  Unusually, it was a few connected huts with low ceilings and small rooms displaying how homes were made, food cooked and stored, and clothes and jewelry for normal use and much more elaborate for weddings.  I would have liked to spend more time there especially as there were explanations in English. After the museum visit, we had lunch at a village restaurant that I will mention below.  On the next day, we stopped at a 12^th-century village, Ait Benhaddou, where a local guide told us about its history. It was built along the former caravan route trading salt and gold from modern Ghana across the Sahara to Marrakech and is a great example of earthen clay architecture.

Casablanca

Our tour ended with a short stop in Casablanca, just an afternoon and evening before an early morning flight the next day.  The highlight was a private tour of the huge Hassan II Mosque which took 7 years to complete and can house thousands of worshippers.  Its architecture and decorations are in the elaborate Moorish style.  It employed about ten thousand workers and craftsmen partly to keep these dying artistic skills with tile, calligraphy, and cedarwood painting alive.  Later that evening we had dinner at Rick’s Café that was made famous by the movie Casablanca.  The line outside was long and a group of about 50 East Asians preceded us.  I assumed it was going to be a disaster, but turned out to be a pleasant last evening with good food (see below).

 

Shopping

A tourist visit is not complete without shopping for local souvenirs.  OAT selects reliable artisans who give travelers a demonstration of their craft and allow them to browse their offerings without pressure to purchase.  We visited studios and shops for pottery, leather, rugs, spices, and fossils.  As I am downsizing, I decided not to buy anything on this trip.  The pottery workshop made colorful designs we saw in our residences (see below) and some restaurants for tables, fountains, and walls.  The tannery was well-established, cured leather, and designed handbags and elegant clothes.  The carpet store laid out with a flourish an endless number of colorful rugs of many sizes.  The neat spice store in the medina regaled us with the virtues of many spices.  Finally, near the Sahara, fabricators cut stones embedded with fossils and smooth and shape them into plates, table tops, and statues.  As these fossils are millions of years old, I overcame my resistance and bought a cheese plate for my daughter.

Hotels

In Rabat, Fes, and Marrakech we stayed Riads in the medina.  These are former joint-family homes converted into small hotels.  They have a central rectangular courtyard surrounded by rooms going up several stories.  The ground floor is elaborately tiled with colorful mosaics.  In Rabat, I had a large room with a high ceiling which was comfortable, but not easy to heat.  In Fes, my room was tiny, with the opposite issue of being too warm.  In both places, running hot water was an issue.  While in Fes, our guide showed us a large Riad (Salam) that combined several old mansions.  The decorations were elaborate and colorful, almost overwhelming.  Everything worked well in Marrakech, and sitting in the comfortable and peaceful courtyard was a pleasure.  Hotels in other cities were fine and the Berber Palace Hotel in Quarzazarte near the Sahara was remarkable for its Egyptian motif.  OAT’s tent camp in the desert was surprisingly cozy and had ample hot water thanks to the solar panel that provided electricity.

Food

Having eaten several times in Mourad Lahlou’s two restaurants (Aziza and Mourad) in San Francisco, I expected food in Morocco to occasionally match his Michelin star level.  I was disappointed.  My pescatarian dietary preference was taken to be vegetarian and I got endless tagines with couscous that was fine, but topped with over-cooked mushy vegetables that had no taste.  Still, the starter salads, like mezze, especially those made with lentils and eggplant were tasty, and I liked the baked egg omelet with spiced mixed vegetables inside, especially at the village restaurant near the Berber Museum and also at OAT’s camp.  Moreover, the crème brulee at the village restaurant was creditable.  Our farewell dinner in Marrakech at the stately and elaborate Red House was memorable. Surprisingly, my last meal of the trip, a seafood pasta, at Rick’s Café, a completely tourist place, was quite delicious, especially with the strains of “As time goes by” in the background.  I tasted a couple of local wines, a Volubilis Rose and Medallion Red Blend.  Both were eminently potable to drink with or without food.