Today we touched the soil of Africa for the first time in
our lives. We’ve been looking forward to
this day since we booked the cruise.
It’s is going to be a great experience to discover the culture of
Northern Africa as we expect it will be very different from anything we’ve been
exposed to before.
We landed in Agadir Morocco.
This city of about one million residences was levelled by an earthquake
in the 1960s and since it has been rebuilt it has become a very a popular
European tourist destination. Unfortunately
much of the Arab culture was replaced with European friendly shops and
restaurants. So we decided instead to
take a trip to the city of Marrakesh.
Marrakesh is about 150 miles northeast.
The bus took us up and over the Atlas Mountains into the sub
Sahara desert. The land is very rocky
and as you would expect dry. On the west
side of the mountains the ground is red and filled with iron. There seems to be some agriculture with the
main crop being the Argane tree. They
use the nut from this tree to produce skin oil for beauty products. As we passed one farm, the Argane tree was
filled with several goats. Apparently
they are trained to climb the trees and knock the nuts from the branches.
The farm houses are flat rectangular shaped buildings with a
distinct reddish colour. It seems that
barns that house the sheep and goats are attached to the houses.
The road between Agadir and Marrakesh is a modern four lane
highway but it had very little traffic.
Our tour guide, Najib, was an informative and entertaining
actor. He gave us an interesting history
of Morocco and how the major towns were developed based on which tribe ruled
Morocco at the time. He told us about
the recent politics of Morocco and how the royal family has been progressive
and liberal, so that problems that caused the Arab Spring revolutions in other
Arab countries did not take root in Morocco.
He stated that the progressive nature of the Moroccan government had
also encouraged foreign investment and that many European, American and Asian
companies now had factories in Morocco.
He explained that women’s rights have been greatly improved
in Morocco. This included advances in education, family law and the
workplace. Unfortunately, he then
followed up this explanation with a series of comments and jokes that were very
chauvinistic and insulting to western women.
Marrakesh is a strange city.
It is a combination of ultra modern and very old architecture and
roads. It is human zoo wrapped around a
very powerful spiritual Islamic culture.
During the tour Najib took pains to explain the Islamic religion, or as
best can be done in a single day. He
explained that faithful must pray five times a day. There are five major pillars of the faith and
that the Moroccan flag has a five pointed star that equates to those beliefs.
Each mosque has a pool or fountain so that the faithful can cleanse themselves
before entering the mosque for prayer.
We started the city tour by visiting the outside of the
city’s main mosque. When we arrived the
imam was calling the faithful to prayer from the minaret. We then went to a royal palace where the medieval
king had four wives and 20 mistresses in the same palace. The tile floors and archway entrances to each
of the wives houses was very unique.
We then went for lunch, in the old Jewish quarter, where we
were entertained with a performance of local culture that included a percussion
band, singers and a belly dancer.
Usually these types of meals are insulting to both your intelligence and
your palette, but this had very interesting entertainment and the food was
good. It was Moroccan chicken and
Couscous with mint honey tea. As we left
a vendor with a cart of dead chickens rolled his cart pass the restaurant and
we all joked that he was bring them to the restaurant for the next group of
tourist.
This was followed up by a trip to an 300 year old Islamic
school, where we got to see the architecture of the school and the spartan
rooms where the students stayed and studied. We also visited a private school
for 5 year olds where we got to see them practice their alphabet. It was very special.
As we passed a snake charmer, I took a picture of the
cobra. Of course you are expected to pay
for the experience and I was immediate accosted by one of the snake charmers,
who placed a live snake around my neck and offered to take my picture for good
luck, and a fee of course. I had read
that these cobras have had their fangs removed and are mostly safe, so I wasn’t
too freaked out. I also had a feeling that it was a fake snake, although Marg assures me it was real. It took me three times
to ask him politely to remove the snake before he did. I think he realized that next time I was just
going to take hold of the snake and toss it.
Marg was not all that impressed with old city. She found it dirty, noisy and extremely crowded. The narrow alleyways are shared with pedestrians and young men who go whipping down the streets on their motor scooters. The shopping stalls are filled with junk that was described as rejects from an American flea market by one of our group. The so called bargains we not in evidence, at least not in the shops that we saw.
We were not particularly impressed with our guide once we
got into Marrakesh. We wasted a lot of
time as he took us to two shops where he said they offered the best products at
the best prices. Of course we all knew
he was getting a kickback, because he kept asking us not to tell his boss that
we had gone to these stores. Also the
merchandise was nothing special. He
also loved the sound of his own voice and wasted our time as he explained
everything several times over. The
highlight for most people on this tour was the town market square but because
of these delays we only had 30 minutes there to observe the surroundings and
shop for souvenirs. With all this
wasted time, we arrived back ninety minutes late to the boat and missed our
dinner seating.
As Marg was to say, we’ve seen it and we don’t need to see
it again.
Later we went to the evening show in the theatre. There we saw a British musical impressionist
named Gary Thompson. He did a very good
Tom Jones and David Bowie. His other
impersonations were just average. His
comedy was hilarious though. I thought
Norman was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard.
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