Fes, the Sahara and Marrakesh
I toured the Fes Medina for another day with a couple of Canadian women and we ran into all the people I´d talked to on the first day, and I started to think Fes was getting a bit small to stay in for too much longer. We ran into Abdul´s brother who then obviously ran off to get Abdul, as he appeared shortly afterwards, and helped to navigate us through the city and got us the 60 dirham menú at a nice café with rooftop views and more importantly rooftop breeze. The 60 dirham menú is the same food as the 120 dirham menú but for not-tourists. We saw the king´s Fes palace and collected some more election flyers off the Street. These had pictures of wheat, olives, pigeons either crossed out or not crossed out. They related to which industry different parties were promising to subsidise – pigeon poop (used in leather tanneries) wheat (ie bread) or olive oil, or various other options.
Then I had dinner with Abdul and his brother again, which I felt somewhat pressured into and angsted about a lot but turned out to be fine, another fun evening listening to music from the región off a mobile phone. He talked about how he broke his ankle and went to a local healing woman of 109 years old who bandaged it up, and after 3 months it was better. He told himself he wouldn´t play soccer again, which is how he injured it, but misses soccer sometimes. He said hospitals in Morocco used to be really bad – people would go in and the doctors wouldn´t really understand what the problem was and would prescribe drugs and people would die when they´d gone in with minor problems. But he said the hospitals are getting much better now with more doctors there from overseas. He talked about how he has family in italy, Spain and France, so if he was going to travel anywhere in the world, that´s where he´d go.
I booked a 3 day desert tour with the canadians, another Canadian, a british guy, an american, and an indonesian. One of the Canadians, Lauren, was the worst person i´ve met for inappropriate eating conversations. The first breakfast we all had together gettiing to know each other as a group, she talked about vaginal fluids, in the context of gluten intolerance being higher in babies delivered through c-section, through lack of babies´ ingesting vaginal fluids during the birthing process which provides some degree of gluten tolerance. She managed to find a new but similar themed topic pretty much every meal, it became a thing. I personally don´t care about that sort of stuff, and kind of liked that she didn´t care at all, and it was pretty funny. She also writes erotic novels for Amazon, and says that dinosaur themes are in right now.
I´d borrowed a garbage bag to put my things in, since my backpack from Australia had never arrived in Morocco and i hadn´t bought replacements since they kept telling me I´d get it the next day. The indonesian guy leant me a Green supermarket bag, which was a definite upgrade because it meant my stuff wouldn´t fall out any holes in the bottom, and it meant some cleaner wouldn´t throw my few remaining possessions out thinking they were garbage (being, as they were, in a garbage bag).
On the way to the Sahara we drove through ¨the switzerland of africa¨, Ifrane, which is really probably one of many suiss d,afriques. It was obscenely Green, with sprinklers everywhere and wáter running down the streets, and every building had high peaked roofs for the imaginary snow to slide off. The town was built around a rich university that cost $30,000 a year to attend, and we speculated that possibly half the tuition fees were used to wáter the towns´lawns.
We also went through a cyprus forest with monkeys in it, and I watched an angry monkey try to pull the bark off a dying tree, bracing herself against the tree with her feet while pulling at the bark with teeth and hands.
We dumped our stuff at a hostel in the desert and took camels into the nearby sand dunes where we would stay the night. I was on the second camel in the queue and the woman in front of me was wearing a very bright pink top which appears in all my desert photos and makes them look quite artsy. I was proud of myself for being able to balance without needing to hold on, but as we swapped camels the next day I realised camels varied a lot in bumpiness and coordination, and I´d just had a good one on the first day. My camel on the second day seemed particularly special at going down hills, and I had to hold on the whole time. I borrowed some shorts off one of the guys for the camel ride, so again people were helping me out with the baggage situation. From the dunes we could see Algeria, which was the closest I´d been to my backpack since my flights over.
A very pregnant dog accompanied us for the whole camel ride, pouncing on every bit of greenery to look for lizards.
When we arrived at camp, we dumped our bags and headed off to climb the highest dune for the views before dinner. It unsurprisingly turned out to be a lot higher, steeper and further than it looked at first, with the sand at about a 45 degree angle. But we perservered out of pride and made it to the top of the dune we´d picked out., calves a-burning and covered in sand stuck to sweat. Unfortunately this turned out to be a false Summit, but only 3 of the group had the energy to do the last Little leg to get to the real peak.
After dinner, we slept under the stars until the desert broke character by starting to rain on us, so we went inside. Apparently a bit of rain wasn´t too unusual for that time of year. The campsite was supplied with wáter and a flushing toilet with a proper seat, which was pretty unexpected. We could see the black wáter pipes showing above the sand sometimes on the ride over.
After riding back the next morning, we had a bit of a dead day at the hostel, trying to use the ´free wifi´which was someone´s phone turned into a hotspot. Occassionally they´d pick up the phone and walk away to take a call, which stuffed up the odd person´s online booking. If you noticed you could follow them outside to keep the connection. The next day we drove back through Todra Gorge and Ourzazate, but as we all had some stomach thing no one else wanted to stop at anything, so I didn´t want to be the one to hold people up.
I had one night in Marrakesh before flying to Madrid the next afternoon. This was a good amount of time to take a walk through the night markets, with lots of Street performers and food and music everywhere. I would have liked to have bought some things but was limited by my lack of bag space. If i´d had my backpack I probably would have seen Chefchouen and possibly Essouiera, but I was keen to get to Madrid where I could buy some replacement things.
