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Fes, Morocco

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

There’s something about that phrase or mindset that appeals to me as I reflect back on an event that happened to me a few years ago. We were with my brother in Lombok and I distinctly remember that feeling of being in a Moslem country, and how uncomfortable I felt hearing the call to prayer blaring from the mosques. To put it frankly, you couldn’t have got me off that island fast enough. Skipping forward a few years and we are here in Europe, in our comfort zone, doing the touristy thing and feeling a little ‘ho hum’. Within a few weeks of the ‘western-ness’, we were craving a culture shakeup and some diversity that we’d came to enjoy in countries like India and Namibia. When I suggested Morocco for a few days, Dave reminded me of the events of a few years back, in that Moslem country. As soon as we arrived here in Morocco I knew I wasn’t that same person anymore.

Five nights in Morocco ‘had’ to be split up into 3 towns. It would have been far too relaxing to do it any on other way. Based on the advice from a worldly traveller, we opted for avoiding the more touristic places, such as Casablanca and Marrakech and have gone with Fez, Chefchaouen, and Tangier.

First was Fez, Morocco’s third biggest city and a 2 hour flight out of Europe and into Northern Africa. Our accommodation in Fez was in a riad which is a traditional Moroccan house or palace with an interior garden or courtyard. Many riads are now used for people to stay in. Ours had 6 individually decorated Moroccan style ceramic tiled rooms. A fully dressed Muslim woman served us welcome green tea with mint leaves and a moroccan tagine on floor cushions. A tagine is a clay or ceramic pot, which is what the stew or meat (or brain) is cooked in.
As I write this, Im sitting on the roof of the riad, over looking Morocco’s oldest imperial city (known as the medina) with arid landscape just beyond that. It’s still and quiet, apart from the laughs of children coming home from school and the call to prayer from the minarets. Minarets are tall lighthouse looking buildings from which the call to prayer is made. Using a microphone the call to prayer is issued five times each day: dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and night, all over Morocco. Here in Fez, there are 300 of these minarets so you can imagine this cacophony of sound. It’s rather amazing and something you get used to hearing, even at 5:30am.
What Fez is famous for, apart from the Fez hat, is it’s medina (old city) and that it is considered to be the world’s largest car free city. When I mean old it’s 789-859AD and has the world’s oldest university. Within the walls of this city are 9,000 alleyways which make up the medina. Some are as narrow as 60cm and there will be the odd one as wide as 5metres. Too narrow for cars so horses, donkeys and carts are normal form of transportation. It’s quite literally a maze of residences and souks, which are North African markets. The outer edges are good enough for tourists to get a sense of it all but we wanted to see what tourists don’t see, so we hired a local guide for $30. What I love most is that there are different souks for different purposes, and they are used by the 150,000 locals for eating, living and buying their traditional Islamic dress and home ware. While walking through the maze of souks it felt as if we’d gone back centuries. To name a few souks:
– The food souk / markets; where you buy uncooked chicken for dinner. They’ll butcher the live chicken right there in front of you and the pen full of the chicken’s mates. In between spices and buckets of olives are camel heads hanging next to camel meat and about 20 varieties of fish being butchered.
-The tanneries; where you can literally see or smell your leather jacket or bag being made. It’s actually the oldest tannery in the world and the site hasn’t changed since the 11th century. The leather retail shop has a viewing platform which overlooks the process where cows become wallets. The hides are brought in from the butchers, then workers stand in stone vessels arranged like honeycombs, which are filled with different cleaning agents and dyes. To complete the process, the hide is laid to dry on the roofs of the medina. A very, very labour intensive process with no machinery. Did I mention the smell??? The little mint leaf they give you upon arrival wouldn’t even work if it was taped to the inside of your nostrils.
-The bakers; where locals can buy pre made bread or bring their dough to the communal wood burning ovens. Bread is a huge part of the Moroccan diet.
– There’s also carvers, carpenters, carpet makers and silverware souks. We purchased a tea set from two brothers as this is very much part of Moroccan culture. So for those reading this, be prepared to be served tea from our new Moroccan tea set, as it’s going to be flipping heavy (expensive) to post back.

From Fez, Chefchaouen is about 5 hours on a local bus. For a few years there, Morocco was officially named the single biggest supplier of hashish with most of it from around Chefchaouen. Finding this out the day before arriving here I wasn’t very excited about visiting another Amsterdam. (I lost the paper scissors rock war with Dave, otherwise we would have forfeited our prepaid accommodation and gone instead to the Sahara desert, only a 14 hour drive away). However, I was pleasantly surprised when arriving, to find it didn’t look or feel like that in any way, or at least in the medina where we were staying. I knew we would have been told to come here for good reason, and that reason is the medina is beautifully blue! What makes this old city of 40,000 so picturesque is its setting against the dramatic backdrop of the Rif Mountains and it is filled with white-washed homes with distinctive powder-blue accents. Similar to Fez, it also has a car free Medina (old town) within ‘castle walls’, but this one is smaller and far more laid back. I didn’t really feel comfortable getting lost in Fez’s medina but here it was a lot of fun exploring the alleyways that are painted blue, as are the doors and some of the ground. It was painted blue by the Jewish refugees who lived there during the 1930’s, and is blue as a reminder of “God’s power above”. Nowadays it’s a stronger Muslim presence but they have continued the tradition and regularly paint their houses blue.

As always, when hearing an English speaking person, we strike up a conversation. I think of how that would have sounded being back in Brisbane and asking a random English speaker to have dinner with us, but that is exactly what happens when travelling. We have dinner with a different traveller a few times a week. Upon our first meal in Chefchouen, we met Michelle, an American who is volunteering in the south of Morocco. We were pleased to bump into her again the following morning and spent the whole day together. Apart from spending time with a fantastic woman, we were lucky enough to learn more about the country and its culture from someone who has lived here for 2 years and speaks Arabic. We explored the city, climbed a bit of the Rif mountain range and had $4 meals and $1 mint tea all day long. Our Chefchaouen purchase was from an artisan. A beautiful woollen blanket in the colour of the city – blue, and for only 180 dirhams or about $30!

From Chefchaouen it was 4 long hours on the local bus until we arrived in our final Moroccan destination, Tangier. Bit of a close call with a car that slammed into our bus on the side of a cliff but we arrived safely in the most touristy city yet. Tangier is the northern point of Morocco and Africa. When my family were in southern Spain, Gibraltar 14 years ago, I distinctly remember seeing Africa from the Spanish side. It’s a pretty cool feeling seeing Spain from this side all those years later.
As Tangier is pretty touristy, the medina wasn’t as quaint as the last two towns. We don’t buy souvenirs in many towns but Morocco has some great, cheap stuff. To complete our Moroccan tea set we bought a 50 year old tea tray from a lovely man with
an antique shop.
As a substitute for the Sahara camel trip, I took my camel ride along the beach of Tangier. I stood out like a tourist, weaving in between people playing on Tangier’s dirty beach. As dorky as I looked, I had a lot of fun and it was the highlight of Tangier. I’m glad we are only staying one night here, it’s very modern and touristy, very different from the culture of Fez and Chefchaouen.

It’s hard to find countries that are so completely different from one to the next, but Morocco has been just that. Although we are in Africa, it very much feels like a middle eastern country. I particularly liked the tolerance between beliefs and the fact locals speak about 6 languages. In the towns we visited it’s rare to see women not in headscarves and about 60% men are in djellabas, pointy leather slippers and little islamic hats. My view on headscarves has changed since travelling here. I see that we are all the same, we just choose to wear different things. It’s not very touristy here, so us white fellas stuck out like sore thumbs but as long as we dressed respectfully, we were welcomed openly to their country. Hopefully when Islamic people travel they receive the same respect as we have received here. Just shows the importance of not stereotyping, otherwise we wouldn’t have had such a wonderful week here. My other take away from our 5 nights in Morocco is never, ever being able to buy new leather goods again without smelling or imagining the smell of a tannery!

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