Fes: Morocco travel dairy - part 9 and last (September 2014) ...continued from the previous post In the early morning of our last day in Fes (and Morocco), I was sitting on the roof terrace of our hotel, looking over the flat medina roofs and chewing a baghrir – a spongy, thick, tough, hopelessly oily and sinfully tasty traditional Berber pancake. I began to think what I will remember about Fes – this cacophony of colours, smells and sounds. One month on the road translates into 16 different beds in which you rarely manage to sleep as well as you would like, a few hundred kilometres covered on foot and a few thousand travelled in all possible means of transportation. The result of this equation is weariness and somehow, against your best intentions, the negatives are the first to come to your mind. You get annoyed that there are so many places (palaces, mosques, shrines), which you cannot enter because you are not a) a Muslim, or b) King of Morocco. You are pissed off that you cannot enjoy one of the largest and oldest medinas in the world without interference and hustle, because there is always someone around trying to push you into a restaurant or a shop. And no, you are not at all obliged to buy anything, they will be immensely glad if you just do them the honour of looking at all the beautiful things they have on display, but once you walk out of the shop without actually buying anything, they are visibly displeased and sometimes say something behind your back, which you don’t understand, but does not sound pleasant. You cannot stand that wherever you go, there is no escaping from people, who will insist on showing you the way to somewhere where you do not want to go, or to lead you to a place where you were headed anyway and know perfectly well how to get there. No matter what you do or say, this someone will refuse to go away without a tip. No, damn it. It cannot end this way, I said to myself. I swallowed the last piece of baghrir and put on my shoes. It was 8 AM. Medina was still asleep. Shops and street vendors come alive at about 9.30-10.00, and then the narrow alleys turn into a madhouse. I rushed down the stairs and for the next two hours took immense pleasure in countless splendours and marvels, which remain hidden by the constant bustle during the day. Intricate fountains, sublime entrance doors of mosques and madrasas, hidden gorgeous squares. I reached also the famous Fes tanneries, where in tremendously difficult working conditions cow, goat, sheep and camel skins are transformed into the world renowned Fes leather. Ten dirhams bought me an “entrance ticket” to the terrace of one of numerous leader shops, which surround the tanneries. From there, I observed the men, fully occupied by their hard labour since early morning. Some soaked the skins in large vessels filled with white liquid – mixture of water and bird droppings, which filled the entire neighbourhood with the smell of ammoniac, and removed remnants of meat and hair from the skin. Others washed the skins thoroughly in clean water. The third submerged them in vessels full of liquids in all possible colours – all natural. The fourth group of men was placing the skins on terraces and roofs to dry in the sun. A truly interesting, if a bit smelly, sight. While I was walking back towards our hotel through the already fully awoken medina, I asked myself a rhetorical question: are there really enough costumers for all these hundreds of thousands of shops, selling an ocean of items? How can I possibly be angry with these people struggling to catch my attention in any way they can? Furthermore, for every one individual who tries to con a few dirhams out of you, there are at least 50 others, who will help you with a big smile on their face, if you ask them, or who will, when they pass you by on the street, greet you with the obligatory “Bonjour” and “Ça va?”, and will quite often add also “Welcome to Morocco.” There is one more thing that catches the eye in Fes – especially if you are a cat lover. Wherever you go in the medina, you notice – in the corner over there, a cardboard box, in which small kittens are playing or sleeping. Under the vendor’s stall, small bowls for water and food. Big tomcats walking beneath the chairs and tables of restaurants without any fear whatsoever. Stray cats in Fes (as in other Moroccan cities) are countless, and hardly any of them is afraid of people, which says a lot. How can you not love a city in which they love and take care of stray cats? (Of course, a much better care would be an extensive and efficient sterilization programme, as the population is completely out of control, but this – as many other things in Morocco – is Inshallah). Where cat is the king, there is no place for dogs. Seeing a dog (domestic or stray) in a Moroccan city is a very rare occasion. One of the few barking buddies we saw in Fes was the dog in Dar Ba Mohammad Chergui, an astonishing mansion of the former Pasha of Fes, which once housed 160 people (Pasha’s family and their servants). The mansion, composed of two houses connected by inner garden, was built in the 1920s. In complete contradiction to our expectations, the mansion was completely authentic and practically intact – in other words, no restorations have taken place yet. Covered with a thick layer of dust and without electricity, the mansion resembled a haunted house from a horror movie, a ghost of its former self. It was recently bought by a group of wealthy investors for a few million euros with the intention of transforming it into a 5-star hotel. For now, the mansion stands somehow outside the time and place and visiting it is a very special experience. We spent our last Moroccan afternoon in the modern Fes, where we had to attend to a few trivial, but unavoidable tasks. We checked the exact place from which the bus leaves for the airport. We changed the extra dirhams into euros. We had a good lunch for a normal price. And we spent the last remaining dirhams in a supermarket with fixed and visible prices. To do that, we allowed pragmatism to get the upper hand and the last place we visited in Morocco (what a disgrace for seasoned travellers!) was – a shopping mall. After the visit to the supermarket, we were left with exactly 23 dirhams (2 euros) and a hope that we have correctly calculated how many dirhams we would need to pay for a taxi and a bus early next morning. We got up at six, collected the luggage and walked onto the ghostly empty alleys. In these early hours, medina and especially the market through which we had to pass, was an undisputed suzerainty of cats, who were hunting for breakfast under the stalls and among the rubbish. We left medina through one of the gates. There were two taxis waiting on the parking lot beneath the city walls. We negotiated a price of 13 dirhams for a ride to the stop of the bus no. 16, which charges 5 dirhams per person to the Fes airport (taxis ask for 150 dirhams to take you to the airport). The bus 16 stops on a small parking lot near the train station. When we got there, there were only 3 people waiting. About 20 meters away, on the main street, there was another bus station, where the situation was completely different. A huge crowd, composed mainly of pupils and students, was waiting for some other bus. Its arrival triggered a full-out war and hand-to-hand combat. I don’t believe I have seen such struggle to get into a bus ever before. It turned out that the buses are anything but frequent, and are absolutely insufficient to collect all the passengers, especially at the peak times like mornings when huge crowds go to schools or to work. I thought to myself how lucky we were that our bus is not very popular and that the crazy scene we just witnessed could not be repeated, as there are only five of us waiting. Oh, here it is – no. 16 is coming. In those few seconds it took me to bend down and grab my backpack, the entire crowd which did not manage to squeeze onto the other bus attacked our bus as a flock of piranhas. We found ourselves in the centre of a horde, fighting with tooth and nail to push through the narrow doors, half blocked by the bus driver, who was heroically struggling to establish some order and sell tickets. Luckily we were in the centre of the mass, so following the laws of the physics, we were simply shoved into the bus by the stream. Half an hour later, we were at the airport – despite everything, alive and well and with all our limbs accounted for. There was only one more thing left to do: look back and say: Bessalama Morocco, and shukran!
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 07:21:47 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015