...continued from Morroco Part I: Discovering Marrakech
I couldn't sleep too well that night: it usually happens to me during the first 2-3 days of a trip due to excitement. I woke up at 4:30, checked work email, called Jyoti, worked on this blog and went down for breakfast at 6:30. It was a hearty meal of traditional bread with honey, cream-filled crossaint, fruit pie, some other type of bread and some other sweet concoction. At 7 am I was picked up for the day trip to the Atlas Mountains, visiting the 1000 year old village (kasbah) of Ait Ben Haddou and the new city of Ouazarzate.
I was the only non Frenchperson in the group of 7. One of the guys had spent six months in Varanasi in an orphanage and another girl had spent a month in Nepal with another NGO. Every time I travel, I end up meeting Europeans who have worked for a month or more with an NGO in South Asia. When I asked the Varanasi guy where he was from he said Nice and then went about explaining where it was in France. I quipped that my sister and a friend were in Nice for a vacation at that time. We Indians crave for French glamour and they are enchanted by our spirituality.
I was the only non Frenchperson in the group of 7. One of the guys had spent six months in Varanasi in an orphanage and another girl had spent a month in Nepal with another NGO. Every time I travel, I end up meeting Europeans who have worked for a month or more with an NGO in South Asia. When I asked the Varanasi guy where he was from he said Nice and then went about explaining where it was in France. I quipped that my sister and a friend were in Nice for a vacation at that time. We Indians crave for French glamour and they are enchanted by our spirituality.
The winding drive through the mountains made me a little nauseated. The drive was nice but not out of the world. Moreover the landscape was barren: give me a green landscape and I can keep watching for hours and hours. We reached Ait Ben Haddou around noon. A lot of movies such as Gladiator, prince of Persia , Lawrence of Arabia, Babel, Indiana Jones etc. were shot here. Only 10 families live here while the rest had moved to a modern village across the river. We had to cross the river to get there and the locals had made a bridge of large stones. It was tricky to cross and young boys came to your aid and held your hands, demanding a steep 10 dirhams after you crossed. The old kasbah was perched on a hillside, with the houses having a foundation of stone, walls of brick and a wooden roof. Many Jews lived in Morocco at one point of time and there was a synagogue in the complex. This place was a major stop for caravans coming from the Sahara carrying salt. There was a modern bridge to cross the river back to the car park: the crossing by the stone bridge was just to ensure some income for the boys. Our guide remarked that the construction of the bridge had taken income away from mule drivers who took supplies across the river.
The guy from Nice and his wife stayed behind in Ait Ben Haddou and the rest of the pack headed to Ouarzazate, a new city whose main attraction was film studios and a museum of cinema. The driver parked at the city center, and the group split into two: I joined the Parisian girl who had volunteered in Nepal and her friend from Bordeaux who lived on a farm and rode horses for fun. We took a walk through an old Kasbah nearby. Our guide was a young local boy who kept cracking jokes, which of course I didn't understand. The girls were nice enough to translate, for my benefit, some of the information he gave.
A four hour drive bought us back to Marrakech by 7:30. I picked up a margarita pizza for dinner. At 20 dirhams (130 rupees) for a 10 inch pizza, it was the cheapest pizza I've had anywhere in the world, and it wasn't too bad. I had planned to get the traditional hamam and spa treatment for the evening, but was tired and sleepy, and called it an early day.
The next morning's breakfast was served in the terrace. Some of the small touches at the Riad were quite memorable. The breakfast table was decorated with rose petals, candles were put in the room before I had arrived the previous evening and my clothes were nearly folded or hung in the closet. At 4k rupees a night this place was a steal. Clearing the bill proved a little tricky though. To settle the EUR 115 due, I gave Niza three 50 EUR bills and she went in Ghizlane's room and came back with change in Dirhams. As per my math she owned by 350 dirhams but she came out with 450: 2 notes of 200 in one hand and one of 50 in another. I much later realized that she meant that take this 400 and give me 50 back to make it 350, but at point in time I was clueless what she was trying to indicate. I asked her if she could wake up Ghizlane, but she wouldn't get out of bed and kept giving directions from there, and Niza would keep flitting in and our of her room. Finally I made the payment partly in Euros and partly in Dirham in a manner all of us understood. I left my luggage at the Riad, to be picked up in the evening and joined the tour to the sea side town of Essouira.
Unlike the previous day, this journey was on a flat 4 lane highway. En route we stopped at an Argan co-operative farm and factory. Argan is a Moroccan oil which can be used both for cooking and as a body oil. We saw the women removing the skin from the fruit, and then crushing it into oil. The prices here were much higher than I had paid at Marrakech for a small bottle of oil and a bar of soap: either what I had bought was substandard, perhaps fake, or this place was one of those scams that display some random certificates, pay commissions to drivers who bring business and overcharge gullible customers.
At 11:30 the minibus reached Essouira, whose Medina is listed on UNESCO's world heritage list. I walked around the port first, photographing the hundreds of seagulls flying about, as the fishermen were unloading their catch and selling them to the locals. The outer walls of the medina were lined with canon pointing out at sea. Blue and white dominated, as if this place were a poor man's Mykonos. There weren't any particular buildings to see - the idea was to just walk around, look, eat and shop. I found a nice fast food place, and ordered a falafel sandwich, which came with fries. This was the only city during the trip where I got falafel. I picked up a wooden jewelry box, 2 bowls, a lamp with Berber designs made using henna, and something that can be approximately described as three miniature Tagine vessels joined at the hip. It could be used for serving 3 different sauces at one go. 
During these three days, I had many locals asking me if I was from India and when I answered in the affirmative, they rattled off names of famous Bollywood actors. Shahrukh, expectedly was the número uno: apparently he attends the Marrakech film festival quite frequently. The next few names that cropped up were Dharmendra, Shashi Kapoor and Mithun Chakraborty. One of the guys broke into a "I am a disco dancer" gig. I recalled a similar event in New York when the cashier at a Senegalese restaurant had tried to imitate the peerless Mithunda.
The tour bus departed for Marrakech at 4 pm, and rain delayed our arrival in town. I had the same pizza at the same place as the previous evening, rushed to the Riad, charged the phone, changed into dry clothes, and re-packed the luggage to accommodate the shopping. In the bargain, I dropped one of the bowls and it shattered to pieces. Thankfully the rain stopped after a while and I could walk peacefully to the bus station to board the overnight bus to Fes.
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