Markets and Mountains and Missions, Oh My!

Internet cafes are surprisingly interesting places. I come to get caught up on my e-mails, check the news, creep around on facebook for a bit, and (heaven forbid) update this blog. I must admit, though, I also come to peep at the various social dramas going on around me. This has gotten to be even more amusing since the invention of Skype - at this moment, I'm sitting on the top floor of a dank old building in the middle of old Essaouira, a port city on the Atlantic coast full of history and beautiful architecture, and all I can do is listen to the dreadlocked Moroccan across from me try and seduce someone (in English, albeit abrupt) over video, while the girl at the other computer whispers sweet nothings in Arabic into her mic. The trademark of our generation must be just this - the gradual disintegration of the barriers between public and private spaces. But I digress. I'm in Morocco. Here's a brief run-down of the last week or so.

I arrived in Marrakesh on Monday morning courtesy of a 2 pound Ryanair cattle-class flight that had me sleeping on the floor of Luton airport the night before. A short city-bus ride later had me at Djemma-el-Fna, the centre of the old town and one of the world's great public spaces. During the daytime (such as when I arrived) it is populated by fruit-juice sellers, dried-fruit dealers, flower salesman, snake charmers doing all sorts of odd things to gaggles of cobras, and men who try and place a monkey on your head in return for whatever protection money they can extort. As is so often the case, the hotel I had thought of was suffering from Lonely Planet Disease - the decline in quality and increase in price that comes from the guaranteed business of being included in the guidebook. After an hour of backstreet meandering, checking what must have been 2 dozen hotels, I settled on the second I had looked at - the rather well-named Hotel des Amis, running about $12 for a double room, and worth every penny.

Marrakesh really is quite full of the scenes one would expect of a Moroccan city - covered markets full of bright fabrics, carvings, and metalwork, carpets (and their salesmen), minarets blasting the call to prayer 5 times a day. What it isn't, though, is some sort of anachronistic hangover from the middle ages. Those minarets are blasting their call from loudspeakers. Buried in the market are umpteen mobile phone shops. Internet cafes abound. Motorcycles are absolutely everywhere, including in alleys barely big enough for two people to walk, let alone drive. It's noisy, smelly, chaotic, and alive. I was pretty sold after one afternoon, and after tracking down Mike Brown at the train station, we spent a few days getting even more sold on the place.

On the first day there, we spent much of our time getting thoroughly lost - perhaps the single best thing you can do in any foreign place. We put a good many kms of alleyways underfoot, and got caught in more dead-ends than I care to count. Excellent. We did, later, get to seeing some of the tourist sites - the Saadian Tombs, with their beautiful plasterworks, the ruined, but beautifully empty Palais el-Badi, and the gorgeous Palais al-Bahia, pieces of a history that is headed toward 1000 years. There was a good deal of mint tea sipped throughout the process, with Moroccans being fond of a blend that runs about equal between tea, mint, and sugar. Excellent. After a good walkabout, we jumped round the corner to the neighbourhood hammam, or bathhouse, for a good steaming.

Once again, noteable mention must go to Djemma el Fna, which at night transforms itself magically into a huge open air food market, with stalls serving up piles of food of all kinds. Over a few successive nights, Mike and I downed good portions of sausages, local fishes, steamed snails, sheep's heads, and other delicacies of the kind that travelling makes one more prone to enjoy. All of this to a background of storytellers, drum circles, singers, and one man who tried to make money somehow from a hedgehog. To each their own.

The city's delights, though, can only last so long, and with the mountains shimmering in the distance from the roof of our hotel, it was time to head for the hills. We caught a couple shared taxis (involving 7 people shoved into an old Mercedes banging up the mountain roads) to the town of Imlil, starting point of the trek to Jebel Toubkal, tallest peak in the High Atlas range.

One of the many reasons I like Mike Brown, and like travelling with him, is that he possesses an invincibility complex that rivals or even exceeds my own. Unlike me, tricked out with a pile of shiny new MEC gear bought for a year of adventuring, Mike arrived with what he had available from his Sierra Leonean stash of cold weather gear. I went with boots, toque, jacket and sleeping bag. Mike went with running shoes, windbreaker, and warm thoughts. Even with the acquisition of a hat in Imlil, he definitely had to tough it out.

The trek itself was gorgeous, and utterly exhausting. We started from the village with a steep scurry up switchbacks that took us to a path that overlooked another village, snagged onto a hillside like a barnacle on a ship. We pushed forward, hopped a few streams on some well-placed rocks, and pushed up a rocky path that moved steadily (and occaisionally steeply) up the hills, following a stream of meltwater up towards the source. The first day's hike takes around 6 hours, at the end of which you find yourself at the mountain refuges set up with chalet-style dormitories at the foot of Toubkal itself, in a little valley surrounded by grey peaks and bits of snow. Having hauled 40 pounds of food and gear up to there, I was a wee bit sore, but exhilerated by a perfect day. After a night piled into a chilly dorm, listening to the drunken singing of a huge group of Slovene climbers, it was 5:30 am, time to rise, shine, shove some bread and Vache Qui Rit cheese (it's everywhere) into our mouths, and get climbing. Stepping outside the lodge at that time of morning was pretty magical - you could look towards the end of the valley and look down at the cloud deck sitting over the countryside. Over us, it was only blue, sunburn-inducing sky.

The ascent to the top of Jebel Toubkal took about 4.5 hours, and although never a technical climb (ie, no crampons or ropes) was often a bit of a scramble, with long stretches up very steep snow slopes, or hopping from rock to rock, or simply wheezing our way ever upward. Although I left my big bag at the bottom, I was definitely feeling my lack of cardio, with a good many breathless stops on boulders. In any case, by 11:30 AM we were surveying the mountains around us from the highest point in North Africa - 4 167 metres up. I took a quick nap, a tone of photos of the utterly stunning view, and headed down a bit after Mike, who had managed to mangle his knee solidly, making the descent pretty torturous for him. We had decided early in the day to descend all the way back to Imlil and catch the taxi back to Marrakesh, which proved a wee bit ambitious. We did make it to Imlil, to stagger exhaustedly into our hotel at 8 30 PM, after 14 hours of trekking. With the resteraunts closed, we fed ourselves on general store food, making it a full 2 days without a real meal. Needless to say, we slept well. One hell of a trek, it was - I've climbed things called mountains before, but neither of us had really experienced the proper alpine thing, glaciers and crags and all. It was absolutely sublime.

The next day, it was back to Marrakesh by shared taxi, and then right onto a luckily timed bus - we had decided to head to the coast instead of back to the valleys of the Atlas, with both of us a good bit debilitated by the climb. It took us about 4 hours to get to Essaouira, with one bus breakdown in mid-journey to make it a bit more entertaining. Essaouira itself is something else entirely - a gorgeous, whitewashed town on the Atlantic, surrounded by 17th century French fortifications that can be climbed for incredible views. It's full of little treed squares, cafes, restaurants with soft pillows against the walls, a windy beach and a busy fishing port. Mike and I being who we are, we found our way to the local seaside drinking den - bars being few and far between in Muslim lands - and had a few beers with the local drunk. Indeed, the pursuit of beer has taken us to great lengths here, hidden as it often is in unmarked little places, reserved for the sketchiest of men - never women. Today, our mission was made easier by a further revelation - the local wine shop, unmarked and surrounded by local ne'erdowells. How did we find it? A friend of ours collared a local who was visibly drunk and asked him. This information was passed through some other acquaintances, and presto - a 5 dollar bottle of Cab Sauv to drink on the terrace as the sun goes down.

Essaouira is lovely, and will be home for a few more days - it's perhaps one of the most picturesque places I've been in a long time, with wrought iron and carved doors and bright fabrics and markets all demanding your attention, and great fresh food filling our bellies. It's a tough life, let me tell you.