The Morocco Mission

At the end of February we flew into Marrakech and into summer conditions (for us!) of beautifully fine days and mid-20s temperatures. We walked for seemingly forever experiencing Tangines and Brochettes of one sort or another and wonderful smells mixed at times with the distinctive smell of sewerage that is almost ubiquitously synonymous with a developing world. Marraakech impressed as a clean and tidy city from inside the Souks of the Medina to the Nouvelle Ville beyond the old city walls. The wafting warm air made early evenings quite pleasant and provided a brief barrier between the heat of the day and the cold of the night. Getting lost was just so easy. School and University French was definitely a valuable aid even though vocab and expresiions were dredged up from the depths of the grey matter. The Medina was an almost overwhelming experience, particularly when we were there in the early evenings: everyone it seems tends to gather there and the entertainment and food smells were just too enticing to ignore: it was a step outside our square to eat on the side of the square in the food stalls but it was a great place to watch the world go by. Dinner on our last night in Marrakech was spent upstairs in a cafe overlooking the Medina and the view was just awesome. But Marrakech was more than Medina and food. We tracked around the traffic riddled and sometimes very narrow streets looking for Old Palaces, Old Temples, and with the Lonely Planet as our guide,over the three days we were there we were able to tick off all our (Well, Shelley's) predetermined must sees. One of the most impressive days was the day we took a trip into the lower hills of the High Atlas to Ourika Valley where the early days of Spring were being born through snow melt in the rivers and apple blossom along the roadside villages. But also impressive were the Koutoubia (the Mosque and its Minaret just outside of Djemaa el-Fna, the Medina square),the Kasbah and the Saadian Tombs (which we were not going to let escape us despite the map reading difficulties); the Palais de la Bahia (the old and partly dismantled Royal Palace); the Musee de Marrakech (which for 20DHS we were eventually able to find - the cost of getting some direction from the side of the Souk); the Dar Si Said and its Museum of Moroccan Arts and even to the Jardin Menara where seemingly almost every Moroccan family (a bit of an exaggeration) whiled away their Sunday afternoons, the way Kiwis would do by going to the beach. Marrakech was Marvellous.