The Storks of Rabat

Clack. Clack. Clack-clack-clacking. I know this sound even though I have never heard it before. It is the sound that storks make with their bills when they are on their nests. I recognize it in Chellah, the expansive archeological site on a hillside above the Bou Regreg in Rabat. Just before leaving for Morocco, I read Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov. I enjoyed the novel immensely, in which storks and their clacking feature. As I start descending into the site, beginning with Phoenician ruins and continuing past the Roman period, I hear the noise and at first do not think much. From the walls looking over the river valley I see trees filled with nests and realize that those are storks wheeling about or hunkered in massive beds of twigs. The last section of the site that I explore dates from the Muslim Marinid period when Chellah was repurposed as a necropolis beginning in 1285. Up close is a stork on a nest crowning the ancient minaret. It is there, where I can see its bill moving, that the realization arrives, oh, that noise comes from the storks, just like in the book. An unexpected discovery, which is what everything in Morocco proves to be.

Rabat is a gentle welcome into Morocco. It disproves all the mildly hysterical blog posts and careful but clear warnings in guidebooks. I am a woman travelling alone and Rabat puts me at ease, makes it clear that I am going to be fine. I am not hassled. People are disinterestedly friendly. Accepting. I start walking the medina at night, absorbing the atmosphere, finding a café for an evening meal of harira, another night joining a long line for a simple slice of pizza then strolling along the exterior walls, dodging kids playing soccer to circle back to my riad.

I am a curiosity at the riad, with my five-night stay. Most other guests are just passing through for one night. I wanted time to settle in, figure out how things worked, find my rhythm and get a feel for Morocco. Which I do. I enjoy having the time to slowly explore Rabat and Salé just across the river. Setting the pace for the entire trip, I don’t worry about checking off sights, although I eventually see many of the ones in the guidebooks. I do what I enjoy anywhere in the world – I just start walking. I may have no set destination, absorbing daily routines, observing little details, letting the city and the country find its way to me.

As the most recent capital of Morocco, Rabat is a city of wide, treed avenues flanked by monumental buildings with extravagant decoration. The medina is white and blue and feels well organized and well lived in. The coast is immediate with beaches and craggy rocks catching the surf. There are parks where students squeeze into benches, packed restaurants with tile-lined walls and tagines heating on their individual braziers, sleek modern trams and men pushing carts through the medina. Even the dogs roaming in small packs appear big, bold and happy.

Rabat is the only place in Morocco where there is a rowing club. My first full day in the country is National Independence Day. I find the tiny club in the marina of Salé, really just a collection of boats by a tent with ergometers. But I am too jetlagged and too uncertain to approach anyone. But in fact I do row. Small blue wooden boats, known as flouka, serve as ferries between the two cities. The oarsman stands, facing forward, rocking as the two narrow wooden oars dig deep into the water, working against the strong tidal current. I hire a boat to row me across provided that he lets me try rowing. It reminds me of rowing the traditional boats in Venice. I earn some praise from the boatman but he takes over to get us docked. I sit by the pier for a while, watching families stroll by, girlfriends share a snack of chickpeas, a fisherman toss some of his catch to the waiting cats. I wander off to my next discovery.

Atlas Mountain Drive

The day after a solo drive from Marrakesh south to Agdz I struggle to conjure detailed memories. Instead, adjectives come to mind. Stunning, spectacular, amazing. The Atlas Mountains are hard to capture, and not just in photographs. The landscape changes so frequently and so distinctly that there is no one Atlas Mountains to take a picture of or hold as a memory.

On the way towards them from the north, they hold you off, forming a formidable wall, setting a barrier, not showing you the way in. Even as you begin to climb and must now, surely, be in the mountains, they remain hidden and evasive, offering a quick glimpse of one beautiful landform, immediately replaced by another startlingly different set of slopes, valleys, walls, peaks, villages and colours. Just a tease of the expected snow-clad peaks, the real mountains.

The pass is non-committal, unclear that this actually a continental divide and that the water will now flow in a different direction. A jumble of peaks adds to the confusion and only the road shows you the way through.

Going south, the landscape opens, becoming friendlier, inviting you forward, onwards. More villages perfect in their red houses edged in white, a slope of boulders posing as soil, patches of fields unnaturally, densely green, a trio of peaks finally looking like the mountains of pictures, distant hills soft enough to stroke, a long flat line demarking a mesa. The Atlas Mountains leave a blur, like a photograph snapped from a car moving too fast or a panorama shot that presents too much foreground with insufficient details to grasp and say, there, that is the Atlas Mountains, that is my memory, that is my photograph.

Le Grand Sud

Agdz and the Vallée du Drâa are places where the kids still want to say hello. Walking or driving I receive constant waves and calls, sometimes bonjour and just as often hello. Only once am I hassled by a kid when I am walking, a lone girl when most children that I see are with others. I understand little of what she says as she follows me except for “stylo”. When I don’t produce a pen, a practiced pout appears. She is the exception. There are so many smiles, much curiosity and many gifts of joy for me in the momentary connection of a wave or greeting.

Adults look at you too and may smile, especially if I do. Most say bonjour, often followed by “ca va?” or “ca va bien?”. Walking the streets of Agdz I see virtually no other westerners. The chambre d’hôte where I am staying is located at the edge of the city, in an old village with no space for cars and many buildings crumbling into ruin. Here or on the myriad paths of the palmeraie, if I don’t get greeted I get ignored but in a way that feels accepting. I am just there, walking about. We are all just on our way.

And then there are the donkeys. So many wonderful donkeys. Some are pulling carts but most are ridden, with just a saddle cloth. Usually behind the rider are a pair of panniers, open at both ends. The variety of objects transported is remarkable. I am especially taken with long palm fronts far bigger than the length of the donkey, trailing behind, kicking up dust.

Walking about in the palmeraie occupies me for hours. A web of paths and dusty single lane roads weave among the palm trees and fields. I am lucky to be here after recent heavy rains. The green is refreshing – I understand that for two years of drought it has been mostly brown and grey.

One day I drive south past Zagora to a first dune, although not yet the Sahara. My route south from Agdz is the old highway which in turn was the track used by caravans for centuries. It is slow going on a narrow bendy route through multiple villages and towns. Which is perfect. Time to look at things, stop to take photos, wave to the kids. I have been surprised by the hills or low mountains, a long massif with lines of time and erosion emphasized by green shading.

The further south I go, I am convinced the air gets drier. I regret forgetting my lip balm, take more frequent sips of water. Waterworks become more evident and significant. There are deep, wide canals of concrete with yellow control structures. Half circles of aqueducts run above ground. Old wells are big and round, a drill rig is boring a new one. I am told that solar panels are being installed to replace diesel pumps but there is concern that this might lead to wastage. The small black PVP pipes of drip irrigation are everywhere – dense lines in fields, coiled in the back of pick-up trucks, for sale in multiple shops.  The first green shoots of wheat and alfalfa are popping up, while other fields look freshly ploughed, some by horse, some by tractor.

On another day a tour of a restored kasbah (home) within a crumbling ksar (fortified village) is organized. It is a two hour walk there, and I am guided for the first hour through the palmeraie, along the ledge of an abandoned irrigation canal, across the oued or wadi, currently a dry riverbed. At the point from where it would be impossible for me to get lost despite the many intersecting trails, I continue on my own. I am told to just walk towards the sun. At some point I will hit a road and then the way will be obvious.

I had seen numerous ksars already from the road or path and wandered through extensive ruins near where I am staying in Agdz. Built of mud brick, with few windows on the crenelated exterior walls, sometimes beautifully etched with decorations and often with regular holes from the same construction methods I remember seeing in Mali so many years ago. To be inside the ksar walls where apparently 20 families still live, and especially to tour the restored palace or kasbah of Tamnougalt was an exceptional experience. A confusing maze of stairwells, courtyards, vaulted passageways formed the kasbah. There were a few displays making it a museum but it was the architecture and form that struck me the most. And the stunning views from the terrace where I had lunch. Constant upkeep is required – the majority of ksars I saw elsewhere are melting from the onslaught of the harsh environmental elements of wind, rain and sun.  

I am introduced to Hassan, the owner of the kasbah, the driving force behind the renovations and a direct descent of the caids who represented the sultan in the area for centuries. He is building a restaurant in the adjacent palmeraie. I ask him when it will open. He looks at me and says “When it is ready, it is a project for the future”.

The Beach at Essaouira

Up here, on the edge of the high dune above the long beach, I am enjoying observing the activity down below. Horses walk, trot, canter, gallop while camels stroll majestically or just sit in the sand. People walk or jog the beach, alone or as couples. Barefoot and edging into the water or with shoes on, moving purposefully. It is relaxed action. Three quads travelling in a line fail to irritate me. Out on the water, surfers practice on little waves, windsurfers zip about, kitesurfers’ sails billow and swoop and the bright wings of the hydrofoils dance among them all. It seems that everyone is enjoying what they like to do, co-existing on the great wide beach with a view of the fortified town.

From the dune the water looks like multiple shades of pale indigo. From the beach, it is greyer, with a hint of green below the white waves and brown where it finally lands on the sand. I catch up with and pass three camels languidly stepping along the water’s edge. The tourists are brightly dressed adding extra colour to the eclectic saddle cloths. They look like they are enjoying themselves.  Maybe another time I will add camel to my small collection of unusual rides. In South Africa I rode an ostrich. They run fast and it is hard to stay on. When I was 15 our family was returning from Malaysia to Canada. While living in Kuala Lumpur we were great fans of Hindi movies. In Jaipur we rode elephants to the Amber Fort up the hill. The whole way a few boys followed us, taunting and heckling, reducing the pleasure of the experience. As we arrived, one elephant decided to pee, which came out in a vast arc of liquid, soaking our tormentors. My father had the wherewithal and wit to shout “haathee mere sasthi”, the title of a popular film which roughly translates to “elephants are my friends”.

There is no heckling on the beach at Essaouira. I walk on. Lately I have been feeling slow and sluggish – good to know that I can still outpace a camel.

Earlier I did the requisite walk through the harbour, took a photo of a seagull, strolled along the skala or fortified walls, then wandered through the medina. I didn’t spend long. If I had found the perfect seat in a café I might have paused and taken in all the people doing whatever it was that absorbed them. But I don’t and all the things for sale begin to overwhelm me. I found the medina a bit sad. Away from the stores and stalls crammed with colourful and exotic wares or busting with vegetables or tangerines buried in beds of leaves, the medina seems old and falling into disrepair. It reminds me of the crumbling ksars in the Valley of the Draa. Impossible to know in one brief visit whether it is being rehabilitated or going further into decline.

A second pass through the medina on a different day gives a more positive impression. I find a place to sit and watch the passing parade and this time I stop to look a tiny bit at the wares for sale, to appreciate the variety and craftmanship. I avoid those back alleys, sticking to the main thoroughfares which are animated and colourful.

I return to the hotel via the beach. From a distance the scattering of camels waiting for customers reminds me of the savanna of argan trees beyond the city. It is Saturday and the beach is busier. Kids cram a playground, a couple of football games attract a few spectators and still the horses gallop, the camels saunter and the couples stroll. I go back to the beach every evening for three days in a row, to watch the action, sometimes weaving among the parked camels or wandering along the water’s edge as the sun sets.

Fez and the Middle Atlas

In Essaouira I began to get bored. As pleasant as it was to stroll the beach, as tasty as the homecooked meals at the hotel were, as fascinating as I found the faces I passed on the street, I felt that I was starting to mark time. I was feeling ready to get home. But I was locked into five more nights in Morocco with non-refundable train and hotel bookings and a likely impossible task to change my flights. I worried that four nights in Fez, with my accommodation in the heart of the medina, would be too much intensity, too many people, too much of walls and pavement.

I was so very wrong. My last few days in Fez were magical. It began with the final hours of the train ride there. Once we left the coast, the landscape evolved to hills and contours. There were low mountains in the background. Fields and orchards. Villages up close and in the distance. The scenery was everchanging, sometimes smooth, sometimes textured, offering infinite variations of a small palette of colours and not a straight line anywhere.

The riad, Dar Seffarine, was sensational. Twenty some years ago, an Iraqi-Norwegian architect and his wife bought the property in a state of disrepair. Working closely over five years with local craftsmen with traditional knowledge of wood, tile and stonework, they not just restored the home to its previous grandeur, but they elevated it to a work of art where guests can imagine, if only for a few nights, living in a kasbah, a taste of Arabian nights and dreams. My bedroom was as intricately decorated as the public areas and spacious with a salon complete with Ottoman lounger and a perfect writing desk. Vast shutters opened to the light-filled inner courtyard. I could spy on the other guests. To reach the rooftop terrace with its spectacular views of the medina, I had to descend a twisting staircase to the main floor, then ascend an equally tortuous route to the top. The tiles on the stairs were identical to ones I saw in a medersa and in shops above the stink of the tanneries.

In the words of another guest, the medina in Fez is chill, even though the main passageways near the riad are jammed with shops bursting with wares, and people, not just tourists, throng the narrow pedestrian streets. Every medina I visited in Morocco was very different. Rabat’s was wide and spacious, bright and white with splashes of colour and sometimes potted plants. Taroudant felt full and lively. There I took dozens of pictures of metal doors in pastel or bright colours with patterns of squares or circles or triangles, entrances to the homes of families. Essaouira’s made me sad, especially the side alleys in states of ruin or dirty disrepair punctuated by riads for the tourists and the main streets of shops, stalls and boutiques. Fez is a massive warren of narrow, twisting, turning passages many of them roofed, walls sometimes crowding in. The passages barely had room for the carts carrying goods to pass. You are always either going up or down. Spectacular historical buildings dot the medina, announced by beautifully painted and carved doors. At prayer times it is possible to snatch tantalizing peeks into richly decorated mosques, entrance forbidden to non-Muslims. Big, wide, open doors invite you into kasbahs with central courtyards ringed by two or three floors of wooden balconies, also stunning with repeating patterns of stone and wood. Parts of the medina are in need of repair and often wooden beams prop up walls you pass by. Work seemed to be underway and everywhere. The day I checked out, the tiny passage out from the riad was blocked by donkeys burdened with cement bags. We good-naturedly squeezed by to enter the square where coppersmiths still clang at their craft.

I particularly appreciated Fez because I had a day away from the city. I needed to be immersed in landscapes, see the wide sky free of buildings, hike alone among the cedars. This part of Morocco is greener with a richness of agriculture and forests. We drove up past turnoffs to ski resorts onto high plateaus dotted white with sheep troops. In villages, the onion harvest was stored in multiple lines of “frigos natureaux”. A base of stones, onions draped on top covered with straw then tarps.  They could last there into the spring when prices would be higher. On pitted backroads we passed a village of dull, low stone houses at the edge of a dry lakebed, one of five that no longer have water. Nearby was a new complex of bright, modern buildings and massive, high cages where falcons used by the rich to hunt were housed and trained.  We skirted the edge of the vast weekly souk in Azrou and cruised past the chalets of Ifrane. Refreshed, I could dive back into the people, alleyways and gentle tumult of the Fez medina.

On my last day in Fez, following a park path to the new city, I pass a nest on an electricity tower with two storks clack, clack, clacking their bills. I spotted storks infrequently but everywhere that I travelled for the four weeks in Morocco. I saw them from train windows, during long drives across sculpted terrain, while exploring on foot. A pleasant constant, a delightful discovery among many from a charming country.