January 6th, 2008, No Comments »
Yesterday afternoon we hired a guide and meandered through Djemaa el Fna, Marrakesh’s extraordinary, sprawling souk. Wikipedia says it’s the busiest marketplace in all of Africa, and I believe it. I’d need a week to write a satisfactory description of the place, which overpowers the senses at every turn. Instead, here are a few photos we took, both before and after dark. These are three of my favourites:
Our ultimate destination, Essaouira, apparently has a nice, smaller-scale version of Marrakesh’s market. We can take the next couple of months to explore that at our own speed.
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January 4th, 2008, 6 Comments »
We have successfully touched down in the Palmeraie, a resorty suburb of Marrakesh. Thanks to LuxuryLink, we’re staying at Jnane Tamsna, a luxurious, garden-filled sprawling compound of lovely Moroccan houses.
I had mixed feelings about staying in the Palmeraie instead of the middle of Marrakesh, but we’ll be living in the dead centre of Essaouira’s medina for two and a half months. I figured we could enjoy a little touristy luxury for a few days. Plus, this place is only about a quarter-full, so we pretty much have the gardens and heated pools to ourselves. It’s gorgeous.
Of All the Gin Joints
We landed in Casablanca, and overnighted in Morroco’s grimy commercial centre. I’ve never much cared for big cities in the developing world (the exception being Havana), and I wasn’t particularly enamoured of Casablanca.
The exception was the extraordinary Hassan II mosque. I gather non-Muslims are usually not permitted inside mosques, so we jumped at the chance for a tour. Maybe they made an exception for this mosque to recover expenses–it cost half a billion dollars to build. From Wikipedia:
Built on reclaimed land, almost half of the surface of the mosque lies over the Atlantic water. This was inspired by the verse of the Qur’an that states “the throne of God was built on the water”. Part of floor of this facility is glass so worshippers can kneel directly over the sea; above, lasers shine at night from the top of the minaret toward Mecca
By a significant margin, it’s the biggest religious building (nay, complex) I’ve ever seen. It can accommodate 25,000 worshippers (20,000 men on the floor, 5,000 women on enclosed balconies). The main worshipping space is mind-bogglingly enormous–it defies description. I took some photos, but they don’t satisfactorily portray the experience.
Riding on the Marrakesh Express
The following morning we took the three-hour train trip down to Marrakesh. The landscape changed from farmland to red rock terrain. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit how much I was reminded of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet. Though, of course, I’m pretty sure those scenes were shot in Tunisia.
Morroco seems like an ideal culinary nation for me. The food is flavourful but not particularly spicy. They eat a lot of poultry, and I’ve always preferred cous-cous to rice. Plus, Morocco is mostly a dry nation, so restaurants offer a rich variety of non-alcoholic drinks and juices.
Here’s our nascent Morocco photo set on Flickr, if anybody’s interested. More updates as events warrant and web access permits.
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September 25th, 2007, 8 Comments »
As I’ve mentioned, we’re planning on spending two or three months in Morocco in the new year. We plan to visit a couple of towns to see what we like, and then find some medium-term, Internet-enabled accommodation.
When we first arrive, we’ll obviously need somewhere to stay. We turned once again to Luxury Link, an auction site for luxury travel (I have a soft, slightly rotten spot for lovely, unusual lodgings). We were the successful and sole bidders on four nights at the awesome-looking Jnane Tamsna, a guest house in the Palmeraie on the outskirts of Marrakesh.
As the only bidders, we paid the minimum price for Jnane Tamsna–about CAN $950 for four nights, breakfast every day, one dinner, a guide for a half-day and sundry other tidbits. The website put the retail value of the package at $2500. Even if they’re padding those numbers, that’s still a fantastic deal.
We got a similar killer deal on Luxury Link for the mind-buggeringly luxurious Boscolo Dei Dogi Hotel (some photos of our room) when we visited Venice.
Minds Change, Should Post Titles?
When I originally booked our first trip with Luxury Link, I was pretty unhappy with the auction system, which differs from eBay’s. My subsequent happy experiences with Luxury Link has ameliorated those concerns, and a while ago I updated my earlier post to say so.
I’ve exchanged a few friendly emails with the folks at Luxury Link, who more or less asked me to change the title of that post, because of its SEO juice. I declined, but ever since I’ve wondered if I should.
Should I modify the post title to reflect my current thinking, or should blog posts remain archival reflections of my thinking on a given day in my past? I have written positively about Luxury Link since then, but haven’t knocked off that first post. It’s a trivial little test case (less trivial for the SEO-sensitive owners of Luxury Link), I suppose, and an issue I’ll encounter more often the older my blog gets.
What would you do?
UPDATE: I decided to change the title of that post to something more accurate, and reflect that in another update at the top of the post.
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May 12th, 2007, 7 Comments »
I know nothing about Morocco. Well, not nothing, but hardly anything. Let’s see what I know:
- Possible destinations include Marrakesh, Fez and Casablanca. There are probably plenty of others.
- They apparently have nice rugs.
- Crosby, Stills and Nash had a hit with “Marrakesh Express” in 1969.
- “Play it again, Sam”, “of all the gin joints…”, “beginning of a beautiful friendship” and so forth.
- I’ve looked at this awesome-looking place on LuxuryLink before.
- I just read the frustrating “You Shall Know Our Velocity” (Eggers is a great stylist, but must all of his books feature such aimless losers?), and part of it took place in Morocco.
- No Westerner can smoke from a hookah and not look utterly ridiculous.
- I thought part of Star Wars was shot there, but that was actually in nearby Tunisia.
That’s about it. Has anybody been there? Any recommendations of places to see or places to avoid? I obviously plan to read a guidebook or two and surf around ye olde web, but I thought I’d start here.
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