Traversing the High Atlas to Marrakech
After spending as long as we could justify in Ait Ben Haddou, we hit the road for Marrakesh. This drive (180+ km or 110-ish miles) on paper looked like our easiest drive of the whole trip. Road trips, however, don’t happen on paper. Especially when you consider that we had to drive up and over the snow-capped High Atlas Mountains - one of three ranges in Morocco (the High, the Mid and the Anti). The meandering, narrow roads that Morocco features in that part of country had Sarah and Maya’s stomachs turning, while I sat up front and enjoyed the views. At one particularly long delay at a construction site, Hicham explained that the French were taking the lead on that project. I half-expected they might surrender while we were waiting (sorry…obvious joke). We eventually got moving and made it to the high pass where a collective bathroom and lunch break got us out of our Hyundai 4x4. Maya made a point of getting on the snow and we all savored a brief rest stop connection with the white stuff. We drank our mint tea, Hicham inhaled yet another impressive pile of Berber fare, and we were on our way down the mountains heading north.
Marrakech (I actually now prefer that spelling much like Fes instead of Fez) was a place we’d struggled with possibly skipping for an overnight stop. The medina there is the biggest and brashest. Unlike Fes’s reputation for having (allegedly) the world’s first university and an intellectually stimulative sense of itself, Marrakech has the reputation for commerce. The uniqueness of its design history piqued my interest more than anything. We’d also gotten a bit punchy by the amount of time we’d spent driving through and past Morocco’s delightful sights. Man, are we glad we did pull the trigger on a Marrakech night. It ended up being one of our favorite cities, and definitely a place we’d like to come to explore well beyond the less than a full 24-hours we got there. We ate dinner in a tourist-geared but still quite lovely place (La Cantine Des Gazelles) near the medina’s famous central square (Jemaa El-Fna). I’d heard we could find snake charmers and all manner of Indiana Jones-esque character in all directions. Unless they were hiding behind all the restaurant barkers, we didn’t see them before we’d made our way back to Riad OLY. This one had a hobbit-hole door and an especially lovely interior garden. Here again - Morocco’s riads can be a major bargain (nightly rates for the “family rooms” were booking for around $70-80). Especially when you consider the epic breakfasts many of them serve. I’m getting that out there (foreshadowing…) before touching on our last few overnights in Morocco in the next post. Let’s just say that things went seriously downhill from Marrakech on the accommodations.
The next day’s shopping explorations provided a solid survey of the sorts of delights that were around every corner in the medina. Sarah found an honest-to-god cape that’s awesome. As the shop owner explained, the men wear capes all the time there. Women - not so much. Ask Sarah to check it out the next time you cross paths with her. It’s not the sort of thing you wear under your regular clothes in case a call goes out for a superhero’s intervention. But I’m hoping it will still be on or near her person often enough to sport when duty calls. We also took time for an adequate introduction to Majorelle Gardens - a private garden built by a French painter with a pair of related museums. Right next door is the Yves Saint Laurent Museum. It was his connection to Marrakech and the Majorelle’s art deco buildings and gardens that had fallen into disrepair that placed the design inspirations coming from Morocco so firmly on the world’s fashion map. I could have spent hours more there and in the surrounding area outside the medina. As it was, I was inspired by The Berber Museum (inside of Majorelle Jardin, to use the proper name for the place) that told their story so well in fashion and objects.
As we hit the road for the Moroccan coast, I savored the idea of Marrakech being infused with a vibe. Its design elements - current, prior, or eternal - forming a collective inspiration. We all agreed we’re coming back, one way or another. I’m pretty sure we won’t exactly head back on a version of the train in Crosby, Stills & Nash’s Marrakesh Express from Casablanca to Marrakech. But you never know, do you? Ciao.
