TEN years on from Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud’s affectionate look at the Moroccan hippy trail, and Marrakesh continues to shed its artful scruffiness in favour of over-designed hotels and fashion spreads in glossy magazines.
Those of us who remember kaftans the first time round and backpacked the world 30 years ago can afford to be sniffy, but we face a genuine dilemma. Where do we find somewhere relatively unexplored, ethnic, colourful and exotic enough to excite our middle-aged appetites? The answer, so I discovered recently, lies in Fez, Morocco’s third-largest city after Rabat and Casablanca. Described by the French, who ruled until independence in 1956, as “a labyrinth of vagabonds”, it’s a raw unmade bed of a city.
It does have tourist-class hotels and the inevitable tour groups, but the crocodiles of French, German and Japanese we saw in the medina were clutching white-knuckled at their bags with rabbit-caught-in-headlights stares. If, like us on their first morning, they found themselves in butchers’ alley, the poor dears had just had a stomach-lurching initiation to the city.
On Day 1 our guide, Mo Mo, led us straight into an open-air slaughterhouse where carcasses dripped blood and scabby squawking chickens were being scalded alive as sweet little bunnies in cages waited for a practised hand with the cleaver. He pointed out the tastiest dishes of the day — bull’s testicles, ram’s head with eyeballs intact (the best part, allegedly) and pyramids of yellow preserved animal fat laced with bits of dried beef called khlir, a delicacy he urged us to try. No, thanks.
It was a freezing winter’s morning so both sexes were wearing dark wool jellabahs with hoods drawn down over their faces. As we strolled past more stalls piled high with tripe, hooves and other body parts, it felt like shopping with medieval monks in a creepy Hieronymus Bosch painting. I looked around at my six fellow travellers. It seemed perverse to enjoy such an experience, but we were all smiling.
Fez claims to have the largest and oldest medina in Morocco with 10,000 alleyways, many of them dark, dank and spooky. In Marrakesh a guide is vital to swat off the other pests who buzz, hover and bug your every waking hour. Here we needed Mo Mo simply to get us out of the maze, cry “balak!” (mind out!) whenever a loaded donkey threatened to hoof us into the gutter, and literally unlock the doors to enchanting palaces.
For now Fez retains a refreshingly innocent charm. Merchants selling anything from olives to leather slippers and dried rosebuds are happy just to display their wares. With shy smiles we were invited to touch, sniff and taste, take it or leave it. When Mo Mo shepherded us down an alley to a shop selling hand-embroidered tablecloths, we braced ourselves for the usual silver-tongued hard sell. It didn’t happen.
The city is said to have 300 abandoned palaces, a legacy of the ruling oligarchy who fled when independence threatened their lavish lifestyle. All are allegedly for sale, as the Government recently passed a law allowing foreigners to buy property, and all are begging to be turned into stylish hotels. There are no high street estate agents but our guides claimed that a complete wreck, virtually a heap of rubble, would start at about £80,000.
To restore any of them to former glories, like our hotel Riad Fes, rescued and rebuilt over five years by a wealthy French architect, would surely cost millions. All wear an air of decayed decadence, none more than the Glaoui Palace, owned by the former southern ruler Haj Thami Glaoui, who hosted a reception for Roosevelt, Churchill and de Gaulle in Casablanca in 1944. Later he made a bad career move by attempting to assassinate the king.
Today the palace is still owned by his descendants. A five-star French hotel chain has been snooping around, but for now its weed-choked fountains, elaborate filigree plasterwork, exquisite tiles and stained glass can be seen only with a registered guide on the whim of its guardian Abdou, a man of hawkish leanness who protects the property with emaciated chained dogs and shows you around on silent slippers.
So far our only disappointment had been mediocre restaurant food, so we were happy to spend most of the next day with Feta, a guide and guesthouse owner, on a mission to learn how to cook couscous the Moroccan way. He turned out to be as unexpected as the rest of our Fez encounters. Within minutes he told us in chirpy English that he had a wife from Ipswich, a cat called Compost, had guided Michael Palin around town and recently did the mosaics in Mick Jagger’s London bathroom.
Amusing us with unprintable stories about Mick and Jerry, he first took us to market to buy the ingredients. While he went off to buy the basics, we were happily sidetracked by glossy green pyramids of egg-sized avocados, just-picked navel oranges with their leaves still in- tact, garlands of figs like Christmas decorations and dark blood-red strawberries at 60p a kilo.
