Our lives are aching for places like Fez and Marrakech. We have need of Aladdin’s caves and magic carpets. Aromatic spices piled high, baskets of dried pink roses, handwoven rugs, lamps, snake charmers. Morocco enters our sanitised lives with energy and exuberance, and our imaginations with colour.
More than offering medinas and souks, reminiscent of medieval eras, or squares that come alive in the evenings with story-tellers, food stalls, fortune tellers and henna painters, Morocco offers a change of perception and invites reassessment of cultural norms.
Travelling from the hustle and bustle of the cities and shops, and guides that lead you to opulent carpet shops weaving story after story with golden thread, to the countryside, earth-built houses blend into the hillsides against vibrant verdant palmeries or gardens. Old kasbahs decorated with Berber designs, crumble away into dust and the rivers run clear with mountain water. Donkeys carry threshed wheat from the cultivated gardens lining the river, fringed with sweet-smelling roses, almond, peach and fig trees.
The rhythm of village life pervades the day, lunchtime centred around a slow-cooked tajine, the tasty stew simmered in earthenware pots and eaten communally around a small table. Rooms lined with carpets and bordered with cushions provide sitting areas, challenging the western world’s stiff and formal dining arrangements. With shoes left respectfully at the door in a heap of cheap plastic, a meal, accompanied by flat oven-baked bread, is heartily eaten with the right hand, after a kettle and bowl has circulated to wash the hands.
For every occasion, there’s a round tray, small glasses, a silver teapot crammed with fresh mint leaves, tea ceremonially poured back into the pot until the perfect consistency is obtained and then raised to a height so that the sweet hot aromatic liquid arcs down into the glasses in a golden stream.
Moroccan hospitality includes mint tea and chatter, and flat bread dipped into pungent olive oil, argen oil, or fresh butter if the family owns a cow. Siestas are enjoyed sprawled on the rich-coloured carpets and cushions. With meals eaten late, supper often approaches the midnight hour, and late-waking in the morning begins the day.
Hamams provide, as they have done for centuries, a communal bathing facility, open to males and females at different times of the day. Here, as steam fills the room, buckets of hot water are filled, mats placed on the floor, a dark treacle-like soap is lathered over bodies and exfoliating gloves remove tired old skin. They provide a way for residents without hot water to bathe and a sensual interlude for the self, to luxuriate in steam, warmth and water. These bathhouses initially challenge cultural norms as semi-nudity and group-bathing is an unusual experience for outsiders but soon becomes a comfortable and friendly sojourn.
Heightening of the senses and paradigm-shifting in Morocco is an integral part of the visit to the country. With dress-like jellabahs blowing in the wind, long turbans wrapped around heads, women’s henna’d hands and nails dyed burnt umber, greetings with handshakes and hand to heart or lips, western perceptions fly off into the Sahara as we embrace a culture that does things differently.
The joy of travelling: to discover other cultures and to realise that our way isn’t the only one and more surprisingly, may not necessarily be the best.
Morocco comes home with you. In the form of carpets that you have been cunningly convinced to buy, babouch slippers, colourful blankets, Berber jewellery, ceramics, cushions, tajine pots, teapots. The traveller attempts to transport the vibrancy and magic back with him. More than that though, a different way of life has secretly sneaked into suitcases. It challenges perceptions. And, even if you’ve surfeited on stories and snake-charmers and shopping, or had an overdose of mint tea, it follows you home and begs attention.
We have a need of places like Morocco in our lives, where we can let go of formality and rigidity, to invite in imagination, fantasy and colour, and the opportunity to indulge in a different way of being.