Morocco arrives in dry heat, colour, music and aroma. From Marrakech’s souks and late nights to the Atlantic coast and Agafay Desert, those first impressions gradually become something lived.
Morocco captivates me the very moment I step onto the airport grounds.
The dry heat comes first. Then the colours, music, noise and aromas arrive almost together, before I have had time to decide which deserves my attention. Ochre and terracotta sit beneath a hard blue sky. Palms interrupt the masonry. Arabic and French move through the voices around me. Marrakech seems to have little interest in introducing itself one thing at a time.
*Salaam alaikum.*
It is the first phrase that belongs entirely to where I have landed. I have heard the words before, of course, but hearing them here is different. They now have heat around them, colour behind them and a city beyond them. I look about with the undisguised curiosity of somebody newly arrived, trying to take in everything at once.
Then Marrakech gives me my first surprise.
By night, the city I met in ochre and terracotta has dressed for dinner. The party scene at Safran defies my preconceptions about the Arab lifestyle. Music, dancing and high spirits carry on into the early hours. Conversation rises around the tables; the music grows louder rather than quieter as midnight passes. Outside, people are still waiting to come in.
This is not the Arab evening I had imagined before arriving.
Travel has a useful habit of embarrassing certainty, and Marrakech wastes very little time doing so. The language outside the airport has not changed. Nor has the city. What has changed is the picture I brought with me.
By daylight, Morocco gives me considerably more to look at.
Morocco – it is colour, aroma and attire.
At Bahia Palace, sunlight does half the decorating: cedar holds it above while zellij breaks it across the floor.
At low tide in Agadir, lunch remains on the table while the Atlantic seems to withdraw towards the horizon.
Wake early in Agafay and watch the apparently bare rock begin to keep its own record of light.
The souk seems to gather all three into its narrow passages. Aromatic spices stand beside tea and olives. Traditional leather babouche slippers appear in rows; woven and leather bags hang beside jewellery and kaftans in fabric after fabric. Colour is not arranged politely at a distance. It hangs overhead, fills doorways and sits in heaps close enough to touch. Leather, spice and tea occupy the same few metres.
And then there is the bargaining.
A merchant names his price. I offer something nearer half. His expression suggests that I have gravely misunderstood both commerce and human decency. I begin to leave. Remarkably, relations improve. Another price appears. Then another.
If there is an art to Moroccan trading, much of it lies in knowing that neither the first outrage nor the second should be taken too seriously. The purchase is only part of what is happening. There is theatre in it, calculation, persistence and humour. By the time we agree, I have acquired rather more than whatever first caught my eye.
Marrakech has shown me how it dresses itself.
Then it shows me how it is built.
If my husband hasn’t built me a palace with 150 rooms featuring Atlas cedar ceilings, eight hectares of jasmine-scented Andalusian gardens and sun-drenched marble courtyards… well, there’s still room for improvement.
Bahia Palace
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The great complex is taking shape during the nineteenth century, first under Si Moussa and later, on a much greater scale, under his son Ba Hmad. Eight hectares allowed plenty of room for ambition. Yet it is not the dimensions that hold me for long.
It is the workmanship.
Painted and carved cedar ceilings pull my eyes upwards. Zellij breaks the surfaces below into intricate geometry. Stucco, marble and painted wood lead from one chamber into another until a doorway suddenly releases me into sunlight. The furniture has disappeared, but the palace does not feel stripped. Light has taken its place.
I walk from room to courtyard, from shade into sun and back beneath cedar again. In the souk, colour had been piled, hung, worn and sold. Here it has been cut, carved, painted and assembled. The same appetite for detail has acquired walls.
My husband’s prospects are deteriorating.
West of Marrakech, the Atlantic coast at Agadir changes the ambiance.
The first difference is the air. The inland heat gives way to an ocean breeze, and the compressed world of passages, shops and palace rooms suddenly opens. At low tide, I watch the Atlantic withdraw across the shore until an enormous stretch of wet sand lies between lunch and the water.
There is very little required of me here.
The sea is in front of me. Lunch is on the table. Salt moves through the air.
After Marrakech, the emptiness of the horizon is almost a colour in itself. Nothing hangs overhead. Nobody is bargaining. No tiled surface asks to be examined. My eye can travel until the Atlantic stops it.
I had begun to think I understood Morocco through abundance.
Agadir makes me reconsider.
Then we spend a night in the Agafay Desert, about half an hour from Marrakech, at a glamping site – camping, but with hotel-style comfort.
I sleep in a yurt with proper linen, a bathroom, a toilet and air conditioning. There are limits to how much hardship I can handle in the desert.
During the day, camels make their way across the rocky ground at one speed; ATVs cross it at another. Back at camp, there is a swimming pool, dinner and evening entertainment. All of this is agreeable.
Then the sun begins to go down.
From the bar, I watch the rocky ground change beneath it. The hard glare of the day weakens. Shadows stretch. Colour moves from the sky onto the land, and a landscape that had seemed bare begins to reveal differences I had not noticed before.
By morning, it happens again in reverse.
I wake in the yurt and watch the light return across the same ground. There are no souk colours here, no kaftans, no zellij, no Atlantic blue. Rock, sky and light are enough.
Only then do I think again of those first words at the airport.
Salaam alaikum.
When I first heard them, everything around me was still arriving at once: heat, colour, music, unfamiliar voices and that irresistible urge to look everywhere.
Now the words belong somewhere.
They belong to a place I have walked through rather than merely arrived in. What first appeared as a rush of colour and sound has acquired texture, faces, habits and pace. Even the distances begin to belong together: the crowded passages of Marrakech, the Atlantic shore, the rocky ground beyond the city.
I do not leave Morocco with a neat conclusion about it. I leave knowing what the dry air feels like, how long a merchant can keep a bargain alive, what sunlight does inside a tiled courtyard, how far the Atlantic can withdraw from a lunch table, and how quickly desert rock changes when the sun goes down.
Perhaps that is enough.
Salaam alaikum from Morocco.
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