Travel Guides | Marrakech Travel Guide
Marrakech Travel Guide
Drink and look
Deep in the old town, a famous fountain is known to all as chrob wa chouf, ‘drink and look’. Rendez-vous here. The fountain’s geometric jigsaw surface of tiny tiles is like the city: kaleidoscopic. On a summer’s day, a wander in the médina-maze does more than parch you: it massages all the senses. You’ll gulp down Sidi Ali water, you’ll gaze on all the postcard clichés – and pick up on a hundred minor pleasures. Lose yourself in labyrinths of light and shade, then take a horse-drawn calèche, the gondola of Marrakech, through moped fumes to ‘la Place’, Jemaâ el Fna, the city’s hippy-collage of a centre and pulsating home to unforeseen encounters, storytellers, mythomaniacs.
Sheherazade’s place
And if the city were personified, who would it be? Paunchy bazaar merchant, hospitable but venal? The médina girl adopting urchin airs to wheedle a tourist dirham? Veiled Nada, patron of the internet café? Or an ever-marginal itinerant storyteller? Beneath its coloured surface, there is more to jovial, jostling Marrakech than meets the eye. The city is as unfathomable as the snow-capped High Atlas mountains, visible from médina rooftops on a spring day.
Into the High Atlas
The Red City is the daughter of the Atlas. Mountain melt-water sustains the oasis town down on the arid Haouz. And after the heaving fleshpots of Marrakech, a mountain fastness will be a welcome relief. The High Atlas is a land of shattered rock plateaux and green valleys, deep gorges and shale drops. Here adobe villages and miniature terraced fields reveal a people who long survived in harmony with their harsh environment. The 21st-century ideology of tourist individualism – on a potentially massive scale – remains in the city of the plain. Quest for the essence of exotica in Marrakech if you like, but its time spent in the sunburned uplands of the Atlas really gives life a new strangeness.
|
