Saturday May 2nd awake at 8.30 am. Up in our Taroudant hotel for 9 to receive the full Moroccan breakfast, eggs poached over a bed of tomatoes and onion, coffee, orange juice, fruit jam, flatbread, two sorts of pancakes, and butter. We were pleasantly stuffed, and hid some of the flatbread and egg in our bag, to have for lunch much later. This taking food away for later would become something we did at every breakfast. I am still not quite prepared for travel, I thought we were staying at this hotel another day but we went out to find a hole-in-the-wall bank from which to extract dirhams with which Anthony was going to pay the hotel bill. He packed and instructed me to pack and in the process I left my pyjamas behind, I had put them under a cover before breakfast and forget they were there after, when I came to pack. We were four hours on the road away from Taroudant before I realised where the pyjamas were. it was a small loss; I hope the hotel owner got the wear out of them, they were plain and a nice blue/grey colour.
We were on the road from 10 am to 4 pm, winding our way through the foothills of the Anti-Atlas mountains where as we drove we passed many small communities which consisted of a few people, more goats and sheep than people, and even people camping in the desert who often had motorbikes. The most notable thing was seeing so little rubbish at the side of the roads, because we went on roads that few people travelled on. For lunch we had the flat breads and the Berber eggs from breakfast and the radishes that I'd bought in Tesco's on the Thursday, in the shade of a tree. They tasted fine. The mountains were hallucinatory in their continuous vastness. When we discussed what colours the mountains were we disagreed. Anthony's glasses have a react-a-light tint on them and my glasses are plain. The colour palate for the mountains, were I to attempt to paint them, was green-grey, yellow-grey, and brown-grey with some black for where the sun created deep shadows.
We arrived in Tafraout not at all tired, because Anthony had driven slowly so that we were safe for other drivers whilst we took in the scenery which blew away any sense . Reality arrived with a bang when the first person in Tafraout to meet us was a tout, a driven young man who wanted to direct us to a hotel owned by one of his friends because he thought that was where we should stay. He took us to the hotel, and when we smiled and said 'No thanks' to owner of the hotel who understood that we'd been brought there, the tout zoomed off leaving us to guess which way was back into town and admire the huge rocks which are a feature of the local landscape.
We chose the Hotel Amis. The hotel was central to the town, the room had character, and it was close to the balcony from which we could watch the central crossroads through which all the traffic in the town had to pass, to go anywhere. Most important was the 'feel' of the hotel, which was friendly, like it's name. The minor downside of the room was that the light switching was odd, but easily adapted with. Settling in the room felt light, easy.
Our evening meal was a splendid spread consumed on a table on the balcony. Vegetable soup, dates, olives, and flat bread, beef tagine for me, vegetable tagine with added prunes and almonds for Anthony, and a light fruit salad to finish, which was more of an artwork with food than a course in itself. It was separate pieces of orange and banana soaked in honey artfully displayed on a black plate. Anthony encouraged me to try the beef tagine to have something different to him, and tasted a little of the beef, then said 'It tastes like dead animal'.
For the second time I heard the evening Muezzine, the Muslim call to prayer that is broadcast six times a day. The first time I heard it I thought it sounded like it was performed live and debated this with Anthony. The second time it sounds more like a recording and the melody in the announcement reminds me of some of the more 'bigging up' style announcements that wrestlers used to get from announcers in the ring gave as the wrestlers approached the ring with a slight 'electronic tone' added to it, to modernise it.
Latest reading; 'The Holy City' by Patrick McCabe who I listened to quite closely when he recently appeared on Radio 4 to promote his latest book. He claimed with some immodesty that he was not comfortable with the style of writing that he was self evidently thoroughly in control of. Anthony is reading 'H is for Hawk' - Helen MacDonald. He was pleased I had brought it with me, I had no expectations. What I knew most was that Radio 4 had guided both of us towards many good books over many decades.
For Day 4 of this Holiday Diary please click here.
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