Sunday May 3rd Up at 8.30 Another full breakfast, coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice, Moroccan flatbread served with jams-strawberry or fig, or honey. when the Berber scrambled eggs appeared they went into more flatbread which went into the bag for lunch. Anthony had a milky coffee-the strength of the coffee suited milk for him.
We were handed back our passports after handing them over to reception when we arrived. It was only much later that I found out why they needed the passport. In the passport is a stamp from passport security and a hand-written ten digit number written over the stamp. That number is what the hoteliers have to fill in on a form they are given, to account for our whereabouts to the police. We were then asked how long we intended to stay and would we settle our bill in advance, Anthony said that we are staying one more night and he sought to settle the bill, even though there was a degree of not knowing what was going on between the hotelier and his wife who was the one asking us to settle the bill early.
The day does not feel like a Sunday, it feels like a day outside of any everyday framework of time that I know of. This is partly helped by how we have arrived whilst Ramadan is still on, and the level of activity in the town is subdued to help people cope with the all day fast that everyone observes. But for us there was something to do, Anthony wanted to buy a rug as a hanging rather than for the floor, and he knew where and from whom to buy it from.
One of the signs in the town that we passed said something in French which I took to be 'Art Exhibition open today' and mentally I had been dismissive of it, this town did not feel like the sort of place that would support much in the way of art. But it was open and the art in it was the traditional art of carpets, a much under-appreciated form of domestic art. And then there is the art of selling carpets.
Buying a rug from a Moroccan rug dealer is a slow but definite process. The customer comes into the shop half-knowing what they want, what they can carry, and the sort of colours and weight of rug they were looking for, but not knowing what to expect. We were ushered into the main rug room and shown at least half a dozen rugs, the sight of which prompted Antony to get out the measurements he had taken so that we could guess the size of what was in front of us and compare it with the measurements he had. Then the the young man who had hustled us and deserted us when we refused his choice of hotel appeared and served us hot sweet mint tea. More deliberations and I put my tea down to photograph some of the most interesting looking rugs whilst Anthony narrowed his choices to a few. Since he told me where the rug was to hang then the final choice of colour and weight was an easy one. But we had gone to the carpet shop before finding to the hole in the wall....
Anthony and I set off for a cash point where I used my debit card to get 2000 dirhams from the hole in the wall, 700 of which will be used to buy the rug Anthony chose. Success, for now anyway. It may be possible to get more than 2000 dirhams from the machine we do not test the machine to find out how much we can get per day. Wandering around after the carpet purchase we discovered one of the notable, and perhaps admirable, shortages in the town was the lack of choice of postcards to buy. But we found one shop that had enough cards with enough designs that we liked for us to get a few. I should have pressed Anthony to get us to get more, after all one point is clear about this holiday-whatever our itinerary is we are not going to return to the same places twice. We are spending two nights in the same place so that Anthony can rest from driving every other day since we may well be retracing certain journeys.
With Anthony's rug safe in the boot of the car we sped off for lunch in the nearby rocks for which the town is famous, just a short journey out of the town. It was nice to see motor- cyclists not wearing helmets wave at us as they slowly drove past, we felt like we were in a landscape, part of something bigger than ourselves. The drive was as hallucinatory as yesterday's drive, though it was much shorter.
Some of the trees seem to grow directly out of the rocks, though we don't go up close to them to see where the tree roots wen. Lunch was leftovers from breakfast plus the radishes I brought with me. Finding the width of road to turn around on and go back took us further into the wilds, which I had no problems with. With the windows down to displace the heat each view seemed better than the last. We did turn round and return to the town, where in the afternoon sun everything seemed sleepy. Anthony slept too, I went out for a walk on my own and took my camera with me. I took very few pictures, mostly of dogs asleep on the pavement which I took to be a sign of the depth of ease around the town. I preferred to believe that image over the vague sense I had of the men of the town being watchful of me as I walked around on my own. If they wanted to help me buy something, to get rid of me, I would not know how to communicate with them.
Anthony was rested when I returned, so it was the obvious time to start writing postcards to the folks back home. What we wrote will surely be like many of the photographs we have taken; the words will be a border around what we feel in the same way that a photo has edges, edges that shrink the content therein.
It is still Ramadan, so evening activity in the town is limited, so we were surprised that when we went out to find a lace to eat we found it easily enough, but even more surprised it was the same place as made our last night's meal only we were eating it on their premises rather than our hotelier presenting it on their own balcony. One enquiry that produced a dead-end response was about quality alcohol free beers. This is a relatively new area of sales in many Western supermarkets and I wondered whether ordinary Muslims might have been curious about them; it seems not-they seemed to remain caught up with the binary argument beer=alcohol=what westerners want to drink. Their idea of a refreshing non-alcoholic drink remains to be strong mint tea with sugar.
I chose badly with the meal. I misread the menu and got the meatballs tagine and I did not need that much meat, it made the meal 'heavy'. Anthony could rightly look at me in a mildly chiding way for my lack of forethought. Sat outside the restaurant, we could watch the local cats and dogs play in the evening light as it slowly faded and the strange pointed lights on the street lights alternately coloured red and green. I liked how these animals adapted with passing strangers as if they always had right of place. We had a short walk to the edge of the town only to realise how shut down the place was, still Ramadan has two days left to run.
For day 5 of this Holiday Memoir please click here.
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