Tuesday 17th of October 2023.
Awake at 7 am, tired from bad sleep but okay. Out of the hotel for 7.15 to find breakfast. But before that we needed to find a hole in the wall to get some money. We definitively confirmed that Anthony's card was blocked and my card worked. The local currency is the Dirham, the notes come in denominations of 200, 100, 50, 10 and 5. The five Dirham note is always the note that looked the most grubby. The coins go between five Dirhams and one Centime (French) or Santimat (Arab). Because of the historic connection with France, where up to 1960 the French franc was the currency of Morocco, the Euro was also accepted as currency by many of the bigger local companies in Agadir.
I was slow about interpreting the instructions in the screen, and pressing the right buttons to get the money out. I was relieved that by chance I chose a hole in the wall where the buttons were to the side of the screen rather than on the screen itself, and that I got and kept the receipt. I have often had problems with the sensitivity of touch screens the same way I problems with smart phones screens that are meant to be 'touch sensitive' and don't work for me. Richer to the tune of 2000 Dirhams, equivalent to £160, we found our breakfast, a milky porridge, milky coffee, and the local flat breads to be eaten with tahini or apricot jam. The flat breads were very nice, and there were a lot of them. A couple went into my handbag for lunch, later. Walking away from the cafe, and the sound of The Koran being recited as we ate, we both enjoyed seeing the local dogs taking walks on their own. They looked so confident and happy, as if they knew where they were going. On the way back from the breakfast restaurant to the hotel we hovered around inside an interesting looking French supermarket, and found a large tub of what we hoped would be a thick set, almost ice cream like, yoghurt for 38 Dirhams. It took two attempts at finding a cashier who would serve us, we were very early customers.
The next bill to pay was 400 Dirhams, paid to the hotel, which was the local tourist tax. Refreshed, we set off to find the local car hire agency the Anthony had had previous had contact with. They were happy to accept drivers over the age of sixty five with clean driving records, unlike some of the bigger car rental companies. Here Anthony tested his card again, and again it would remained inert and not process any fee. I produced my debit card, and it did not process the car hire fees either, but my credit card, for which I wondered if I had remembered the code correctly-I use it that little, took the payment of 7000 Dirhams, equivalent to £560, easily and then the car hire firm surprised us by asking for a sum of two hundred Euros, in addition. I had the Euros, having brought all I had with me. My Euros were in our room back at the hotel. We agreed to the car and their driver drove us to the hotel where I would produce the Euros, and he would leave us with the car. I did not think through at the time if the car hire might have been cheaper were Anthony under sixty five, but with hindsight it seems like a good but moot question. I don't/can't drive and now aged over sixty I would make a difficult pupil were anyone to insist on attempting to teach me.
With our bags packed and the room checked that we had left nothing behind, we booked the same hotel for our last night, in six days time, then we set off in the car, out of Agadir and away from the flat landscape around it, for the Atlas mountains between Agadir and the coastal town of Sidi Ifni, a journey of about five hours including a break in the fortress town of Tisnit. Anthony was intent on more coffee and Tisnit seemed self contained, pleasant, and easy to park in. I was more curious as to what there was in the markets, I was easily drawn towards the clothes stalls where for both men and women clothes there were full length 'gowns' on many rich and different patterns/designs, not that I was going to buy anything, the colours and size of the blocks of colour were what attracted me. Anthony and I toured the silversmith shops, which are historic to the character of the town. We ummed, oohed, and aahed over the contents of the many jewellery shop windows after our reviving coffee. I did privately wonder if we might return here, to explore further. I dislike having to ask directly, and enjoy much more the idea of waiting for the obvious to seem almost naturally obvious...
We arrived in Sidi Ifni earlier than we needed to, by 3.30 in the afternoon and found the hotel that we stayed in last year, and had booked in this year, very easily. No reversals of the car or going round the houses in the town. We went up the stairs of the side door, up the central stairs, amid the rooms, and onto the roof, to have our late lunch-whatever was left of the potato bread I had made for me, The yoghurt we had bought that morning for Anthony. Soon a member of staff appeared, and we were offered the room next to the room we had occupied last time. It was notable at the time that the staff seemed either lukewarm or inattentive in some way. Had the people who staffed the place changed since we were last there in May 2022, or was it that we projected a sense of being tired?
My first decision on my own was to dip a toe into the Atlantic Ocean, a five minute walk from the hotel room, whilst the beach was sparsely populated. I can swim and no doubt could have immersed myself fully in the water, but up to my knees was enough. Anthony lay on his bed and enjoyed a rest after the five hour drive.
The first thing Anthony did was make enquiries about our evening meal with the staff of the hotel. Then we took our walk took us through the town When Anthony talked about a scene being right for a photograph I had the camera ready. We were not the only people who
were ready. Five minutes from the hotel two men in quite dramatic looking traditional Arab or Berber dress invited us to enjoy mint tea with them. It was easy for us to think 'They are not doing this for nothing, what are they doing it for?' Particularly when they found that we spoke mostly English and then said to us 'We need to practice our English.' in English that did not need much practice. It turned out that they were travelling salesmen, selling Berber made goods, made in the travelling tribal communes, where wherever they stayed were they were only temporarily settled. The items they told us about as they showed us them included clothing, jewellery, leather work, decorative objects made from the ibis horn and other similarly rare materials. Anthony relied on me to be the one to say 'But we don't have any money on us. We had better be leaving.' softly but firmly enough that when they named prices for goods after telling us quite exotic stories about them they knew we would refuse. They tried me out wearing a Bedouin chief's tribal costume which he would wear at a Loya Jirga, tribal elder's council meeting. It was a sort of headmaster's gown and long white scarf that gets tied in a turban and wraps around the face and neck. I am glad I resisted their suggestion that I be photographed in it. It was very self-important looking clothing on me, definitely wrong. I forget the form of words by which we made our declension but eventually we got out of their grotto. Walking to the town centre after we confirmed each other's suspicions that some of the Berber craft work was not as good as we thought it should be, and whilst their stories were very good, some of the detail they shared did not quite add up, their stories had gaps in them.
We went through the market as it was closing, which including passing the poultry and the fish that were for sale on stalls which were 'challenging' to Anthony, who was more strict in his vegetarianism than I was. What challenged me was the obvious desperation of the sellers who spread their blanket just outside the market and tried to sell trinkets of little obvious value to the now diminishing trickle of passers by in the early evening light. My eyes were drawn across the way to the wreck of what clearly was a former circus attraction, on waste ground behind the shops across the road from the market. In my head was the questions 'Does every small town have such wrecks that the circus that visits leaves behind, because they can't be fixed/are not worth fixing?'. There was definitely a narrative going on behind the wreckage which had become a seat for some of the less prosperous looking local population.
When we returned to the hotel there life in the kitchens. We had over an hour before eating and so settled into our books. I started 'Carn' by Patrick McCabe, one of his many caricatures of the small town Ireland that he grew up in. I liked the book partly because I could follow it, but I found myself even more intrigued by the recent Abacus books mentioned at the back that it was common in the 1980s to list, promoted on the strength or reputation of the main title. The title that intrigued me was 'Cannibalism and The Common Law; the story of the tragic last voyage of the Mignonette and the strange legal proceedings to which it gave rise' by A. W, B. Simpson. Perhaps it was the mention of eating with the cannibalism that made me take notice of the title. Our dinner was served at 8.30 pm, it was a traditional Moroccan meal. The starter was the local flat bread bread and dips, olive oil, tahini, and other dips. Then a vegetable tagine made with local spices. We were ready for it. I liked the presentation when the lid of the tagine was lifted off to revealing the steam coming off the contents, artfully heaped underneath.
There was a small but tasty fruit tart for pudding. It was just as well it was small. Rather deceptively, the vegetables had filled us up. Back to our rooms with more bottled water brought from the car for 10 pm. The day ended with the usual back scratch for Anthony from me, one of the more consistent and small pleasures of life for him when I am around.
Please left click here for Day Three of this diary
