Day five of our holiday started with a surprise. We were given semolina porridge for our breakfast. I had seconds and enjoyed it, I'd probably not had semolina since my school days.
Anthony was less keen on the porridge. More likely his mind was led by thoughts that made the food seem relatively uninteresting. He was equally restrained about leaving the
auberge with any haste. Less because we did not want to, though we knew we should
leave. More because the journey to our next hotel was about ninety minutes, relatively
short, and we/he did not know the area and had no plans for how to fill the spare time
were we to leave the auberge with any promptness. Our next hotel opened it's doors
between 1.30 and 2 pm. One thing this slowness did give us was time to do was triple check that we had left nothing in our hotel room which left us feeling more settled as out car descended the driveway.
Our next place to stay in was called The Kasbah Imini Hotel and Restaurant, Douar Taourirt. It was clearly an upgrade on the auberge we had just stayed in, but it was still very affordable. It was nearly as isolated from the few surrounding buildings as the auberge had been, and it was on a road that looked much more likely to go from somewhere that mattered to somewhere else that mattered.
The building showed no sign of having been touched by the earthquake, unlike all the previous places we had stayed The Berber style decoration throughout building, the throws on long seats and varied selection of antique looking rugs in many different colours were inspired by the owner being part of a family who had weaved carpets and throws for several generations, something Anthony learned from engaging him in conversation on one of the afternoon rest days we were there. I took my rest times by going out with my camera into the surrounding scrub countryside to look for images that I could take away. It could have been a sign of low level of disengagement from each other that I found the camera and the landscape to be my play space. But still we engaged well with each other and if a lot of my photos were not 'keepers' than taking them was a fine way to discover my fascination with light and shadow. The food was good and the living was light. If waking up to a messy bed, for having moved a lot in the night, is a sign of contentment then I was happy.
Anthony had a sight seeing journey in mind that he wanted to complete our first full day there. So we set off but whatever directions Anthony had in his head, had got from his smart phone, or got from strangers on the way, they proved to be inadequate. We took the same route three times, each time we found variations on our previous route, but still we could not find the road that he was looking for. There was one photograph that I chose not to take. Most of the landscape was bright and epic looking, even the different shades of red of the earth/mud seemed to have a subtle variety to them with the way the light landed on different parts of the landscape.
There was one small place that was an exception to the bright light and shade. The area was used for mining the manganese and there was one building where the the rock from which the manganese ore was extracted was processed. Because of the work there the building was covered in thick layers of a dark grey dust that covered the surrounding ground to a distance of a few metres, whereupon the colour of the rest of the landscape resumed. There was an, in my view, stunning photo to be taken of this grey spot in the landscape of the manganese extraction building surround the varying shades of red earth around it. I had one chance of taking the picture whilst Anthony was asking a youth for directions to this place we could not find. I did not take the picture. It was a trivial loss. No picture is worth annoying a friend over, least of all on a holiday, but there was some small loss of opportunity at tuning into the landscape I wanted to be part of.
The food at the Imini Hotel and Restaurant was good, even as it was uniformly Moroccan in character. The thing that charmed me most was the smallest, least noticeable, thing of all by other people's standards-the toilet roll holder in the shower area.
Would that such effective and simple constructions were used for holding toilet rolls back home, and we could collectively return to leading such simplified lives again.
When we left there would be five more nights, and three more hotels before we got our flight home, but none of the other hotels had the same balance of charm and ease in relative isolation as we found at Douar Taourirt.
With everywhere else we went the earthquake had quite clearly profoundly shaken the buildings, the people, and the economy en route, if not in the hotel itself. Along many of the roads we travelled there were piles of rubble at the side of the road, all of them former dwellings without foundations that were now building material for the next construction without a foundation on the site.
The devastation of the people was expressed in the vehemence with which the many beggars begged in the small towns, like the places we stopped for a coffee. The people looked and acted like they had not even something as elegant as an improvised toilet roll holder to hold on to, and wonder at the elegance thereof as they put a toilet roll on it.
Please left click here for part seven of this diary.
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