One of the themes emerging from this holiday seemed to be that it was becoming a survey of the many styles of hotel and auberges that tourists would stay in, a survey that looking at the images of the hotels online could only be a poor imitation of, by comparison, for all that the online images could be seen by millions more people.
The food changed far less than the hotels did, the standard meal being the tagine, where the variations it offers being the choice of ingredients though even that limited variety reduced with the vegetarian option. But the hotels and auberges varied a great deal from old to new, to when-did-this-building-last-have-an-upgrade? As it was The Auberge Targa, Mninoun was a new, modern, and earthquake proof, hotel with more than acceptable amenities where how modern and secure it was made it seem to lack character.
The stray dog that followed us around The Auberge Targa showed more of the kind of elegant but shabby chic that we admired the country for than the hotel did. The dog also knew what distance to keep us at from it whilst still being content to follow us. Though the hotel scored higher on the shabby chic scale by having a swimming pool with no water in it, and a small parched looking orchard with orange trees in it. I picked one of the two oranges that were on one of the trees for a future lunch.
We were only an hour's drive up the road from our next destination, The Hotel Safran so there was the usual gap of about a couple of hours between one hotel closing and another opening if we were out of the first hotel in good time for the cleaners to be allowed into our room, and unhappy cleaners they looked too.
But we were leaving behind their unhappiness and the empty sense of modern comfort of the place for, well, we did not know what until we got there. If it was like The Auberge Targa we would go along the same road three times before we found the sign for it, which when we finally saw it seemed obvious to us that it made us feel like fools. It remained consistently strange how the signage seemed to be so directional and well hidden before we saw it.
The Hotel Safran proved to be at the far end of a large town. When we arrived the weather was hot and the town looked busy as we slowly drove through it, our passage through delayed by roads that were choked by busy traffic. The slow passage allowed me to view the life on the pavements. The town seemed to be quite poor. I have often been drawn by examples of cheapness suggesting choice, so when we passed a pavement sale of clothing I thought 'I have not seen a stall like that since I was allowed to roam small town France on my own.'. That said, I knew I had too many clothes, and even at a distance far enough away to not see clearly the clothing looked well past it's best.
The Hotel Safran was a large old hotel with plenty of room for parking at the front and a pleasantly sheltered area at the front and to one side of the hotel where the guests drank chilled freshly squeezed orange juice very slowly in the late afternoon and studied their smart phones for news from home. At least that was what we did after checking in and getting our cases and bags to our room on the second floor.
This was going to be one hotel stay where we ate every meal at the hotel, because the food was good. I also like the appearance of the guests. It was obvious that the hotel attracted bikers both young and old and they brought to the shared eating spaces a faint air of friendly unpredictability that regular tourists like ourselves did not generate.
Picture left; Anthony's jalaba, a traditional men's robe that it was common for men to wear in Morocco, waiting for him to put it on. This was one of many pictures taken in the room, which had many details and fixtures that practically invited us to photograph them, as the light and shade of the day changed what the room looked like hour by hour that first afternoon. The heat outside, on the street, was forbidding and since there was really nothing that we wanted to buy beyond cool drinks we were best staying in our room with the room temperature bottled water that I had brought up three flights of stairs.
By this stage of the holiday-one more hotel to stay in
before we were to leave Morocco, and an awareness of the regularity, of how repetitive the life around us was, Sleep, eat, walk, read, sometimes write a few notes on things that seem different or interest or go for a drive to pleasing scenery I had lost interest in writing any notes of what there was that seemed interesting and new.
On the second day in the hotel we looked around the local market. For a down-at-heel town it was good, Anthony bought some spices to take home from a stall, I looked at a lot of things but not with any interest in buying. If I saw a hat stall I might have been curious but the hats that were for sale were made for tourists to buy thinking they would wear them at home, Very few Moroccan men took any in covering their heads with the sort of thing the market sold. Though maybe the locals made their children wore the hats at the behest of their parents, for practical reasons like protecting the child's head from sun stroke in the heat.
The time went by for us at reasonable pace, but it must have gone by much slower for the locals who saw the same things every day. On my own I bought two small bottles of saffron less because I needed the spice more because I recognised that we needed time apart.
In the end recognising each other by our shadows and the slightest variant of our image was the best way around being together in us being together in a place which we found it difficult to explain to ourselves and each other what the place we were in was for beyond how it made us consumers among other consumers. The image left, of Anthony at the table of his evening meal on the last night with me absorbed by the shadow of the tree on the right sums up the days in the hotel Safran perfectly, In the light of life we are all passing shadows where all the images we cast are dependent on the light that creates the shadows and all shadows are ephemeral.
There would be one further hotel, in the small town of Asni. It was several hours drive away and the drive was going to be enjoyable, the amount of money the French government poured into Moroccan roads through epic landscapes was generosity beyond belief. How well we engaged with what there was around us at the hotel might also improve. But whatever happened was a matter of us having the self discipline to engage in spite of the familiarity that surrounded us.
Please left click here for the last episode on this holiday diary series.
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