Holiday Diary Morocco - May - Part Seven - Downhill From Here

Leaving the Kasbah Imini Hotel and Restaurant, Douar Taourirt was as smooth and pleasant a departure as we could ask for. Anthony wanted to photograph more of the rugs and soft furnishings before we left. I thought 'okay, that is one way to respond to how you know you are not going to be back this way again'. I was happy to leave behind in the room the bit of quartzite and the stone I had found wandering in the plain behind the hotel restaurant. I knew that a lot of the pictures I had taken were duds but I had the storage on my camera to live with that and sort out later. We had paid up, got everything packed and said our 'Goodbyes' in good time.

Anthony was in for a long day's driving. Our next destination was The Auberge Targa. To get there we were going through the areas where the rug making family communes lived. He had got the details of the location for where they were from our last visit to Morocco, which was well before the earthquake had struck. We did not know that we would be driving through where the earthquake had destroyed either the means to a living of many families in the family based carpet making communes, or worse; it had destroyed many of the buildings that sheltered people, where because the foundations of both the lives and economic choices of were weak, nobody knew how little it took for desperation  to take hold.

We knew before we got anywhere near them how easily fatigue set in at seeing too many rugs, from how our visit to the fourteenth century fort had gone. There every other house on the route from locking the car to the first sight of the fort itself seemed to be a place of high level sales pitches where the tourist should never take the pitch at face value; either the item was overpriced or it was not the age it was sold to be, or it was not the thing it was sold to be.

Having been through all that, we thought we knew, between us, how to deal with the high pressured sales pitches better. So two and a half hours on the road from Douar Taourirt  and after another later lunch of items rescued from the breakfast tray that was brought to us retrieved from my bag, we reached the town where Anthony expected for there to be families businesses where the family made and sold their own rugs.

And yes, there were clearly many buildings where the rugs on display outside, in the sun that were for sale that may well have been made inside the building. But it was a very scrappy town overall, and the most forward people in the  town were the male owners of the businesses who took one look at us and went into overdrive to attract our attention and disliked it when the limit of our attention span was us getting our cameras out and photographing rugs we liked the look of but would never have bought and it would have seemed rude to say so.

When I thought of the carpet shop from the last holiday where it took us two attempts at choosing the rug we wanted. With the first try we narrowed our choices down to two or three rather handsome rugs. The vendor knew he had a sale from then on. We went away and worked out which we really liked, and got money from the hole in the wall to complete the purchase at the second attempt. With this present holiday we realised how much of a world away we were from the carpet shop, with it's slowness and ease.

Carpets for sale... ...in Agunce 

But Anthony was right in one way, he wanted to see what life looked like when we were close to where the carpets were made. 'Bare and uncomfortable' was the short answer to Anthony's question. After a couple of near encounters with some Moroccan men who were more hostile than we expected for us attempting to photograph their rugs we stopped at one house that looked more promising.

 There we went through the ritual sales dance where we were shown many carpets and given mint tee. It was much easier to say what we did not want than to be able to decide quickly what we did like. The mint tea was rather good, not as sweet as some would have made it. It could have taken us forty five mins at the first attempt to choose what to buy, and another thirty minutes to decide with the second attempt what we were going to settle upon. Anthony had an idea that whatever he bought he wanted it to be all wool, no synthetic fibres. But how could tell what fibre was synthetic and what fibre was natural in the short time we had to see all these rugs and weavings? There was some respite to choosing when we were shown the grandmother of the household actually threading some weave on a carpet. It may have been her age speaking but as a process it looked quite meditative.

Having seen the elderly woman with the lines on her face and delicate wrinkled hands working we settled on what to buy, paid for it and got it wrapped before leaving. The purchase being complete was a burden lifted. We could concentrate on finding Auberge Targa Nmimoun in the two hours after that. We found it easily enough, but we had to go through the usual routine with finding our hotel. The map and online info that Anthony had noted down said one thing but all it took was for the sign to be facing the opposite direction to the one we were going in for us to pass the sign and not know we had passed it. At the third attempt at finding the Auberge we found it.

Anthony was somewhat weary when we stopped and went in to find the hotel manager and were met by some serving staff who were rather all over the shop. Still the first order was for afternoon mint tea in the dining area and enjoying not moving anywhere. I took our bags to our room when we were shown it, and took the passports to the manager for him to fil the form in for the government as to who we were, where we had been and where our next destination was. I lied on the forms, said we were going to Marrakesh but these forms, well who knows what it worth to the government for us to fill them in with any honesty?

The hotel was rather large and had very few guests, must of whom seemed to be rather detached. There was a dog that seemed to not have an owner whom we quite liked when it followed close to us. When we went on an afternoon walk the day after arriving, and saw images like the one here it followed us for fifteen to twenty minutes of the walk and as we headed back it found it's own entrance to the hotel car park, well ahead of Anthony and I who had to take the long way round.

We spent two nights there and we liked the food, repetitive of Moroccan cuisine as it was. If it is repetitive to say that the hotel seemed isolated, then it can be said that the isolation felt different to the isolation in the previous hotels that we had been in. The walks outside of the hotel were more engaging and there was a small rather parched looking orchard which had a orange tree on it. I picked one of the oranges and when Anthony had it declared it to be delicious. Next stop Hotel Safran for one night.

Please left click here for part eight of this diary.