My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Eight - Going Home

 Monday October 23rd

  We 'broke new ground' when we discovered where the breakfast hall was in the hotel, and also found that we could pay 50 Dirhams apiece on the spot for a much better breakfast in a much nicer ambience than the one we might have bought if we had taken the walk out of the hotel, and gone down the street. The hotel did a self service buffet of different breads and pastries with a varied selection of jams and spreads to accompany them. They also presented a choice of tea, coffee, and orange juice, which tasted as if it was freshly squeezed. Anthony secreted several pastries in one of his deeper and cleaner pockets for lunch, later. For not having slept so well I did not think as clearly as he did, to take advantage of the self service character of the buffet.

  Back in the room, post breakfast, it was 'tidy up, make sure you have left nothing out or behind, and leave the suitcase and hand luggage' time. Anthony had to buy herbs at the market because the herbs and spices in Morocco are so much fresher than their equivalents back home, whether home was France or County Down. I had around 400 Dirhams in me, and they were no use outside Morocco so we had to spend them now. There were about three stalls open in the whole market, every thing else was shuttered and closed. The three stalls that were open were herb and spice stalls. After a little indecision we got the best selection of spices we were going to get. I still had 200 Dirhams on me, Anthony was itching to spend them and I looked at the postcards that were for sale in what was otherwise a silversmith's shop. 

  One thing I am never sure about is when salesmen engage with the targets of their sales pitches how conscious are they of the theatricality of their sales pitch? How aware are they that the boundaries and roles of the situation are artifice, artificial and there is a degree to which, if we both chose to acknowledge it, the contact between two people could be played out in a much calmer way? The silversmith was either a very good actor or absolutely desperate to sell what looked to be very good wares. So for 200 Dirhams Anthony bought a silver bracelet from the silversmith where with all the dramatic salesmanship the silversmith employed to get Anthony to buy the bracelet, the bracelet was surely worth 800 or a 1000 Dirham. And maybe the display of dramatics in salesmanship was worth paying something for as well.

  I still wonder if by having so little cash on me I cheated the silversmith. Something about the scene still does not read right with me. If he was in a conversation with Anthony and me, then as he kept dropping the price, not knowing how little we had, the more he lowered the price the more it felt more like he was talking to himself and were meant to be witnesses to his diminishing grasp on reality. He got his 200 Dirhams, though. Back at the Hotel Kamal we took our luggage, rugs and all, to the car. Having given the silversmith all our Dirhams, all I had left were Euros. Anthony paid the doorman as we left with a 10 Euro note. We were out to the car hire office and their driver was booked to use the car for our last journey, to the airport in plenty of time. But Anthony and I have always had a different sense of time with travel. I like to give myself plenty of time ahead in airports, train stations and bus stations, and he likes to have less time in such places, where we meet is that we both know that they are good places to read and ignore the bustle for journeys other than the one we want to take.

 The driver the car hire company offered us was hired because he knew the most direct route to the airport. Anthony sat on the front passenger seat, I accepted a back seat. I enjoyed seeing areas of Agadir that I would not have expected to see, seeing these places was part of the premium of being a back seat passenger. Even when many of the sights I saw could be described as 'urban sprawl', they left me intrigued. Our arrival at the airport seemed sudden, even with all the clear road signs that long in advance clearly signalled where we were going. With travel, time will play tricks on us, and each trick has to seem fresh for it to work.

  I was relieved that we had more time than we thought we needed in the airport. Anthony had been unable to print his boarding pass for the journey before we left home. He did not know what the wrinkle with the form was but the boarding pass download simply would not download. So he had to go three desks and explain how he tried to print his boarding pass, but to no avail. The best help he got was directions from one of the many policemen in the airport. Anthony's persistence won out in the end and we went through security. Again, his luggage caused more delays. He had left a small pair of scissors fit only for cutting paper with in his suitcase, on the upside this meant that security were not interested in the large tub of yoghurt that was in his is hand luggage, which we could then take home.

  Sitting and reading kept us calm up to a point, after all the 'duty free' shops in Agadir airport were full of tat that you'd be appalled to be seen carrying with you. But then there was knowing when to move to the departure gate and guessing how long we might have to wait there. It all clarified slowly. First the many people formed queues because they thought they ought to then some staff appeared and they were absorbed by the screens behind the desks that were their stations. Then there were announcements and the queue was a buzz with the expectation of movement. From being in the position of being part of it, expecting to board the plane for Toulouse, I could not be objective about how the sense of time felt vs what it might have looked like and been measured as, by somebody looking at it with hindsight. The sense of time passengers have with airport queues defies analysis unless you are an airport manager. I have no idea how airport managers form over-views of the passengers they process.

  The flight was calm and ordered, I made notes about the days, rather than read. Being sat nearer the back then Anthony was, I was slower than him to get through Toulouse Blagnac Airport. It felt good to be within reach of home, But on leaving the airport we were still several hours from home and bed. The car was parked on a side street that was about four stops away on the relief bus out of the airport that was running because at present the tram was shut down.     

   Everything went smoothly, The car started at the second attempt. We were soon whizzing round the ring road that went around Toulouse, and found the junction that would get us to the toll motorway that would take us towards home. The evening skies either side of the motorway were rather dramatic but we were travelling at speed so whilst I could have my fantasy of taking a picture of that sunset, the memory of wanting to take the picture was the nearest I would get to it. Anthony had his five euro not ready for the machine when we got to the exit point, so we were calm getting off the motorway. Soon the colours muted. It was not dark yet, but it was getting there. Anthony dislikes driving in the dark, so it seemed to be a mix of good planning and good luck that we got home with enough light in the sky for his liking, at 7.30 or 8 pm. 

  We had a light meal of salad and leftovers from the fridge that was surprisingly good. The end of  very good holiday.  

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Seven - Return To Agadir

Sunday 22nd October 2023

  From the start, the day felt more like the holiday drawing to an end. The German/French couple had checked before we presented ourselves for breakfast, which seemed to be served inattentively. But the sun was out and our plans seemed simple, get some money from the hole in the the wall, pay the hotel for the room and the meals, buy some spices to take home and some pastries for lunch, pack the car with all we have with us, and get on the road to Agadir. 

  There was a queue at the hole in the wall. So I watched whilst I waited. The people ahead of me were a group of men and women from either New Zealand or Australia. There were about six of them. One by one they approached the machine to get some money and one by one the machine refused the cards of five out of the six of them. Cue minor whinges and criticisms of each other before they left not knowing what to do next on a Sunday with nothing open, whilst having no money. Whilst the tourists were not getting their money I watched as two doors down from the hole in the wall a stray dog was taking flat breads from a pile outside a bakers, and, one by one, eating most of the flat breads he took, leaving an edge of the bread on the pavement. I had tried in this visit to keep an eye out for the street dogs whilst I was in Tafraout, and this was the best viewing of any dog I had yet seen. 

  There was also a young beggar who I had no small change for, when I knew that Anthony always gave such people something to them whether he was in his now native France or as a visitor in Morocco. I got my 1000 Dirhams out of the hole in the wall and returned to the hotel to settle the bill. It was then that Anthony asked the proprietor, a cook, about the best place to buy spices. We went and of course it being Sunday morning they were not open until the afternoon when we were going to be halfway towards Agadir. We realised that we should have made the purchase the precious afternoon when we spent time looking around the small market for maybe the third time.

  Room emptied, car packed, and room checked twice again to make sure we had not left anything behind, on the way to the car Anthony met the young beggar I met earlier and gave him some loose change, which pleased him no end. I don't know why I got into a mental block about giving small amounts of money, money which meant little to me, to the poor of Morocco who seemed delighted with any notice being taken of them on their terms. I would give back home. Somehow I could not sort my head out over such simple generosity away from home and in a different currency. I observe this, Anthony made up for what I lacked.

  On the road to Agadir there was further opportunities for generosity. We picked up one man seeking a lift of alas only about twenty minutes length. But he was standing at the side of a misty road in the heights of the Anti-Atlas mountains where the clouds met the road we drove through the clouds, and we had seen no other car pass us for at least half an hour. 

  When we stopped for a break from Anthony driving, and to eat the pastries he bought from the bakery earlier whilst he was looking for spices to take home, the place we chose had to be photogenic spot. Taking pictures was part of the pleasure of the holiday. There were so many places to stop and so many sites that seemed photogenic that part of the pleasure was being being spoilt for the choice of where to stop. One factor that encouraged a sense of 'enjoy it whilst it is there' was that we knew that eventually we would be coming into huge and unphotogenic Agadir, where if we knew that we were on the right road for the Hotel Kamal we might be surprised. One of the weather effects I could not stop myself liking was the mix of sharp and soft outlines of

peaks where the clouds covered some    peaks

but did not cover other peaks, I had admired this effect  from a distance at home when I saw the Mountains of Mourne in County Down. Even if the effect looked the same the world over, with every mountain range in the world, I'd still be pleased by the sight of that effect.

  Lunch, and our last photography break over, we descended from the mountains to where the road flattened out. Apart from some small settlements and the odd rather 'sculptural' looking dead tree which would not have lent itself to the good photograph we wanted, the scenery became mundane.

  We crept upon outer Agadir through the many smaller towns that Agadir's expansion and development had swallowed up, such that we could not tell where one small town ended and another began, or when we were in Agadir proper. The weather turned grey and wet, this further added to the sense of us passing run a series of down places. The signage on the duel carriage ways was good. It was because the signage was as good as it was that over the two hours or so that we took to get through the joined up small towns into central Agadir we did not have to turn around, or reverse-though with the big roundabouts we often went around twice, sometimes three times, to make sure we found the right exit for the next roundabout. I remember for the briefest second seeing a dig curled up, looking contented and apparently asleep, on one round as we came off one exit and on to the roundabout. 

  Between the good road signing, and what seemed to me like travelling by dead reckoning we found our destination, the Hotel Kamal, much sooner than the staff there expected of us. We rolled up to sign in to our rooms and rest before 4 pm.

  Rested, showered, and refreshed, and our notes on the journey up to date, we set out to walk, partly for some fresh air, partly to find a hole in the wall, and partly to find a restaurant since we did not know the procedure for eating in the hotel. At the hole in the wall I got out 400 Dirhams, that was what Anthony said we would need on top of what was in my wallet. When looking at where to eat, the stand out choice was an Italian restaurant, not that we saw a menu or saw what it cost. But we had been eating Moroccan all week and the only other nationality of food on offer was Japanese. We saw a menu and it did not inspire us.

Me in my handmade 'Mondrian' T shirt 

  When we rolled up at the Italian restaurant we were quite hungry and tired. The presentation was rather posh, stiff white linen napkins. It seemed like a good start when we saw on the menu that we could have a beer. The rest of the menu was more opaque there were items that were listed as salads, but that could mean something light, small and tasty or, well, what arrived in the end. I ordered a salad for starter and a main course of roast aubergine and ravioli. When the salad arrived it was huge and delicious, there were medallions of roast beef in it, and a whole large avocado sliced finely. The dressing was very rich but it did not overwhelm the taste of the lettuce, tomatoes, and other ingredients over which I felt it was my duty to take my time. The way I had been brought up with food excluded eating at restaurants, but made eating at home and pleasing the maker of the meal happy by presenting an empty plate for the washing up, which as a teenager I would pressed into helping with. This salad was seriously sumptuous, and it was added to by Anthony, who had a similarly full plate, giving me the large prawns that he decided he did not want.

  If we could have changed the order and said

Anthony in Moroccan djellaba  

 to the waiter when the salad arrived 'Please, can we cancel the ravioli, these salads are big enough to be a main course?' It would have been a good thing to have done, if only for our stomachs. But we accepted that the main course had to arrive. I enjoyed my ravioli, mostly by eating it slowly, and we both had a second beer. Eating out like this was a major occasion. We rested and said 'No Thank you' to coffee or any of the small puddings in the list.

   When the bill arrives it was obvious to us that we had not calculated the costs of the meal before we ate very well. The bill came to something over 500 Dirhams, I worked it out to be the equivalent of about £45. We were not expecting that. It was lucky for us that they took credit cards, and that I had mine on me. 

   That night I slept poorly, I could not find my medication for helping me sleep and I was afraid of my snoring, not knowing I was snoring, and waking Anthony up. 

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Six - Tafraout

Saturday 21st October 2023.

  Anthony enjoyed further conversation with the German/French couple across breakfast tables whilst I felt that I did not know what to say to them. It was easier for me to be more focused on the choice of foods for breakfast, the scrambled egg with Moroccan spices, several jams, honey, and tahini that were all to be eaten with the generous amounts of flat bread. 

  After breakfast the main thing we had to do was to return to the carpet shop. What should have happened before we went to to the shop was that either Anthony should have prompted me to go to the hole in the wall or I should have known to go, unprompted. But I held back partly because Anthony had reminded me much earlier that any Dirhams we got were no use outside Morocco. So, our money counted up but no more money taken from the bank, we returned to the carpet shop to look again at the choice of wall hanging that Anthony had admired yesterday. In the shop a question hung in the air, unstated until the carpet man showed us several more carpets. That question was 'Why don't you buy a carpet, Malcolm, as well as Anthony?'. I had never bought a hand made rug before. I had been given some by Anthony to furnish the house I lived in, which he liked to visit when he lived in Ireland. But me buying a new handmade rug for wall space on one of my walls had never struck me.

  The carpet that changed all that was shown to us alongside Anthony's choice from yesterday and it took about five minutes of looking at the two rugs for the decision to buy both to seem obvious. I had known I was, ummm, 'picky' about how I liked to be sold things. I disliked being induced to haggle. I liked to think of goods as being of fixed value and worth, where the choice of whether to buy or not was a formality. There was nothing much to actively negotiate. All that was required of me was to count my cash and decide if the goods were worth the price on the label. I remember feeling a certain horror at witnessing a particular open air event where a man was trying to sell bed sheets to housewives who were unused to open sales of stock that was clearly not part of any regular trade. The stall holder presented what was meant to be an auction, but instead a limited dialogue where the housewives could bid and would be acknowledged, the stall holder made his sales pitch into a horse racing style monologue where he did all the talking, where the housewife had to interrupt him talking to buy the goods they wanted at the price they thought heard. That price may not be what the commentator eventually asked for. Seeing this display of popular machismo persuaded me that if displays of hucksterism and machismo were signs of being male, then I was not male and they were not for me, ever. 

My new rug

  To return to our carpet shop, the owner presented us with an obvious, almost self selecting, pair of rugs at prices that it was silly to query, where somebody more cautious would have wanted to ask how he seemingly plucked a price for the two out of thin air. But to do that would have been to enquire about the process of his trade, profit margins and the like, that it seemed rather too much to enquire about-as if he might not be that generous towards us if we asked for his generosity to be quantified. He gave us a price, 2450 Dirhams, when sold apart they might be worth nearer 3200 Dirhams. 

  He wrote the sum 2450 out on a piece of brown wrapping paper, which he then took from my hand and stuffed out of sight between two rugs, where even if I wanted to see it again I could not find it. We paid him in a mix of Euros and Dirhams and he rolled the rugs tight, wrapped them in brown paper and parcel tape. The common exchange rate was ten Dirhams to one Euro. I would not have known what to say if I was asked to explain why I had that many Euros on me for. At the time I was in the carpet shop I was simply relieved that they were useful as a means of paying for the rugs. 

  We were out of the shop with our parcels under our arms in the late morning sun when the first people we met and recognised were the German/French couple who seemed politely pleased for us when Anthony told them of our adventures in the rug shop. He would have offered to show them his purchase, but they declined and walked toward the market.

  Putting our rugs, still tightly wrapped in brown parcel paper, in our rooms, Anthony suggest that we go for an afternoon drive along the roads around Tafraout. On the journey I mentioned to Anthony how the carpet seller had written the number we paid on a piece of paper and then discarded it. Anthony explained that his approach to money and government had to be very different to mine, his ideas about what caution was would be different to mine. Anthony said this, or words to that effect, and he knew me. But he did not know the memory I had of the open air sheet seller who sold his sheets to housewives, using a horse racing commentary to cajole cowed housewives into buying something they would normally take much longer to consider buying, and only buy when all excitement in buying was subsumed by a sense of utility, and 'family values'.

  Soon the grandeur of the scenery we were passing through quelled any further enquiry about the carpet transaction, and we returned to the primary purpose of our being there-to feel as if we were part of a landscape that opened us up without really trying. Anthony also very much enjoyed driving because the power steering of the rental car made the car easy to steer. The brakes were very sensitive and needed a much lighter touch than his old car at home, In fact the only aspect of the car where he might have been less than ideally pleased was when he sometimes did not find the right gear, as he changed gear, without looking. But the brakes were that good that not getting the right gear first time usually happened when we were driving slowly and in controlled settings, like lots of traffic, that made the mistake safer.

  We ate out in the evening. In the small town centre there was a restaurant that Anthony felt we should try. The menus were slightly difficult to interpret at first. Yet again we avoided the chicken, beef or fish based dishes. With a lot of the spiced vegetable dishes we had been served over the week there was a clean taste to them that any meaty or fishy flavours would have diluted if meat or fish was added to the veg. 

  The portions at the restaurant were huge, and quite tasty. The meal also cost surprisingly little. And from our seats we could watch life on the street, including the traffic passing and some of the handsome young men, no doubt extended members of the same family, who seemed to have nothing more to do than hang around the general stores and fresh fruit and veg stores, even when there were few customers to serve because of the time of the evening it was.

 A lot of life in Tafraout seemed to consist of waiting and watching, rather than doing anything much. We slept well that night.

Please left click here to find Day Seven of this holiday diary.    

 

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Five - Tafraout

Friday 20th October  2023

  Out early to look for breakfast took us down the street, since our hotel was more basic, not the sort to serve breakfast. More pancakes and bread with tahini, and hot milky Nescafe. We were packed, and the car was packed, and our room was clear and paid for by 9.30 am. 

  

The Touristes Hotel was very simple and very nice. I got one last surprise when I sat in the passenger's seat and Anthony said to me 'We have ten minutes before we leave. I need to look at some maps. Do you want to take more pictures?' So I took more pictures of interesting doors and what ever else took my eye. Anthony says I 'have a good eye', but I find myself oddly ambivalent about taking pictures. In my impression I take my best pictures barely seeing the image but reacting as if by instinct. I am too busy reacting/taking the picture to more fully enjoy the view. For this reason I like taking pictures of things that don't move, that are scenery. Though I know that like the example left of this paragraph waiting for the light to be right requires my patience.

  Our journey to Tafraout was mostly uneventful. One of the pleasures of the journey for me was that this being my second such trip I could take in the scenery much more easily, and Anthony was happy to stop at anything that looked like a photo opportunity, which given the brightness of the sun was plenty. The roads through many of hamlets/small communes were often quite rough which required Anthony to drive quite slowly, which in turn made us all more aware of the photo opportunities in the colours the walls were painted, and the different plants and trees that were either side of the narrow road. When I saw another driver also taking photographs of oleanders, date palms, and even common geraniums that thrived, seemingly uncared for, where there often seemed to be no humans living as we stopped. 

  Tafraout looked bright in the afternoon sun, as we arrived. I had forgotten the sound of the muezzin, which in Tafraout could be heard really clearly everywhere across the village. It is a recording broadcast from somewhere within the tower of the mosque. I assume that once, in the times recording, all muezzin calls were live. When the words were slowly shouted or chanted by the imam from the top of the tower, the speaker's voice would spread as far as ever it needed to. We heard the call to prayer in our previous stop, in Tiznit but it sounded submerged, rather, within the noise of commerce and traffic from our room at the corner of one of the routes into the old quarter. The elongated vowels in the shout/chant of the muezzin always sounded to me like the speech that every Master of Ceremonies spoke to the live audience in the recording, at the start of the wrestling that my dad insisted the television should be tuned to every Saturday afternoon.

  Friday afternoon prayers sounded quite loud from where we were in our new hotel room, as the rest of the village went quiet. We were staying in the same hotel we stayed in last year, even the same room. 

 We were served coffee on the balcony which overlooked the central junction of the town, I knew Anthony was not going to rest after, from how he was energised to take pictures of the shadows the chairs and table made with the brightness of the sun. 

After ordering our meal for the evening, another vegetable tagine to be served on the balcony, that evening. Together we went to see Anthony's carpet dealer. Last year, when I first saw the place I marvelled at his shop and took lots of bad photos of carpets, where the pleasure was more in the taking of the photos than the later processing the images that my camera had captured.

Anthony gave the man the rough dimensions of the carpet he wanted, and said it was going for a tapestry for a large wall. One reason I think Anthony liked this carpet dealer was not just that he was the representative of women's co-operative of carpet weavers, and therefore there was a virtuous circle in buying carpets from him, but also he has good gut instincts for what his customers wanted. The second carpet he brought out to show was the obvious choice. The first carpet we were shown was good, but not quite right. It was as if the first were were a taster for him knowing what we wanted to buy that hid how he knew what we wanted. At this point I should have gone straight to the hole in the wall to get 2000 Dirhams (equivalent to £165) out of the hole in the wall to cover payment for the rug and the hotel when we left. But I didn't, we further investigated the market, telling ourselves we were looking for postcards, we found one or two designs that we liked enough to take take back to our room. Anthony wrote one postcard to friends back home. I have lost interest in sending cards to friends. I have lost enough friends in the last three years that sending cards to the few that are left seems to be an unrewarding venture.

  Before dinner I read more of 'Carn' - Patrick McCabe. Some of it rather exaggerates a sense of drunken queasiness, but like all life in small towns, the queasy parts, and the moments when events spin out of control of the townsfolk, are when people are having the most fun.

     A sharp wind was blowing across the town

and over the balcony in the evening, which meant that we ate indoors, at a traditional Muslim  or Roman table, with near ground floor seating around it, all much lower than a Western dinner table and upright seat. The tagine was perfect and very filling, we refused the coffee that was offered after. Even if it was milky Nescafe then we did not want to be drinking anything more than water that late.   

    Another, rather good, day over, and with something to show for it when we take our purchases home and I take down one of my paintings and put the rugs on the wall in their place.

For Day Six of this holiday diary please left click here.

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Four - Tiznit

Thursday October the 19th

  Our breakfast was quiet compared with how the bikers breakfasted. From our table we could say that it was enough to enjoy their high spirits, as after eating they put on their leathers and got on their bikes, and the furniture van was opened up again and bike parts and tools were stored for easy retrieval at the next stop. 

  Our own breakfasts seem to have been prepared with a lack of forethought, as if the breakfast chef was also distracted by the sights and sounds going on outside. Anthony had to ask twice for what he ordered and the orange juice was bitter. Partly because of the way breakfast was served Anthony suggested that we leave Sidi Ifni that day. He felt that the place seemed to be done with us. He had looked up hotels in Tiznit, where we had stopped briefly en route for Sidi Ifni. There seemed to be plenty of characterful places to stay there. The inattentiveness that was with the staff over breakfast was still present when we settled the bill, over which there seemed to be some initial muddle. Eventually it was clarified that Anthony had paid quite a lot up front well before we arrived in Morocco. All I had to pay extra was 500 Dirhams before we packed our bags, put the bags in the car, made sure that we had left nothing behind in our room, We were set to go.

  On the way to Tiznit I very much admired the mountains. They were majestic rather than dramatic, slower in how they impressed me than mountains I'd seen before. Every mountain was spotted with dark foliage that seemed to be small at the distance we were from it, but close up the foliage must have been much larger. It was hard to take the scale of views we were taking in except by how small vehicles looked on the narrow roads next to what was beside them.

 Tiznit was slow to come into view, and then there is was. Tall thick sand coloured walls with entrances at several different points all of which which led inside the outer walls. The first thing we had to do was park the car to work out where we were and where we wanted the car to be. This was when we first realised how labyrinthine and narrow the streets of The Old Quarter were, how much it was a place best explored on foot. And even then the goods on sale in small hole-in-the-wall sized shops were often repeats of what was in other hole-in-the-wall sized shops. 

  We eventually found the right road into the city square, and parked where our car would be watched, but we would have to tip the watcher, to have more coffee before we started looking at the different hotels. I have not been a tourist very much in life, and the habit of having small amounts of money to give away, say, to the person who guides you safely out of the car park was something to adjust with.    

 

The hotel we chose was, well, on the decent side of being run down. Our room gave us a view of the rooftops and the street sounds below were highly audible as we looked across. This was not good for an afternoon snooze but the windows and shutters that quietened and darkened the room at the same time. The toilet and shower facilities were communal, and primitive. But again atmosphere made up for positivity where there might have been seen to be a lack of privacy. nice was 

  Anthony rested whilst I went off to explore the old market, not wishing to buy anything-I had most everything I needed-but wanting to see the sights of the place for myself. It was part of the tipping culture that a person, usually a young man, would latch onto a tourist and take them directly to where they thought the tourist wanted to go. I got caught in that a bit, but also resisted because what he showed me on the way was more interesting than where he wanted to take me. I thought the doorways sunk into the outer walls of the fortress were

rather splendid. They had a character and variety that reminded me of how I imagined the doors in 'Lord of the Rings' to be. The history of Tiznit is that it was originally five villages or communes, until 1880 or so when Sultan Hassan the !st built a fortress that became an administrative and commercial centre for the five communes. drawing all life from outside the fortress walls inside, or close to the walls.

Jewish silversmiths found themselves a new base there when they made the town famous for it's fine silverware. 

  In the early evening Anthony a guide soon found him and helped him find the restaurant mentioned in his guide book. The guide took us part of the same route that I had been unwilling guided early in the afternoon. We had the nearest experience of the week to gay, or camp, fun at the restaurant. The food was very good and we were offered beer to drink. It was all served to us by a young waiter who having to decided that we were 'gay'. He clearly enjoyed flirting with Anthony, who good humouredly flirted back. I have gay friends who like visiting eateries with young waiters who are nearly always wearing tight fitting trousers. This young man was never going to be that knowingly louche, but there was a distinctly non-literal tone to the conversation in French, which I was surprised at. Anthony was charmed. 

 And so, after a last late night walk back to the hotel, we came to rest at the end of another day. The communal washing facilities were easy to navigate, there were very few of them.

Please left click here for Day Five of this diary.   

    

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Three - The Rest Day

Wednesday 18th of October 2023

  Awake gone 8 am, and dressed and down for breakfast for 9 am. A fabulous breakfast, warm flat breads, butter, marmalade for me. Anthony had pancakes with fresh banana and chocolate sauce. Fresh orange juice and milky for both of us. At home I would have my coffee black and strong, but with the coffee as it was presented in Morocco, the milky version tasted best.

  After Breakfast it was time to walk into the town. Our first task was to find a chemist. 

  Anthony had to present a prescription from the French health system to present to the chemist there, for him to get medicines that now were available off prescription in Morocco for him to take back to France where such meds were no longer available. The chemist was generous towards him and gave him forty pills rather than the suggested prescription number of twenty eight.

  Getting 2000 Dirhams out of the bank proved to be much more of a trail. First Anthony wanted to try his card in a hole-in-the-wall machine. He was half blinded by the sunlight so that he could barely read the screen. From his reading of the screen he thought he was going to get his money out and a receipt. When neither appeared he asked the staff inside for assistance. They assisted him, he got his card back and the assurance that he had not lost the money but he had misread the screen's instructions. Then we drove around the block to park the rental car in a better place and take a break from the stress of cash machines after the previous altercation. It was my turn to try and the first machine I tried had a touch sensitive screen and I tried using my debit card. The sun was a serious impediment to reading what was on the screen, but it was clear that the machine was not accepting the card. Enter a Moroccan policeman telling us that the care was inappropriately parked. He was calmed when I produced both our passports from my black bag. With the car moved to a place that disturbed the local police less, we found another hole in the wall and this time I could read the screen better and it had buttons to press at the side which was an improvement on previous attempts. I tried the debit card card and the machine did not want to recognise it. So I tried the credit card and slowly got the hang of interpreting the instructions. With the first two attempts I got used to cancelling the transaction and retrieving the card. At the third go, and speaking out the instructions on the screen to Anthony beside me, who told me what to press we got the better of the instructions and got the money and a receipt. All by 11 am. The point being that for me at least, in my home country I would usually fill in a withdrawal queue and get money from a live bank teller, partly to slow down the bank automating it's services. But in Morocco the hole in the wall was what we had to work with.

 The walk back to the hotel was via a wander around the only French-style supermarket in the town, there was nothing there for us-at least not today.

  Anthony wanted to see the mountains close to Sidi Ifni, so between 12 noon and 3.30 pm we were on the roads out and around the town. For lack of vehicles on the road, the power steering of the car making the drive so comfortable. and the dramatic backdrops we passed through, we could have been in a very long car advert. Not that cars in adverts stop to give lifts like we did. Twice we stopped and gave local men twenty to thirty minute journeys to the next town from seemingly random stop point on the road. 

  Soon after we arrived back at the hotel a group of motorcyclists stopped and parked their bikes close to each other, in front of the hotel, with a large moving/storage van full of who-knows-what in terms of bike mechanics connected to the bikers as back up. Their arrival and settling in rooms in the hotel, and then having afternoon drinks outside was all quite a show of activity, added to by the display of workaday masculinity where the local boys were particularly impressed by the bikes and some of their mothers got permission for the boys to sit on the bikes and be photographed on them. 

  Our evening meal was fish surrounded by salted ice, with side portions of stuffed aubergine. it looked impressive when it was served. The hotel had agreed the meal with Anthony in the afternoon, where if they did tell him what sort of fish it was then his hearing aid did not help him catch and pass on to me that bit of information on to me. But the town was known for being a fishing port and went with the flow about the fish. It tasted okay, and there was plenty of it. Part of me would have liked a few different veg for more variety of flavour. The bikers were again the centre of attention as the dozen or so of them ate together, and collectively decided to eat their main course in front of the hotel, by taking their tables and chairs there, by agreement with the staff.

  Read more of 'Carn'-Patrick McCabe before bed. I could admire how he satirised small town Ireland by reframing his fictional Irish small town as one of the many small American towns where in the late sixties the presentation of pop music on vast temporarily erected stages nearby became like some new kind of circus coming to town. Woodstock and Monterey were the names of the towns that came to my mind. I could admire his satires of certain English towns whose previous characters were warped by forced expansion, and later similar changes were wrought by dramatic economic shrinkage. But sometimes the grafting of different imported realities onto his fictional Irish town took more than a stretch of imagination, it stretched credibility. Anthony was mostly puzzled at what McCabe seemed to be doing, he had seen the Irish town McCabe was writing about for real, in the 1960s. 

 The third day was over.

Please left click here for Day Four of this diary.  

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Two - Off To The Seaside

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

Holiday Diary - Last Day

Friday May 8th The alarm on my smart phone went off at 23.45, I had not slept even when Anthony suggested I should. I could not stop myself feeling watchful. I quietly dressed and made sure that I had everything packed. I was outside the hotel for 23.55, where I waited in the sodium lighting with my chit from the hotel in my hand, my luggage held tight by the handles in the other hand. The taxi was white and it arrived across the road just after midnight. I got in the rear seat where I was dimly aware of  a young man driving and his wife was sat beside him, their conversation sounded like some minor disagreement in which neither cared whether won the argument as long as they had the last word. I enjoyed the late night light show the city had to offer. The journey took over in thirty five mins, I had expected it to take an hour. My luggage went through the security x-ray machine first thing as I entered at arrivals. I offered to show him my papers but he waved them away, suggesting 'Later other policemen will want to see them, not me'.

  The departures hall was pleasant, with some traditional decoration in the stonework of the walls. From the information on the electronic screen there were perhaps only a few more than a dozen planes departing that day. It was quiet, I looked at the post cards, saw that some of them were rather good but there was no way of buying any of them at that time of day. I settled into my half read/half dipped into book 'Bowie, Bolan, and The Brooklyn Boy' -Tony Visconti and read solidly from the start of the book and re-read passages I had skimmed before, until near 3am, occasionally moving seat to give myself exercise. 

  When I approached one policeman he waved at the check in desk where there looked like there might be activity soon. There was; my boarding pass got stamped and the lower half of it was torn off. With the boarding pass stamped I went back to the policeman who saw all my documents and let me through to another two policeman who between them were thorough in checking my documents, Covid pass, passport, boarding pass, etc. I looked at the food store and wondered about what they served, decided it was junk, as was the contents of the duty free shops-no character in the goods at all. I did wonder are these goods chosen for their lack of character, as if one can never show too much contempt for a tourist?

  The departure was on time and undramatic. I slept through the emergency/life jacket instructions and woke half way through the three hour flight. To amuse myself and tune out of the noises being made around me I tried to photograph the mountains of Morocco from the air with my smart phone, I am used to taking several pictures of the same thing in the hope that one of them will be 'the one'. When I download this lot onto my laptop I somehow doubt any of them will be 'keepers' but taking them passed the time, and there is always the delete button.

  When the plane landed I thought that I would be delayed enough getting through airport security and passport checks etc that I would miss the first bus to leave the airport, which was I due to leave soon after my flight landed, but I was proved wrong. The queue at the bus was long enough that it's departure was delayed long enough for me to catch it, in spite of my online booking being for the next bus. 'Thumbs up to good timing' I thought. 

  It was only in Belfast, two hours later, that life became familiar and uneventful, the slow blur of events that I recognised from before the time away.

Holiday Diary - Day Eight

  Thursday May 7th The best breakfast yet, and the best views out over the valley to the blue hazed hills beyond, to go with our food. The best coffee too. We both had thirds from the flask. The choice of what to put on our bread and pancakes included home made Tahini, something I liked but I would never have thought of it as a breakfast spread, and home made marmalade. It was worth taking a long time over our food. There was no drama with our packing this time, nothing seemed lost and everything was checked twice before our walk into town to get money to pay the hotel bill. 

  The town is too small to have a hole-in-the-wall banking facility, so we got a ticket and joined the queue of about ten people at the recessed entrance of the local post office, where whilst he was waiting Anthony checked just how much money he had on him. He decided that it seemed like enough to pay the hotel bill, so we risked it and left the queue, nobody wanted Anthony's ticket. To be clear, everybody in the queue looked a bit dejected. We admired the articulated lorry/trailer that was the mobile eye clinic that had parked locally, and the many brightly coloured doors, all in different colours. At my suggestion we briefly looked in on the souk. After admiring the goat who quietly bleated at the back of the covered concrete square that passed for the vegetable market I discover that it is hat buying time again. 

  Anthony knows me by now, I admire what is in front of me and make a bee line for the clothes stall to find the coloured hats with desert designs on them, camels, towers, and similar visuals. To reduce his sense of impatience or discomfort with me he helps me choose the right hat faster, if he says that a hat is 'Lurid' then I know it is the hat for me. Purchase made we walk back to the hotel, paid the bill and exchange last pleasantries, and get in the now comfortably laden car. Our first task was to patiently negotiate the bunged market day traffic where there were laden lorries and vans going in both directions down the narrow street. 

  We threaded our way back through Paradise Valley which remained as stunning as the first time we passed through it. For my seeing the valley from the opposite side of the car to yesterday the views were different. E.g. in the cafe next to the shallow stream the cafe owner had put different coloured plastic tables and chairs in the stream so that customers could cool their feet in the water whilst eating. I enjoyed seeing that simple thoughtfulness, a lot. Anthony made our exit at a different point from where he entered the valley yesterday. to take us through a different part of Tiznit, to make for the vastness of Central Agadir. 

  Between Tiznit and Agadir the traffic was light, the travelling seemed easy. There were no cairns at the side of the road. The ribbon development also seemed much reduced. Agadir came into view quite slowly, but it got bigger and bigger, and bigger again, until it seemed HUGE to me. It was, by far, the biggest place we had visited in Morocco. From the outskirts of the city, where the kings name was imprinted into the side of the biggest hill to the centre took at least an hour of our travel time and it probably took nearer ninety minutes. But I enjoyed how we alternately hurtled and crawled along multi-lane roads and traffic light systems, as if we were a car-shaped pinball in a pinball machine. Anthony somehow knew which lane to be in, and stopped about four times to ask for directions, each time he asked we did not know how many more times we would have to ask, but we felt that we were getting closer, according to the rough map we had.

   The hotel Anthony had read up about was called Hotel Kalam and I spotted it after about the fourth time of Anthony asking for directions and those directions getting him closer along the wide roads of fast moving traffic, but not at the place itself. We retraced our way back along very few of the roads in attempting to find the hotel, except for very short runs where we could see that we had missed our turn or we went twice around roundabout. If our map was rather limited, then the passers by who Anthony asked served us much better.

 Settling in was easy, and a relief though there was a sense of 'journey's end approaching' between us. After settling in our first task was to find the hole in the wall from which to draw money, that proved easy though with the road repairs and remaking the pavements that was going on I had to really watch where I put my feet, awkward when there was also so much to see around me. Since my flight left before dawn I had to ask the the desk at the entrance to book a taxi. Anthony had no reason to drive me there when he did not know the way, disliked driving at night, and needed his sleep, and taxis were cheap. So I counted the money on me and they booked my taxi, they were surprised at the time I chose. I had a feeling that I would not be able to sleep before the taxi took me away so I asked for a midnight taxi even though it was well ahead of when I expected to leave. They wanted me to leave 2 am or 3 am, but I insisted on midnight. Apart from anything else I wanted Anthony to not be disturbed by my departure.

  That fixed we were free for the afternoon. So we were free to look for coffee and cake. Soon we,found a very modern, very clean, looking coffee house with a choice of tempting looking cakes. The interior architecture of the coffee shop was what drew us in, along with the rare looking cacti in boxes all around the edge of the canopied space. Anthony took softwood cuttings of a couple of the plants, who knows? They might take and have a life i France.

  After a few photo opportunities and some other minor fooling around we walked back towards the hotel, which was only ten minutes walk down the street, but very slowly. With the pavements as uneven as they were concentration was required.

  Anthony suggested we go to the pool in the hotel. My swimming trunks found their use for the only time they would this holiday, Anthony wore his underpants and we were tow of very few people lounging and splashing about. The water was pleasantly cool, I swam several ten metre lengths of the pool and Anthony took some time in the water too. I don't know when I last swam in an artificial pool, but it was never anything like this, where the air was as warm as anyone could want and the palm trees gave us their shadow to cool ourselves under.

  More packing and repacking in the early evening and then we set to read quietly, and wait until dinner, where unlike previous places we had stayed we did not know where we were going to eat in advance. Darkness was in the air when we went to look for a restaurant and when Anthony could see where we should go, then it was across a broad, busy, and seriously dug up, road. He went ahead and did not see me trip and fall headlong, as I followed. I  broke my fall with my left forearm and feared for my glasses being broke but nothing like that happened. No real damage done, beyond sensing my own fragility afresh, in a minor way. 

  The meal was great, a Mozzarella cheese salad, the first proper green salad we had  found in our travels, where one of the standard warnings was 'Beware of the salads' because they may or may not have been properly washed before being presented. It did not not matter one jot or mouthful to us that the cheese that was called Mozarella was surely not what the Italians had in mind when they coined the name of the cheese. It was not made from buffalo's milk, more surprising was to see our green salad garnished with very long, very thin, strips of cucumber peel. That was a bit of recycling to admire.  

  We had to leave the restaurant by 9 pm, which we did and I was much more careful walking back. But then I could see there was no urgency in getting back. Anthony and I were in our beds in the dark for ten, I had set the alarm on my smart phone, a function that I did not know it had until I went through it's list of functions. I was not going to sleep anyway, knowing that when the alarm went off I would be getting up and going out, and informally at least it was the end of the holiday. 

For the last day of this Holiday Memoir please click here. 

  

Holiday Diary - Day Seven

  Wednesday May  6th Last day in Sidi Ifni and our breakfast was excellent, crepe with bananas and chocolate sauce was the first course. There was plenty of bread to put in our bag for later as well as toast and marmalade which was very good. Given how oranges are abundant in Morocco I wondered why marmalade was not served more often, why it was not a speciality of the place. Anthony was dressed to impress in varying shades of green, dark green silk shirt, light green waistcoat. The bill was eventually presented to Anthony. I went up to the room, I could add nothing by hanging around, though I caught Rolando's eye, when he had appeared again. He explained he was taking a bus to Marrakesh later, we could only imagine the heat and noise of a bus bus that full, including children, on an hot day, and wish him well with that. H seemed pleased at the idea...

  I felt a mild numbness at us leaving, which oddly made packing, and making sure we left nothing behind, seem more efficient. I gave Anthony space on his own to pack and from the distance I kept Anthony seemed fine about packing too. But then there became the problem of where he had put the car keys 'so that he would not lose them'. Where ever they were for forty five minutes he could not find them either. The bags were by the car, the car was locked, the room was searched three times, separately, by both of us, along with checking the table we ate our breakfast at, and underneath the table. the search did give me the opportunity to steal the odd postcard. Eventually the keys were discovered in the top right pocket of the waistcoat that he was wearing, where he had put them 'for safe keeping' all along. I'd swear there is something subconscious about the process of losing/hiding the keys but the 'sub' part of the subconscious means I should not, and won't, ask about it. The relief of being able to leave over-rode any thoughts of recriminations about the delay.

   In retracing our journey back to Tiznit we passed Mirleft along with many more small settlements which would be called 'ribbon development' in County Down, where I come from. I was struck again by the character of the vernacular architecture, the mosque is always the one building with a tower among so many low level buildings. On seeing so many mosques here I admired them for the simplicity and elegance of their architecture, and the way the colours they were painted give them all a variety I know the church buildings at home lacked. Where whether church or mosque, they have to be the tallest buildings in the settlement. I used to believe that their height was a matter of status. Now I realise that whilst religious buildings are high status places, the point of the tower was always that it was an echo chamber for amplifying the sound of the call to worship; the taller the tower the further the sound made from the top carries. It is surprisingly easy to conflate height, size, and status, whether with humans or with buildings.

  There seemed to be an oddly similar height/status principle at work with many of the newly built ribbon settlements that were built close to the road. The fronts of the houses were two or more storeys high, but the rooms built in a square behind the frontage would be only one storey high, and there would be clusters of such buildings, built together. I had no idea why this was done. My best guess was that if the owners got settled and had established their trade and lives there, then they could extend the property upwards by building another floor, but on starter incomes/bases life on the ground floor was all they could afford. 

  We stopped in Tiznit to have a freshly squeezed orange juice at a breakfast bar and look at the map/check our route. I took what will probably be my favourite picture of the week, of a German Shepherd dog resting in the shade of a bicycle where both dog and bike were part of some vending spot where newspapers were sold to passers by who stopped at the traffic island they were stopped. We left Tiznit with the city walls to our right, where I glimpsed the entrance to a souk. For a micro-second I wished the car could be stopped and we could investigate what was on sale/for show in there. I do feel that the life on foot seems to be the life in scale with awareness.

  I had no clue that even as I glimpsed the souk entrance that we drove past, for just one second, there was a dazzling full awareness slow car journey ahead, which would be well in scale which would leave us lost for words of awe and wonder. But the big challenge before that was the negotiate the outskirts of Agadir, for us to get on the road for Immouzer Dess Ida Outane.

  Agadir seemed huge, but then were plunged into what seemed like the centre of it, all high rise smoked glass fronted buildings that gave off strange abstract impressions as they reflected light off each other, and reflected the multi-coloured skyscrapers nearby. With views like that I did not mind one or two missed turnings and brief reversals to find the turning and the lane we were meant to be in, and had just missed. When we got to the coast road away going away from Agadir we felt calmer.

  It was on the coast road out that I had my check shirt opportunity, Anthony wanted a pee, and stopped so that I could investigate a rummage market, to give him time alone. By the time he went up the steps I had found the loose fitting checked shirt that was obviously the best, he paid the stall holder the loose change that it cost and i put it on over my T shirt. We were away again.     

   The entrance to Paradise Valley was low key but well signed. After that the scenery slowly seemed to get more and more immersive, until it was as if we were both on a slowly enveloping LSD trip through the landscape of the valley, Like an LSD trip we were travelling at two speeds at once, one speed was the speed the car was doing conveying us along the road, the other speed was the was seemingly slower and to do with how we took in the trees, the narrow road, unchanged in twenty five years,, the streams and the traffic going as slowly as we were going from in the other direction. For maybe five hours we were wowed and wowed again by the constant variations of rock texture, dead and living trees, and the occasional steam, with the occasional surreal looking shop on the end of the bend of a road in the middle of nowhere that sold honey and pottery. The goods outside of the shop were perfectly safe from thieves, and they were arranged as if the scene was a living postcard that you would store as a memory, the image was one that you could not take away in an intact physical version of it-putting a border around it would shrink it to nothing.

  Lunch was like previous lunches, except that nobody passed us this time whereas with previous lunches we were in more populated places and were happy to be waved at by passing strangers. After we reached the last big peak the bends in the road became fewer, the road became straighter. This was how I knew that we were on the last part of our journey for the day. By 4 pm we were in Immouzer Dess Ida Outane, a small one street town which for us arriving at it in the peak afternoon heat was quiet. Seeing the three dogs keep watch on the wall as we entered the town seemed symbolic. It was the height of activity. 

  Our hotel was special to Anthony. He had been here twenty five years earlier, and I could see why he wanted me to experience it; the gardens were extensive, very lush and semi-wild. One thing Anthony and both agree on is that neat and tidy gardens are dead gardens, and the extended planting around this hotel, which must have stretched to an acre or two, was the second great immersive experience of the day.

  After settling in and seeing a little of the gardens I went into the town with my camera, more doors of Morocco, rusty doors, painted doors, security doors-who knew that the doors that lock on the back of articulated lorries could be deployed to make businesses secure? When I returned to the hotel gardens I did the full tour of them and found Anthony at the far end, where he was admiring the scent of the one of the two types of lavender there.  

  The rooms in this hotel were more modern and less personal than in previous hotels, but the hotel was cool and spacious overall. The nearest there was old fashioned character was the various rugs scattered on the floor before the stairs up to our room, though the paintings on the walls ascending the stairs were interestingly gnomic, full of symbols that may or may not meant something serious. 

  The setting for dinner was perfect, candles and a white table cloth, white cloth napkins, and a from inside the dining room a view over the declining light over the valley that was wonderful. Alas the meal did not deliver in the same way. The vegetable soup was thin, the vegetable tagine was okay and perfectly textured but, oddly, it lacked spices. But with a perfect french apple tart for pudding we had no reason to with-hold praise for the food. Our waiter wanted to like us, or wanted us to like him, I don't know which. Anthony laughed when on our own he called the waiter 'the retainer', which as night staff he as, and I asked is he wrinkled? He told us stories of bee keeping and collecting/selling honey for it's medicinal properties, of his work as experimental scientist, and near the end of the meal he showed and gave Anthony something that he was clearly personally invested in, his own formula hair restorer. The waiter had even thought of airport security, the bottle it was in fitted well into one of the liquids security bags.      

  I was slow to go to sleep, I needed more distance from Anthony that I could have in the room. In the morning I woke him up with my snoring, so he woke me up. Still, we have had this agenda of snoring/being unsettled with sleep for most of the thirty years we have known each other. 

For day 8 of this Holiday Memoir please click here.  

Holiday Diary - The First Two Days

Thursday 30th April, left home on the 2.15 pm bus. On the bus looked at my shoes which were scuffed, with laces that were frayed at the ends-that was something I could have fixed at home if I'd been observant enough. An afternoon in Belfast where there is nothing much that I have to do and the only activity I can do is shop. But what do I need? The best buy was the reduced price pan loaf, sandwich filler, and two packets of radishes. It is not always the case that the healthier shopping is cheaper shopping, but in this instance it is. Browsing the Oxfam bookshop I bought as travel reading 'Bowie, Bolan, and The Brooklyn Boy'-Tony Visconti, Published in 2008, it won't cover the last two Bowie albums, about which I would like to know more about than the rest of Bowie's work, but never mind.  

  7.30 pm at the Aircoach stop, The bus left on time and was surprisingly comfortable, the lighting was subdued which was good. The coach was by no means full, though there was some faffing about from some customers who did not know whether to get on or not. Dipping into the Tony Visconti book, I was surprised at him producing Manfred Mann in the 1960's. Slept a little, well closed my eyes to what was around me, on the coach. 

  In the airport for 9.15 pm, I like airports at night, they are quiet spaces and I can use quiet even if I'd like darkness as well when I can't have it. I had plenty of time to dip in the new book, make my Tesco loaf sandwiches and dip into my garlic leaf salad and my cheesy pasta with the well travelled plastic fork. The economy is still downsizing here, More franchise shops are leaving the airport, MacDonald's is the latest to go, does that mean the airport is going upmarket? I still want W.H. Smiths to return to Arrivals as well as there being at least three branches of it in Departures.

  To sleep for gone 11 in a place on my own in a quiet corner of the airport. 

Friday May 1st Awake at 4 am, Well half awake, first thing was to have an early breakfast of sandwiches, steal a few of the bags they leave for passengers to put liquids in, and get rid of the last of the soured milk from about my person before approaching fast track security with my luggage tightly packed and my passport and boarding pass in my hand. 'You are a bit early' they said as they let me through.

  Had a caffeine pill to be more awake. It is less I might sleep more that I won't be alert when I would be better being more alert, The point was proved when after what seemed like a long wait, there was movement at the check out desk which spread around the seats as the staff checked our documents. 'Have you filled in your Passenger Locator Form?' I was asked and for a moment I thought I had not, until I went through all the pieces of paper and there the right piece of paper was-in front of me and the steward who had asked me. That it did not look like the EU version of my memory was what threw me into doubt.

  The plane came in and taxied up to it's parking spot late, we were late boarding and late lifting off by about 25 mins, I was at the rear of the plane at the window seat that I usually get. Next to me were two elderly ladies, ahead of me and behind were families with some quite vocal children. The plane was bunged, full, with maybe one seat left unoccupied. I don't remember seeing the safety drill. I slept through it, and slept through quite a lot more of the activity around me as well. Many might say that sleeping in airports etc is an odd routine, but it balances out well when through sleep on the flight I can ignore what other passengers are doing around me.

  Surprisingly, we arrived at Agadir El-Massira International Airport on time. I left by the rear of the plane, earlier than many. As we spilled out onto the tarmac, into the bright sun, the first thing that happened was that the passenger locator forms were collected from us by a female Ryanair member of staff. Then we queued to get into the airport, and passport control. There were one queue with maybe eight booths in a semi circle, each with a uniformed gentleman in them. One by one we approached the uniforms in the booths and were 'processed', I could not remember the name of the hotel I was going to stay at when I was asked. I resorted to being as literal as possible, and said that the name of the hotel was on the form that I had just handed over. Having grudgingly said that my passport photo did look like me I was let through.

  There was Anthony, in arrivals, looking thin and excited to see me. His first comment was 'What is in the extra bag?' my reply was 'The coat you said I did not need to bring', as if to say 'You were right; I don't need it'. But the reason I wore it in Belfast, and packed it, was for the several pockets in the jacket that closed securely or had zips in them. Those pockets helped me feel that I was less likely to lose anything. They worked; I lost nothing though I had to check what was in what pocket to find it all. 

  The first contact with normality was a policeman in the airport car park who wanted to fine Anthony 400 Dirhams for leaving his car windows down and his car unlocked. Anthony got chatting with the policeman and claimed to be elderly, poor sighted, and generally lacking, whilst showing a certain wit about being that way. His charm worked; no fine was asked for or paid. The space around the car park was landscaped with huge palms and giant cacti, all o them eight foot or higher tall. It looked incredible.

  Away from the airport car park was the first of many signs of the poverty of Morocco, the ribbon development left half finished of a few houses and a shop every few miles, each settlement with a flash of colour in the one shop there coming from the goods on open display, where the goods with the colour are the items that don't sell. The people, or what I could see of them as we drove past, seemed either defeated or quiet because of the heat. We could not tell whether they were defeated or sun shy as we passed at speed. The first stop was for a drink of water and to take photos of a photogenic looking dead olive tree.

The sun makes everything  seem  incredibly photogenic, even the things we saw were not as photogenic as when we  looked  at  them. How much the sun shows up well in the photos remains to be seen, but whether the photos seem sunny or not the foothills to the mountains seem epic.

  Our first proper stop point was the town of Taroudant, a small city with thick walls around it. Anthony had stayed there the night before. 

The town had a large market which was close to our hotel, which amazed me when I saw it. All the rooms were off a central two storey high central courtyard with plants the height of the courtyard growing from each corner.

  The cat that stretched out on the chaise long outside out room looked very comfy. I had not eaten since breakfast when I had my sandwiches after getting through security at gone five in the morning. I had a bad headache and an upset tummy. I felt better after being sick though I still felt tired.

 Because we were there during Ramadan our meal was going to be served at 9 pm, after sundown, so Anthony took me for a walk in the early evening. He knew I'd want to see what was in the town even if everything was closing or already shut because it was end of the day for trading. We went through dirt track streets which were colourful and packed on both sides of with shops of varying quality and riches. On the dirt tracks there was every form of transport, vans with goods in them for the shops, cars, lots of young men on motorcycles, more young men on electric bicycles and ordinary bicycles, lots of well covered women on bicycles, pedestrians, and most surprising to me horses and traps carrying goods and people. They were all moving with great precision around and in front of each other as if they were choreographed that way, and did the same movements daily. With the sight of carts and horses I half thought of the old Steptoe and Son joke about saving the horse shit for the roses. I had collected horse droppings left by passing horses at home, when the horse riding school met in public, for my peach coloured rose. But roses have not yet featured anywhere that I have seen, and horse riding schools seemed to be several worlds away.    

  At our hotel we were the only ones to eat. My headache wore off rapidly with the food, first course a vegetable soup, second course more vegetables, third course an aubergine dish/a spinach dish-very good, fourth course couscous vegetables and mutton with a spicy sauce, fifth and last course fruit salad with avocados in it-definitely a positive addition and something to try at home. serving it all took a leisurely two and half hours, between 9 and 11.30. Whilst we were eating the background music was saxophone versions of popular songs by Whitney Houston and the like, they were surprisingly good. Also as we ate huge flowers fell off the trees in the courtyard fell on the central table in front of us, adding drama to the scene. The hotel cat greeted us whilst we ate too. It had got up off it's chaise long, outside our room.

  After Anthony invited me to sleep next to him in the double bed I was tired and yet unable to go to sleep beside him. I chose to sleep in one of the single beds, where fairly soon I slept much better. The last day had felt like nearer two days long than one, the time had worked out with it.

Saturday May 2nd awake at 8.30 am. Up for 9 to receive the full Moroccan breakfast eggs poached over a bed of tomatoes and onion, coffee, orange juice, fruit jam, flatbread, two sorts of pancakes, and butter. We were pleasantly stuffed, and hid some of the flatbread and egg in our bag, to have for lunch much later. This taking food away for later would become something we did at every breakfast. I am still not quite prepared for travel, I thought we were staying at this hotel another day but we went out to find a hole-in-the-wall bank from which to extract dirhams with which Anthony was going to pay the hotel bill. He packed and instructed me to pack and in the process I left my pyjamas behind, I had put them under a cover before breakfast and forget they were there after, when I came to pack. We were four hours on the road away from Taroudant before I realised where the pyjamas were. it was a small loss; I hope the hotel owner got the wear out of them, they were plain and a nice blue/grey colour. 

  We were on the road from 10 am to 4 pm, winding our way through the foothills of the Anti-Atlas mountains where as we drove we passed many small communities which consisted of a few people, more goats and sheep than people, and even people camping in the desert who often had motorbikes.  The most notable thing was seeing so little rubbish at the side of the roads, because we went on roads that few people travelled on. For lunch we had the flat breads and the Berber eggs from breakfast and the radishes that I'd bought in Tesco's on the Thursday, in the shade of a tree. They tasted fine. The mountains were hallucinatory in their continuous vastness. When we discussed what colours the mountains were we disagreed.  Anthony's glasses have a react-a-light tint on them and my glasses are plain. The colour palate for the mountains, were I to attempt to paint them, was green-grey, yellow-grey, and brown-grey with some black for where the sun created deep shadows.

  We arrived in Tafraout not at all tired, because Anthony had driven slowly so that we were safe for other drivers whilst we took in the scenery which blew away any sense . Reality arrived with a bang when the first person in Tafraout to meet us was a tout, a driven young man who wanted to direct us to a hotel owned by one of his friends because he thought that was where we should stay. He took us to the hotel, and when we smiled and said 'No thanks' to owner of the hotel who understood that we'd been brought there, the tout zoomed off leaving us to guess which way was back into town and admire the huge rocks which are a feature of the local landscape.

  We chose the Hotel Amis. The hotel was central to the town, the room had character, and it was close to the balcony from which we could watch the central crossroads through which all the traffic in the town had to pass, to go anywhere. Most important was the 'feel' of the hotel, which was friendly, like it's name. The minor downside of the room was that the light switching was odd, but easily adapted with. Settling in the room felt light, easy.

  Our evening meal was a splendid spread consumed on a table on the balcony. Vegetable soup, dates, olives, and flat bread, beef tagine for me, vegetable tagine with added prunes and almonds for Anthony, and a light fruit salad to finish, which was more of an artwork with food than a course in itself. It was separate pieces of orange and banana soaked in honey artfully displayed on a black plate. Anthony encouraged me to try the beef tagine to have something different to him, and tasted a little of the beef, then said 'It tastes like dead animal'. 

 For the second time I heard the evening Muezzine, the Muslim call to prayer that is broadcast six times a day. The first time I heard it I thought it sounded like it was performed live and debated this with Anthony. The second time it sounds more like a recording and the melody in the announcement reminds me of some of the more 'bigging up' style announcements that wrestlers used to get from announcers in the ring gave as the wrestlers approached the ring with a slight 'electronic tone' added to it, to modernise it.

  Latest reading; 'The Holy City' by Patrick McCabe who I listened to quite closely when he recently appeared on Radio 4 to promote his latest book. He claimed with some immodesty that he was not comfortable with the style of writing that he was self evidently thoroughly in control of. Anthony is reading 'H is for Hawk' - Helen MacDonald. He was pleased I had brought it with me, I had no expectations. What I knew most was that Radio 4 had guided both of us towards many good books over many decades.

Please find Day 3 of this diary here.