morocco: November 2008 Archives

Now that we'd come down from the Anti Atlas, we were looking at a thousand kilometres of very flat, very dry country between us and Senegal.  We were on the edge of the Sahara.  Only the edge, mind you - we're not stupid enough to drive through the middle.  And how dry can it really be when you're right next to the Atlantic?

Quite dry, as it turned out.  And quite flat, for most of it.  But that doesn't mean there was nothing interesting to eat, of course.  If you're in the desert, by the ocean, presumably people will be eating camel, and oysters.  Stands to reason.  The fermented sea slugs were more of a surprise ...

Barnaby's not speaking to us. He's making a silent protest against our decision to eat camel brochettes today. (They were delicious, especially the chunks of hump fat.)

Normally he's quite keen to try new things. But back in Merzouga on the edge of the desert he met Leila, who carried him gracefully through the dunes. He rather liked Leila.

So when he saw huge hunks of camel meat hanging up outside the butchers' shops here in the Western Sahara, he was less than impressed.

Poor Barnaby. Maybe we'll try to cheer him up tonight with some local oysters. As far as we know he's never befriended any bivalves.

(Find out more about the popularity camel meat here.)

By the time we'd got over the highest part of the High Atlas, it had started to rain.  As we came down through the plains towards Marrakesh, we noticed some of the little streams were starting to overflow, and fields starting to look really quite damp.  Then we came round a corner and realised we weren't going any further - rivers here can overrun bridges at a moment's notice.  Sadly, after turning round, we realised we weren't going back either: the little overflowing streams of ten minutes ago had now become rivers overrunning bridges too.  We could sit and wait, or take the advice of the strangely animated man standing out in the rain, and take the little unmarked road out into the middle of nowhere ...

We were trying to get to Marrakesh to stay with a Moroccan family: Jean-jacques Gérard had arranged for us to stay with his in-laws, and we were excited to see what real Moroccan home cooking was like.  They say that the best food here is in people's homes, and we'd started to suspect that there was something in this.  We'd realised that lots of the interesting stuff is done by women: this means it's usually done at home - so you don't come across it on the standard tourist trail.

For example, finding the women who know how to make couscous the old-fashioned way, rolling it by hand, had taken us quite a while (although we managed it in the end).  Our new mission was to find the women who make warka ...