Marrakech, Morocco

Editor’s note: Written on the Ryanair return flight from Morocco, November 30, 2008.

It was my goal to write the remainder of my Morocco stories in my journal on the two hour flight back. Then I realized I left my journal at our amazing riad, so I tried to sleep. But the obnoxiously loud Catalans in front of me won’t allow that either, so I’ve found some blank space on the back of Mohamed’s map and will do what my heart will not allow me to live without after such a great trip – write. My stomach is still churning with the feast of last night while the loads of bread and “sehmen” (a wonderful flat, squarish tortilla-like thing) waits its turn. After being praised by Mohamed, our guesthouse manager, for my bargaining skills, I think I can say I absolutely love Morocco. I was cursed at by little boys, street performers and followed by a scarf vendors but somehow I didn’t really let it get to me. The culture is very distinct and different, but full of flavor and authenticity. I bought so much I could hardly fit it in my bag and have no idea how my flight back to the U.S. is going to look. I am absolutely in love with the style of plates, pillows and rugs and wish I could have bought the entire city.

We took an excursion to the Ourika Valley, an area at the base of the Atlas mountains, a ridge that separates Marrakech from the Sahara desert. We stopped and did the tourist things like photos in costumes and pose in front of dangerously unguarded cliffs. We rode awhile with in our white van with the word “tourist” written on it in French and Arabic, as if were weren’t blatantly obvious enough with our cameras and nice clothing. We traveled until we were about an hour and half outside the city, where flat, dusty asphalt roads give way to hardly paved, winding pathways around vertical ascents and little girls wear veils and walk through mud to school.

Our last night here proved to be amazing. We did the traditional Arab bath, right alongside naked, bathing Moroccan women. Yes, it gave the term “community bath” and entirely new meaning.

So there were naked down to our underwear. We were assigned an old stout Moroccan woman with skin as dark as leather and a fine veil of dark hairs above her upper lip. She led us into an open tiled room that echoed with the splash of steaming water and French and Arabic conversations. To the right were a couple of Moroccan women sitting on mats and scooping from buckets of water to rinse their hair. We were lucky enough to have small stools to sit on as our naked Moroccan filled and refilled our personal buckets from spigots that protruded out of the cracked plaster walls. In a garbled mix of French and English she handed us globs of a Moroccan soap that smelled like cheap shoes and looked like silly puddy made from snot. After we’d finished the stuff we were rewarded with buckets of hot water tossed onto our soapy bodies completely without warning. But the next part was definitely the best – the exfoliation. I basically felt like a horse getting bathed for the first time. The Moroccan attacked my arms with a glove slightly less gritty that a nail file and scrubbed until the first couple layers of my dead skin rolled into brown clumps which were later washed away by bowlfuls of water. None of us could believe how incredibly dirty were, but considering we’d climbed up and down a part of the Atlas Mountains things weren’t too bad. Afterwards, we each got a handful of some kind of Moroccan mud slopped on our heads, which we were then motioned to rub in. The Moroccan then attacked us with something that looked like a cat brush, raking if through our cakey, tangled hair. Afterwards, was more bucketfuls of water poured over our heads, which resulted in the mud trickling into places where mud does not belong. As I’m sitting here on this flight, I’m still picking it out of my ears!

The whole thing was something I wouldn’t trade for the world. I only wish I had more time to explore the land of the glorious culture. Oh yes, and did I mention this is the only kind of bath they ever get?