Painted Rocks in the Desert
I have thought a lot of my impressions since we got back. It seems at first strange to go to a place you have heard about so much, read about so much, had so many friends go there, that you almost feel as if you had already been there yourself. It's kind of like the first time you walk around New York City, and you feel that its so familiar and yet it is the first time you are truly seeing it with your own eyes.
Marrakech is a very noisy city, the laughing orange juice vendors, the snake charmers, the constant drums and the smoke from the grilling meat all combine to make an at-first overwhelming cacophony of intoxication that takes a lot of your energy. The Berber (Atlas mountain dwellers) people have just the most intensely ravishing faces, framed by deep lagoon blue robes and saffron yellow turbans, such magnetic faces. Deep russet brown skin with bright eyes.
After three days, we left Marrakech and moved on to Essaouira, the French-planned sea-side town, where it was a lot calmer, with beautiful hippies everywhere and a joyous north African and World Music festival, where girls wearing scarves danced and men wearing traditional robes whirled as one.
After that, we had an epic journey, involving three hours on a sweaty bus, half an hour in the back of a truck and two hours with seven people in a car built for five.
We had arrived at the southern coastal town of Mirleft, where we had a beautiful hotel that cost pennies, and dined on rooftops with turtles munching lettuce beside us.
We were taken into the desert, where we were buffeted by the Sahara wind. It dried your mouth and your sweat as soon as it broke, we were told it could mummify you alive. We feasted our eyes on immense rocks painted the colours of Picasso's Blue Period. It was so unlike anything I have ever seen before that I did not know what to think and maybe I have never seen anything with such childlike wonder for years.
Morocco is a country of many opposites, where the calls of the mosques bid believers to pray, but where men sell you necklaces and hashish for cans of beer, where women are veiled but steal secret glances at you when they think you unaware. Where the mint tea is tooth-achingly sweet and gorgeous young men are taken by older western women as lovers. Where you walk around the souks and the people know at least five languages and you walk up some stairs into the most decadent, surreal and exclusive bar you have seen in your whole life, one which a local person has little hope of seeing.
By the end of our time there, I felt a curious attachment to Morocco, where I wanted to leave but a bigger part of me wanted to stay, but maybe with places such as this... which once you enter, your eyes are awash with colour, having been starved on a diet of muted tones... Maybe if you spent too long in a place so sinuous and glittering like the back of a cobra, your eyes would get used to it, and you would see the glory no longer. Maybe. Or maybe your ears, nose, tongue and eyes would be refined into objects for the perception of beauty. I don't know, but I hope I will find out one day.
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