We set the alarm for Wednesday morning (14th January) for about 8am, but having found the fog so thick that we could hardly see out of the hotel window, we had a leisurely start to the day, taking breakfast and not checking out until about 10:30am, by which time the fog was a fraction thinner but still very very thick. Fez is said to be one of the best-preserved, functioning, walled medieval towns still in existence, and there is a real sense of walking back in time about a thousand years! We drove down to the edge of the old city wall, and walked into the old city – like Moulay Idriss the streets and lanes of Fez are extremely narrow and permit walking only – by donkeys as well as people though, because freight deliveries are done by donkeys, which certainly behave as though they have right of way.
Fez is a fascinating and exhilarating mix of sights, colours, sounds and smells, but it was a bit overwhelming at times for Di, who wasn’t feeling to well (she blamed the egg she ate at breakfast). I think she enjoyed the town, but she did not want to stay too long, especially after we visited an open courtyard area near one of the major gateways into the town where there was a strong smell of urine (for a fairly obvious reason given the use of that land!). A highlight of walking around Fez was a visit to the tanneries, where leather is cured and dyed in large open vats filled with ammonia (actually, goats’ urine) and coloured dyes. The tanneries of Fez are one of the amazing sights of the world, but the price of seeing them is enduring the salesmanship of the leather merchants who own the viewing platforms. It was worth it, though – Di bought two very good leather handbags.
We left Fez at about 2:30pm and started the drive back west, stopping briefly for a disappointingly bland and crowded visit to part of the old town of Meknes, and again for several police roadblocks (we counted about 17 between Fez and Casablanca, and at one we seemed victim of an attempt to extort a bribe for a fictitious driving offence). The plan was to drop Di at her hotel, where she would stay for the night before taking a taxi to the airport the next morning for her flight to London, while Andrew and I would drive to the airport, return the car (due back at 8pm) and take the flight to Bamako (capital of Mali), departing at 10:45pm. We arrived at the outskirts of Casablanca at a little before 7pm, so the time looked good. Unfortunately, the directions we had to find the hotel were very poor, and it involved three stops to ask directions from police or taxi drivers (thank goodness for learning French at school!). We finally reached the hotel at about 8:20, by which time Di was very anxious about Andrew’s and my plane, and she was pleading with us to drop her on the footpath and she would take a taxi. Of course, I couldn’t drop her on the street in a strange and confusing city like Casablanca, so I insisted on driving her to the hotel - I would have rather missed the flight than left her on the street in her already stressed state.
As it happened, we did take a few wrong turns to the airport – the streets were incredibly busy and crowded, the signage appalling and the streets quite poorly lit. After stopping twice more for directions, we managed to reach the airport at about 9:15pm, still enough time despite even though the plane actually departed about 25 minutes early.
Andy (age 12) writes:
Wednesday the 14th of January: We checked out before walking around the old town. There were many interesting things to see there such as donkeys having right of way in the very narrow street, (they take up the whole path) and where they make leather, which is a huge area full of these circular bathtubs full of ammonia and donkey urine. What seems weird to me is that people actually wear leather jackets that have been made in donkey urine. Another very odd thing that I saw was that although their houses are in a very poor state and they can’t afford much, every single house there has a satellite dish. (This fact may persuade mum and dad to buy one for our house!) We also walked to the gate of a Muslim mosque. We spent some time driving around the town before driving through about 17 police checkpoints (where they try to make up an excuse so that you can pay them a bribe) to reach the reasonably close city of Meknès where we simply walked around for a short time before driving back to Casablanca where we spent a very long time trying to find mum’s hotel where she would stay at for one night. Dad and I then drove to the airport. By the time we’d arrived there, returned the rental car, checked in, gone through security and gone through immigration and sat down we had about half an hour to sit and wait for our flight!
