It’s 0645 and I’m currenlty on an overnight sleeper train from Tangier to Marrakech, writing this in the pre-dawn darkness. Mr K is still asleep and I’ve had a shit of a night trying to get some sleep, so I thought I’d give up and write about yesterday.
We left the beautiful Chefchaouen around 0930 to head to Tangier, which was a drive of about three hours by private bus. The drive was not too painful and we didn’t stop too may times thankfully… I’m not used to travelling with tour companies, but at home if we have a nine hour drive we’d barely stop twice for fuel or food. So the previous four hour drive that took nearly seven was not fun.
Our first gliimse of Tangier. As most people know, Tangier has had a tempestuous and mottled past as a gateway between Europe and Africa. Its history is full of invasions, occupations, diplomatic intrigues, spies, war time discussions and all sorts that I’m not going to go into here (Google it if you’re interested). We pretty much arrived around lunch time given we left so late and so we head to a local Lebanese restaurant for something to eat down near the rather modern marina area. 
Lunch was lovely – best hummus ever, and then we set off on a tour of the headland to see the landscape.
The views from the National Park over the Mediterranean on the north side of the city. Tangier has some very, very expensive real estate and many famous and wealthy people live in these areas, and of course the King of Morocco has another palace here too.
On the other side of the point is the Atlantic Ocean.
This lighthouse was constructed in 1884 and from here you can see where the two bodies of water meet. 
The deep blue of the Mediterranean meeting the murkier green of the Atlantic. 
On a clear day, you can see Spain from here, though today was a little too hazy for that.
A man and his donkey. Not sure why they are here, there’s not loads of steps for them to ferry people up and down, but there are quite a few guys here in their funny hats with their cute donkeys just loitering around the tourists.
Throughout the national park, they have a massive boar problem – they’re destroying the ground and, as Samirr pointed out, no Muslims will eat them. So they’re breeding out of control and no one is hunting or culling them.
I found the eucalypts everywhere to be really intersesting – they are planted largely to stabilise the soil and stop the erosion, which makes sense, they’re drought hardy and they make a great hardwood.
Self explanatory I think…
We then stopped by a very popular beach – there was no one here at the moment becuase it was barely 20C, which is freezing cold for Moroccans, and the wind was just about blowing us off the bluff. We saw more than one hat making a dash for escape today.
After this we went to the Cave of Hercules which is a system of long caves, half natural half manmade by th Phoencians and the Berber peoples. 
The Phoenicians are believed to have carved out the sea entrance to the cave to look like the shape of Africa… though how, they knew what that shape was, I’m not entirely sure. 
The Berber used to come down to carve out round wheels of stone to make millstones .
I went to the bathroom here because there was a fair chance it wasn’t a squat toilet and might be pretty clean – and nearly had my head bitten off by a rude little woman over the toilet coins. Now, I’ve travelled all over, and am accustomed to keeping a few small coins in my back pocked to pay the ladies who clean the bathrooms, but this woman was demanding 5DH to use the loo – that’s 5 x more than any other loo I’d enountered so far. When I asked why, she said ‘le pappiere, le pappiere’… I pulled out my tissues and said ‘I have my own paper. 2DH’… and she just would not let me use the facilities without giving her 5DH. Which I reluctantly did (it’s not much money). When I came out, Mr K was coming out of the men’s room and I asked him how much it cost, he said 2DH. Naturally this made me a little indignant, but I wasn’t going to make a fuss over it. However, Mr K marched over to her and had a go at her and got my ‘pink tax’ back! It was both annoying and hilarious at the same time. I asked others from our group who went in after me, how much they paid and they all paid 2DH… so go Mr K, saving the ladies from discrimination. The little old lovie obviously wan’t game enough to rip anyone else off. 😛
Back on the road we stopped for a view over Tangier – there are about 1.1million people living here now.
Our next stop was the Cafe Hafa which was founded in 1921, and was apparently a favoured hang out of Jimi Hendrix and his mates. 
Apparently the cafe isn’t considered very family friendly – there’s no alcohol allowed here, but there’s plenty of turning a blind eye to sitting around smoking pot with your sweet Moroccan mint tea.
After a chill spot for a while, with some mint tea and a few biscuits, we set off on a 7km walk around the town to see a bit of Tangier and the old median area. I have to admit, after the stunningly gorgeous Chefchaouen, the city struggled to provide visual delights. 
In the souk, there are the same sorts of stalls – produce, meats, seafood, dates and figs, spices etc. Again Samirr warned us against buying spices here, as they were laced with dust and crap. 
The cut flower industry in Africa really worries me – I know these flowers all come from down near Namimiba where the countryside is drought sticken, but where large European flower conglomerates are tapping the groundwater to grow flowers for the European markets… it’s so fucked. We are tapping subterranean water aquifers in Qld for fucking coal mines and the Europeans are tapping them to grow bloody roses for the European markets. Say ‘NO’ to cut flowers people – they’re killing our stock, our farmers and our wildlife.
Our walk eventually led us right back to the marina development where we had lunch, which I have to say, was much prettier at night.
We then went to a local home for a dinner. Judging by the cost of dinner per person 100DH and the fact that they had a captive audience of Intrepid pax coming through, they were obviously quite a well to do family – and were immediately greeted by this:
I love pink – but that is just … something else!
Dinner was lovely, a harissa soup, vegetable couscous and a huge chicken and olive tangine dish. But felt a little overpriced compared to other places we had been dining at. Will have to give some feedback on that one in the trip notes.
After dinner, we head off to the train that I am still sitting on! I was really nervous about this stupid train ride – with my chronic pain condition the last thing I needed was to find myself unable to sleep and unwilling to disturb my bunk mates. I foresaw myself spending 10 hours stuck in a bunk trying to lay still and remain quiet so as not to disturb anyone, while grinding my teeth and tossing and turning in pain. :/ 
So, as a preemptive measure, Mr K and I decided to pay the extra to get the compartment to ourselves… cos, yeah, I don’t mind distrubing him in the middle of the night. It might not have been necessary as I managed to get about 4.5hrs sleep (I doubled down on all the drugs I had on hand) but I’ve been up and typing this and walking about and stretching, which I wouldn’t have been prepared to do if there were two other people in here. All up a good strategic move I think – even though I’m fucking exhausted and really need more sleep.
And now, I’m up to date. We arrive in Marrakech in a few hours and I’m not sure I have the energy for running around there much today. We do have all day here tomorrow and the next day, as well as two days at the end of our trip. So I think, taking it easy today and seeing what we say may be in order tomorrow. 🙂
Our room is the bottom one here – we were given the top floor, but gave it to Tess and Karl when I decided I didn’t really feel like walking up six flights of stairs every time we came and went from our room.
After breakfast, we ran into Jake and Tyson, who were chilling out using the wifi in a little fabric lined antechamber off the hotel lobby. They’re from California, both in college and travelling with their lovely grandparents, Chris and Allan. They’re really nice guys, though sometimes listening to how they talk to each other makes me laugh. They’re sure making themselves comfortable… 
Christian may be the only person we beat to breakfast, he’s from Quebec, and here he is looking out over the view from the terrace restaurant.
On our way to the telco, we wandered through some more residential type areas, which were just as blue as the main touristy streets.
We met a lovely lady at the Maroc Telecom who was able to assist me with my 4G problem, in spite of my halting French. She told me that my SIM wasn’t properly activated and promptly fixed it. Service with a smile from a telco – who knew such things even existed? After we left there, we decided to take a taxi around to the top of the springs where we pretty much started yesterday’s walk – it wasn’t much farther than we had just come, but it was all uphill through the very winding streets, and today was supposed to be a chill day – so we shelled out the exorbitant AUD$3 for a Petit Taxi. Got to the top and there were men selling photos with their birds… I managed to sneak a picture of the guy’s peacock – but the guy standing beside an ostrich taller than he was, eluded me.
And so we wandered through the narrow pedestrian walkways of the medina checking out the wares lining the streets… so many beautiful handmade things, so many beautiful blue alleys and so many very fancy doorways.
If felt like there were fewer people around this morning than yesterday evening – not sure if that was the case or if it was because we were trying to wander through the backstreets a bit more, but every time we stumbled back onto the main thoroughfares, it was not particularly crowded.
Very fancy and intricate painting on these doors… my image shrinker has lost a lot of the detail, unfortunately. 
Souvenir hand-embroidered cloths.
Me – standing in a very short, very blue, doorway.
There were so many very funky hand-knitted beanies everywhere, and I had to stop myself from buying some – but, I think I’ve finally learned my lesson. That lesson being – *You live in Brisbane and it’s rarely cold, you do not need twenty bloody woollen beanies collected from every weird place you go to!*. Well, at least the lesson seems to have held up for today, we will see if it makes it intact through the entire trip.
This fountain is fed from the beautiful fresh and clean spring that we went to yesterday, though I have no idea what they have been washing here to make it look so unappealing. Don’t care how clean the water is supposed to be, there’s no way I would fill my bottle from this fountain!
Gorgeous altogether!
In the back streets looking for interesting alleys and vistas and spied this very steep set of stairs… did a double-take and noticed this little guy:
Sitting around like he owned the place.
We stopped for lunch down in the main square. Coffee thick as mud, chicken shish, and kofka tagine. Doesn’t take long to decide you could sure get used to this – a long black, a lemon soft drink, two lovingly cooked and very tasty main meals served with free bread, and we were up for a hefty AUD$15.00.
Gorgeous facade on a local school:
We then made our way into the Kasbah to have a look around. The Kasbah in Chefchaouen was built in the 15thC and in contast to the blue city, it is terracotta-brown in appearance. 
The Chefchaouen Kasbah contains a lovely Andalusian-style garden and a former prison.
This prision reminds me of the one Kevin Costner finds himself detained in when captured by the Moors while on Crusade in the terribly historically inaccurate, but somewhat lovealbe film, (thanks Alan Rickman) Robin Hood Prince of Thieves (c.1990 something).
Looking out from the prison to the Andaluscian gardens. 
Amazingly there are at least half a dozen huge and very established gum trees in the garden. They might seem like a good idea, but I have a feeling if one of them comes down, they are giong to create one helluva mess of the ancient walls. 
The Center for Research and Andalusian Studies is also here and currently undergoing renovations, so we could only see the lower levels at the moment.
After that it was back through the mall by which time the buskers, touts, and generally annoying people trying to get your money had all started to turn out, and we decided it was time to head back to the hotel for a bit of rest before dinner with whoever turned out to be around at the time. 
We also made a stop at an orange orchard so we could buy a few fresh oranges for our picnic. The oranges here are lovely, you can get large, cheap glasses of fresh orange juice in restaurants everywhere and the juice tastes slightly more like mandarins than the oranges at home. 
Everytime we get into the countryside, I can’t believe how green everything is…. the grass is lush and green, the trees are green, the stock looks fat and healthy… the drought at home is quickly brought into stark contrast.
Another stop we made was at an olive press co-op. Some of the smaller local farmers don’t have the expensive machinery required to press olives, so they bring their harvest here and their bags are numbered. They then wait their turn and put their olives through the press. The air felt thick and kinda slimy… the ground is literally dripping in olive oil.
I actually disllike olives, which is weird for me as I usually love savoury and salty foods. The smell here was getting to me quite a bit. Bags of olives belonging to different farmers.
A couple of the men who worked here – their clothes are soaked through with olive oil, their hands and faces black with oily gunk. 
This must be one of the few largely automated processes we have seen in Morocco so far… until now, it seemed like nearly everything is done by hand.
The first press olive oil is thick and green.
Everyone was offered a bit of bread to try it, along side other oils that had been processed for the second time and third time. I quite like my extra virgin olive oil, but not being a fan of things that actually taste like olives, I gave it a miss (good thing that turned out to be – at least two in our group said they paid for it as it went right through them and they were running for the bathroom a few hours later).
Anyway, back on the bus and a few kilometers down the road we stopped for a picnic lunch. Before leaving Fez, we went to an enormous supermarket and all picked up some tidbits for lunch. We had some very tasty sandwiches and wraps with meats, cheeses, nuts, dates, figs etc. We even managed to buy some drinks so many had picked up some beers to have with lunch. 
Hay stacks for the winter. 
Everywhere, you could see enormous rows of prickly pear. They use it for a few different purposes – hedgerows are grown to make fencing to keep their animals in. The plant itself is eaten in some dishes, and the flowers are used for a natural dye. At home it’s a noxious weed. 
About another hour or so down the road and we arrived at Chefchaouen. Chefchaouen is nestled between two mountain peaks – the word itself actually means ‘two mountian horns’ – and is located at 560m above sealevel, about 70kms from the Mediterranean to the north and 130kms from the Atlantic to the west. From this lookout we could see some glimpses of the blue walls this city is so famous for.
We arrived at our hotel Darechaouen and were greeted with cups of Moroccan mint tea and date cookies while they sorted the rooms out. 
After the winter snow melts, this spring will have twice as much water pouring from it.
Directly to the left of these four ladies was a bench with four men, presumably their husbands… “What you talking about?” – “Shopping” … “What you talking about?” – “Football”
Want to see my scoot?!
The surrounding countryside is well known as a prolific source of ‘kief’ – marijuana, and as we walked the town you would semiregularly get a strong whiff of pot as you rounded a corner or walked past a shop.
There are public fountains dotting the town that are gravity fed directly from the mountain spring – hundreds of years old, they have seen a lot of use.
There are quaint little alleyways in every direction, most of them steep and because of the fountains located around the place, most of the walkways were slightly wet and rather slippery.
Chefchaouen is also knowns for it’s remarkably varied and popular blue doors… so many gates and doors everywhere – some simple, some elaborately painted, some enormous and some so small I have to duck to go in.
This (below) is one of the most famous photo spots in the city… Samirr warned us that if there were Chinese tourists here, we would ‘have to come back next year’ rather than wait for them to finish taking their photos. The locals are completely over the habit of Chinese tourists to stand in front of any famous object and take fifty photos of themselves in a myriad of very posed positions (tbh, so am I – Iceland last year was a real test of patience on that front).
Samirr was impressed at my crowd management skills, our small tour group was pleased to have their chance at photos sans Chinese tourists, and I was simply stunned at the amazing beautiful blue colours of the steps on this tiny little street that attracts people from all over the world.
I know it looks like the town is nearly empty in most of these photos – but this is just my judicious sense of timing. Pick a spot and wait for the person to move right out of frame and *click* before someone moves into the left of frame. But trust me, there were plenty of people around and the medina only became busier as the sun went down and the locals came to town for the restaurants and clubs.
The town’s main square, which is pretty much at the bottom of the steep medina. 
Still.. there were further little alleyways winding further down the mountain and we were diving back into them to find a Berber carpet shop. 
As tradition dictates, one must go carpet/rug shopping when in Turkey or Pakistan or India or Morocco and well, nearly everywhere from North Africa to the Subcontinent!
Abdullah, our host offered us all sweet Moroccan mint tea… very sweet this time and quite refreshing. This is also part of the tradition, coming right before the selling! In Turkey, I think they have much more success with the selling part, as they often ply customers with beer and raki instead. Here, have a buzz, buy a rug! 
The group waiting for the rugs to start falling.
And so they did… Abdullah*, threw down about fifty rugs in total, all of them locally made by Berber tribes, and in a wide variety of colours and sizes. These rugs are unlike any I’ve seen before, predominantly kilim style and most of them asymmetrical in design – which makes me twitch like all giddyup. So I was pretty safe from any unplanned rug purchases.
Anyway after our rug shopping experience, where no one found anything they liked, we went to a restaurnt called, Restaurant Bab Ssour, for a lovely rooftop dining and some delicious local tagine dishes. 
The view across the medina from the rooftop terrace.
Goat cheese is a speciality local dish, served with balsamic. It was really good and had a smooth creamy texture.
Goat tagine with plums! The meat was just falling off the bone and absolutely delicious.
After our long day of driving followed by what was supposed to be a short orientation walk (6kms), we head back to the hotel for a vodka tonic and crashed in our big luxurious bed.
The royal palace is a popular tourist stop for its enormous ornate bronze doors in gates heavily decorated with zellige tilework and carved cedarwood. The innumerable hours of hand-craftsmanship that goes into making these things is simply phenomenal.
Zellige is mosaic tilework technique that is achieved by taking individually chiselled geometric tiles and then setting them into a plaster base (for certain purposes, like small fountains, they use fibreglass to set them into place. It’s a really popular and prevalent form of Islamic art that we’ve seen replicated on a lot of Moroccan architecture. The geometric patterns are really appealing and you see them on walls, ceilings, fountains, floors, pools and tables. 
Off to the left of this main gate is a small ‘servants entrance’… frankly, they probably deserve to use the main entrance seeing they come and go way more than the King!
After a quick wander through the Jewish Quarter, we took a drive out to a lookout to have a look at the city of Fez. Fez is Morocco’s second largest city, behind Casablanca, with 1.4million peoples. It is largely locaed in a valley surrounded by the high grounds, and the old city or the Medina is divided by the River Fez which runs through the 9thC walled part of the city.
These pictures show how closely packed the Fez Medina is – it is believed to be the largest pedestrian zone in the world. Not a single vehicle can enter the medina as it is a completely bamboozling labyrinth of winding alleyways some of which are barely 70cm wide. Donkeys, mules and horses are the only form of transport in the medina and everything is transported in via animal or hand cart.
Walls of the Fez Medina…the holes in the walls are desinged to allow the high wind to pass through the walls rather than causing damage. Apparently the wind here gets so bad it can ‘knock over’ wall like this…
Before we threw caution to the aforemented wind and ventured into the Medina, we took a stop at a local mosaic and ceramic factory. Pictoral mosaics like the one below are not particularly common. Usually you see the traditional geometric, typically Islamic styles of art still being replicated in mosaic work.
Piles of clay come straight from quarries and have zero purification or cleansing before being put to use. 
Turned bowls drying before their first firing.
The kilns used are still traditional kilns that have been used for hundreds of years… the ground up dark dirt seen in the front is actually ground up olive pits which are added to the kiln fires. Something to do with the oils being beneficial in the firing process, but I’ll admit the explanation was a bit disjointed. 
Tile making in action – this guys spends all day making clay squares into more uniform, flat and tapered clay squares. :/ 
Painting the ceramics with glaze before the second firing.
Etching off the glaze before a second glaze is done. 
Mosaic work is painstakingly done by hand. From the drawing of the designs onto the nice square tiles the previous guy was making…
To the laying out of the design – upside down so the plaster can be poured onto the back to hold it together!
To the final chiselling of the finished product to clean up any irregular edges or overflowed plaster.
The end results of this meticulous and time consuming work are amazingly beautful artworks.
The World Heritage listed Fez al Bali Medina has alleys coming off alleys,stemming from alleys that are connected to even more alleys. Nearly all tourists who venture into this place come with a guide of some sort, becuase it is so easy to get completely lost and end up wandering around for kilometres to find your way out. We entered near a food section of covered markets. 
Dates, figs, seafood, meat, fresh fruits and vegetables, tea, grains, spices, herbs, and god knows what else was stashed into every available square inch of space in the covered shops. It is very similar to the Grand Bazaar in Isanbul. 
This man was selling live snails, and when he saw the tourists photographing his big tub of slimy delicacies, he started asking for money from people who shoved their cameras right over the tub of writhing creatures… tourists in the medina taking lots of photos and buying no produce must drive them crazy.
The camel heads hanging at the butcher’s shop is apparently the easiest way to tell people that you have camel meat in stock today. Little gory, definitely effective advertising. 
Seafoods – the large lumps of white flesh in the front of the table is some sort of local shark meat.
Not far from the fresh produce and food stuffs are was dyers lane. I could see all this silk hanging up and it piqued my interest immediately. Apparently this is ‘saba silk’, which allegedly comes from the agave cactus plant – yes, that agave plant. Disappointinly, from what I’ve read up on this thread though, the bulk of the ‘saba silk’ used in Morrocan crafts is actually rayon that has been manufactured in Spain or India and comes in bulk and is dyed here for local use. I don’t think people care that their item has rayon embroidery on it – but generally speaking I don’t think it’s ethical to lead people to think that their item is made from hand harvested agave and spun by local women into something beautiful, when it’s actually brough in pre-manufactured from India. This is one of those things you hear about and think: ‘yeah, not entirely surprised’. 
Just outside the dyer’s lane was a small bridge that gave a view of the Fez River which runs thorugh the medina. It’s difficult to see in this photo with such a high contrast ration, but I can tell you unequivocally that the fish and eel and other seafood stuffs being sold inside, does NOT come from this river.
We saw loads of these large cone shaped items around the place and had to ask Mustafa what they were – they are food coverings, and apparently these huge velvet and embroidered ones are used for covering bread… ’tis a far cry from the Brabante bread bin that adorns my kitchen!
I managed to see another man doing some metal work on one of these metal topped tables, and was just amazed at how detailed they were.
Further into the the medina we found ourselves moving into the leather area. Morocco is famous for its leather industry, and the medina has three tanneries contained within its walls.
From a balcony overlooking the tannery, you can see numerous stone pits filled with different coloured dyes and liquids. Hides of cows, sheep, goats, and camels are processed here – the first step is to soak them in a series of white liquids – this first stage of the process uses a liquid that is a varying mixture of cow urine, pigeon shit, quicklime, salt, and water. This cleans the often very tough skins, and it normally takes about two or three days. After the cleaning and scraping, they are soaked in various dyeing solutions. The tannery uses many natural colourants such as poppy for red, indigo for blue, and henna for orange – same as they have used since the 11thC. After the skins are dyed, they get spread out on rooftops for sun drying. The leather then gets sold to various craftsmen who use it to make Morocco’s famous leather goods: bags, coats, shoes, and slippers. The entire leather production process in Morocco is done completely by manual labour and uses no modern machinery. They have retained methods that are unchanged since the medieval period… which is just amazing but also completely nuts.
Thank the gods for that spring of mint – the stench was enough to turn your stomcah. I can’t imagine how anyone survives a visit up here in the summer, and I really don’t know how anyone survives working down there their whole life!
I love all these colourful ottomans… you buy them unstuffed and take them home and can stuf them with wadding, wool, rags, hair, whaterver you want. They’re not particularly small to transport though.
Deep in the heart of the medina is the Zaouia of Moulay Idriss II religious complex. It’s a shrine, a mosque and temple dedicated to the tomb of Idris II who ruled Morocco from 807 to 828 (or Moulay Idris II when you include his sharifian title). He was considered the founder of the city of Fes and the first Moroccan Islamic state. The shrine is UNESCO listed and is one of the holiest shrines in Morocco.
Men performing their ablutions prior to prayer.
There are multiple doors to the enormous religious complex and madras (religious university) which allow glimpses of life inside.
After this we took a well earned break for lunch – we had been walking the medina for a hectic three and a half hours… hectic because the place is packed shoulder to shoulder/cheek to jowl in many places. The ground is uneven and often slippery, it’s winding and there are ramps up and down all over the place, it’s easy to get lost and/or trampled by oncoming donkeys or men with handcarts. There is no dwardling in the medina without creating a traffic hazzard. It literally feels like there is no place to ‘be’ most of the time.
And also included some fabulous local dishes – a chicken pastille (chicken pie – shredded chicken with fruit and covered in cinamon and sugar), meatballs served with egg (this is rapidly turning into one of my fav Moroccan dishes), a beef tagine with almonds and prunes and some mixed grill skewers. Everything we’ve had here (with the exception of that first bland touristy restaurant) has been delicious.
After a wonderful shared lunch, we ventured back into the medina to have a few more glimpses into the various gates leading to the mosque and mausoleum complex. The artwork and elaborate decoration on the doorways, walls everywhere you look is astounding.
There are public fountains scattered throughout the medina, and while the water is safe for locals, tourists generally don’t have the constitution to deal with it… so it’s best avoided. 
Also connected to the mosque and mausoleaum complex is the University of al-Qarawiyyin which is THE oldest existing, continually operating higher educational institution in the world (according to both UNESCO and Guinness World Records). It was founded by in 859 AD with an associated madrasa, and subsequently became one of the leading spiritual and educational centers of the historic Muslim world. It was only incorporated into Morocco’s modern state university system in 1963, but has been a formal institute of learning that entire time.
The small windows above are cells for the scholars who lived here… each has a bare room approximately 2m x 2m where they would dedicate themselves to Islamic religious and legal studies with a heavy emphasis on Classical Arabic grammar and linguistics and Maliki law. Some other non-Islamic studies are now also offered such as French and English.
We went upstairs to see the old student’s rooms, and were somewhat perturbed to notice that there were only locks on the doors on the outside of each room and small slots at eye level in each door… it felt more like a luxiourious detention centre than a student/monk’s type cell…?
After our visit to the monastery, we made our way deep into the textiles sector of the medina – now THIS, I was really looking forward to. I was hoping to gain some insight into the sabra silk situation and find out whether it is made from the agave plant or no. We saw a demonstration of someone weaving on an old treadle loom, and the man who seemed to run/own the shop handed around pieces of agave and told us the sabra silk is made from agave fibres. It certainly seems fibrous enough to create a thread – but we weren’t offered any more information than that. From there it was ‘on with the hard sell’, which was a bit unfortunate as we hadn’t experienced this in the ceramics workshop or the tannery. 
The ‘sabra silk’ items were mostly tablecloths and other durable items that most definitely felt somewhat ‘plasticy’ so I dare say it was all rayon and roughly woven at that. There was also loads and loads of pashmina and various garments, huge cotton tassels – no doubt all of which was imported. 
After this we were pretty much all medina’d out. Some of our group went on their own to find some more shopping and hunt for bargains, and some of us head back to the hotel to rest our weary feet. All up, it was an amazing day with so many sights and so much to see, but now I’m fucking exhausted! So it was back to the hotel for me for a chill evening of writing.
A terrace that would have been an open courtyard for dining with lovely dolphins in the mosaic floors.
Being made of natural stone rather than ceramic, the mosaics are in incredible condition given their age and the disruptions to the civilization here. 
A reconstructed olive press that shows how the town made much of its wealth:
We arrived at the site very early and were the first visitors, so we had the place predominantly to ourselves… there was a very moody early morning fog that lifted about half an hour after we arrived.
The tops of ancient columns seem to be a favoured place for swallows and storks to build their nests…
Front facade of the Basilica 
Interior of the Basilica
A somewhat damaged mosaic depicting the Goddess DIana… Diana herself has been removed from the mosaic, most likely by the French who took many artefacts from the site and sent them back to France.
This wonderful, large terrace space depicts the Twelve Trials of Hercules.
Shooting lions, wrestling pheasants, that sort of thing…
A spa area which had a fountain in the middle and visitors could sit in the semicircular cut out spaces and enjoy the fresh waters from the fountains.
The Four Seasons depicted in the floors of the House of Hercules. 
Attached to the site is a relatively new interpretive centre with some artefacts that were found on the site. Unfortunately, much of the site’s treasures have landed in the various museums of Europe, but there were some interesting objects housed here, including these steles from the Mauritanian to the Roman period. A stele was a small monument which depicts a character in relief or engraved often showing offerings in their hands. 
The Royal Palace still belongs to the current royal family and is not open to visitors. Inside we believe there are lavish buildings and a golf course for the King and his visitors.
Outside, rows of palms and Seville orange trees…
A modern monument celebrating the water bearers who wear the funny outfits.
The Sahrij Swani – enormous granaries and stables that were built to support the military – the stables used to house some 3000 horses at the height of the Alaouite dynasty.
The Bab El Khemis Gate Built in 1693, near the Riad and Mellah quarters – we saw a heavily overloaded truck speed through this gate. It barely scraped through, we all did a sharp intake of breath as it screamed towards it. Whoever packed up that truck was obviously very familiar with the size of the gate! 
The very famous Bab El-Mansour gate, covered in mosaics, tile work and koranic inscriptions – built in 1732.
The history of the gate tells us that on completion of the gate when the Sultan inspected it, he asked the architect El-Mansour if he could do better, El-Mansour felt compelled to say ‘yes’, probably anticipating another commission. Instead, the Sultan was infuriated and had El-Mansour immediately executed.
While I love the weird integration of Islamic and Roman elements in the design – it was less than impressive to learn that the columns were pilfered from Volubilis. 
Across the road from the gate is an enormous town square – currently occupied by snake charmers (yes, actual snake charmers, though I don’t think they were very good – their snakes were mostly just laying around in the sun), and men with little monkeys on chains dressed in soccer team shirts that they were literally throwing onto hapless tourists to take photos with, so they could then demand money from the unsuspecting visitors. Most of our group is very well travelled and didn’t fall for this nonsense. Poor little monkeys. 🙁 
Surrounding the square was an endless row of restaurants and people selling tiles and ceramics and all sorts. The green-roofed doorway to right of this picture was the entrance to the undercover food market, which was full of shops selling spices, dates, figs, olives, pickles and down the smelly end – unrefrigerated meat.
Olives, olives and more olives.
Across the other side of the square, away from the food markets was a maze of little alleyways that were more focused on the textile industries – stores full of silk, braids, garments, and garish fabric. You could hear the busy clatter of old embroidery machines around every corner. 
All up, a very tasty meal with some unsual offerings, which, including drinks and tips, it came to a grand total of 55DH per person compared to the 120DH per person at the first tourist restaurant… but someone else can have the next conversation with Samirr when the group wants to change the plan!
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