Day 11: Marrakech to Essaouira

Having done the lion’s share of the sightseeing part of the trip, we were going to spend out last four days

The famous goats in trees

resting and relaxing. Our chosen destination for this was the town of Essaouira (pronounced Es-weera), on the Atlantic Coast, due west of Marrakech. I had asked the taxi driver who picked us up from Marrakech station to drive us the 200km journey - he charged us 800 dirhams, which wasn’t a whole lot more than the bus would have cost. We arrived at our hotel at about 2pm. What with this being the resting and relaxing phase of the trip, we had booked our swankiest hotel - the Heure Bleue Palais, a 5 star colonial style place that we had been excited about since we booked it in February. It is the first hotel I have ever been to that had an induction, where we were shown where the swimming pool, cinema, billiards room, restaurants and lounge were - all very exciting. We spent the rest of the day chilling out at the hotel, with dad and I going to get some very late lunch and having a bit of an explore (the other two are recovering at the moment). After a swim we went down to the sea front and found a great restaurant overlooking a pretty square where there was some live music playing. First indications of Essaouira are that it is very nice.

Day 12: Interrupted Sightseeing

The Foggy Port

When we woke up the next morning we found that the town was completely shrouded in mist. Breakfast was
served on the roof terrace, though visibility must have been less than 20 metres. Assuming that the mist would soon be burned off by the sun, we headed into town. Mum and Will had yet to look around properly, so we wandered down the main streets and alleys looking at shops and stalls (and at one stage totally losing each other). Unfortunately the mist was clearing extremely slowly and all of the views that we hoped to have of the town and sea were obscured. Slightly disappointed (and hoping that this wouldn’t be the same for all our time in Essaouira) we headed into a cafe for some lunch.

Luckily when we came out it had cleared and we were able to look around properly. The town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, selected as an ‘excellent example of European colonial architecture in Africa’. It was colonised by the Portuguese to protect their African trading empire and is based around a walled town and fort. Today it is a major working fishing port and one of the main sights (and smells) are the fish stalls, which we spent time exploring. It was getting hotter and hotter as time went by, so at about 3 in the afternoon we headed back to the hotel pool. It was while we were swimming that we got a phone call from home with the horrid news that our house had been broken into - so we had to spend the remainder of the day making calls back to England. We made the group decision to not rush home and to try to make the most of our remaining days in Morocco. After hours of phone calls we headed out for some pizza on the sea walls - a decidedly mixed day really.

Day 13: Back to the Holiday

Castles in the Sand

Having passed up the opportunity to rush home to pick up the pieces of our ransacked house, we tried our best to continue with he holiday - we figured that the house would be rubbish whenever we came home so we might as well squeeze out some more from the trip.  We decided to walk out of the town along the beach and keep going until we wanted to turn back.  The area is known as the windiest place in Africa, located as it is on the Atlantic coast.  We must have been lucky though because the wind was more 'gentle sea breeze’ than 'bracing storm’.  About a mile along the beach we came across the so called 'castle in the sand’ - the remnants of an old Moroccan fort that has long since collapsed.  Legend says that it was the inspiration for a Jimi Hendrix song of the same name - a legend that ignores the fact that he visited two years after the song’s release.  Still though, it was a lovely place to spend the early afternoon.

View of the town from the walls

Once back in town we grabbed some food and then walked around the walls.  The city was built by the Portuguese as a trading town and has a more European feel to it, with whitewashed buildings and open streets and squares.  The town’s fortifications are very impressive and are on the whole intact, allowing us to walk from tower to tower around the city.  Having got our fill, we made our way back to the hotel to freshen up for dinner.





Day 14: Last Day

The fish on display

Ali Ben Yousseff Medersa

We had stayed in Marrakech for quite a while now, but still hadn’t quite seen all there is to see here. Unfortunately Will woke up with traveller’s stomach and decided to stay in the riad for the day, so mum, dad and I set out for the sights to the north of the main square. Our first stop was the Ali Ben Yousssef medersa, a religious school like the ones that we had seen in Fez earlier in the trip. The school was extremely pretty and was once the largest and grandest in Arab North Africa. Unlike the medersas in Fez, we were able to look around the students quarters (rather than just the communal areas) and these certainly made my own university accommodation seem a whole lot nicer than I had previously thought - though they were more spartan than unpleasant. Our ticket to the madersa also entitled us to visit Marrakech museum, which is located in what was the foreign minister’s palace when Marrakech was the capital. The building was worth visiting in its own rights and the exhibits on Moroccan art ranging from the medieval to the contemporary was well worth an hour or so.

Marrakech Museum

From here we passed by the closed Koubba Ba'adiyn. This was the only building of the Almoravid dynasty that was spared by the Almohads when they sacked the city. The small shrine was closed for renovation, but it was possible to see it through the railings and get an impression of Almoravid architecture. We were now in the midst of the various souq districts and had a wander around the woodwork, metalwork and dyers souqs before stopping for lunch at a little cafe. There was one more remaining sight that I wanted to see, the Mouassine Fountain, but I couldn’t find it (navigation in Morocco is proving very difficult). Keen to see it, I asked a local kid to show me where to go for a little tip. When we got there I assumed that he had just run off with my money and tricked me, as the fountains weren’t really much to look at, but it turned out that they had seen better days. Having seen most of the places that our guidebooks suggested were worth seeing, we made our way back to the main square for some cheap, fresh orange juice and then treated ourselves to a relax in the riad pool. In the evening we headed out to a posh restaurant on the outskirts of the medina for our last meal in Marrakech. We had all been very impressed by the city, which you could visit for a week or so as a holiday in itself. Our last stop was the Atlantic Coast, where we would be staying in the coastal town of Essaouira.

Marrakech Sunset

Route through the Atlas

Marrakech, apart from being perhaps the biggest tourist destination in Morocco, is also a fantastic base point for adventures in the nearby Atlas Mountain range. On a clear day it is possible to see the outlines of the mountains on the horizon and we had seen them very clearly from the hot air balloon. Today I had planned to get up into them and to do this I had arranged for a driver and a tour guide to escort us to the kasbahs of Telouet and Ait Benhaddou, which are located on the opposite side of the range to Marrakech. We would therefore have to drive all the way through the mountains, using the Tizi n’ Tichet pass which in times gone by would have been the main caravan route from Timbuktu to Marrakech. We were picked up from our riad at 8am and by 9 were up in the mountains. Our driver was happy for us to stop whenever we saw a beautiful viewpoint (and there were plenty) which meant that it wasn’t until about midday that we made it to our first sight, the village of Telouet.

Window in Telouet Kasbah

Telouet was, until the French were kicked out, home of the Glaoui clan who made their fortune in salt and by commanding the various kasbahs (fortified houses) along the trade route from Marrakech through the mountains. For the most part the road was good, but at times we had to pass along very uncomfortable (but fairly exhilarating) dirt tracks. All the way along our journey we had seen crumbling kasbahs belonging to the Glaouis, but Telouet is where the main one can be found. The Glaouis are seen by most Moroccans as traitors for their close relationship with the French (they were also some of Winston Churchill’s closest friends) and as a result the opulent kasbah has fallen into ruin, with the local villagers doing their best to keep it restored along with the entrance fee from travellers who pass through. The kasbah’s decay is almost epic and makes it seem spooky in the isolated mountains. Only three of the rooms inside remain in their former glory, but these are enough to reveal what an incredible place it must have been. The view through one of the windows over the mountains has been reproduced on countless Moroccan guide books - making it strange that the government is unwilling to save the rest of the site.

Telouet Kasbah

Ait Benhaddou

From here it was another hour along the mountain road that took us through a fertile river valley towards the desert. While we wouldn’t get as far as the Sahara today, the scenery got more barren as we made our way south. An array of tour buses marked the entrance to the town of Ait Benhaddou and we stopped at one of the touristy restaurants for a bit of reasonably cheap and filling lunch. The walled town is actually a series of kasbahs belonging to one family which are built into a hill with a military outpost on top. While most people won’t have heard of it, almost everybody will have seen it at one stage in their lives as it is an extremely popular set for movies. Pretty much every western movie with an ‘Arabian’ twist has been shot there - Lawrence of Arabia, Jewel of the Nile, Kingdom of Heaven and Prince of Persia to name a few from a very long list. The movies never quite take in the whole town however and the numerous photos in guidebooks don’t quite prepare you for what looks like the world’s grandest sandcastle. It isn’t actually made of sand - it is made partially from local stone but mainly from clay and mud, which make the town look like it has been chiselled out of the hillside rather than built. We walked up through the small kasbahs to the military outpost at the top for a stunning view south towards the Sahara and north towards the Atlas Mountains. The long mountain drive had been very worth it - Ait Benhaddou is one of the most unique places I have ever been.

More mountain passes

It was now getting into the late afternoon and we had a long journey back. We went by a slightly different route which had no dirt tracks, making for a fair bit more comfort and a whole new range of panoramas which we happily snapped up. We had been told that we would get back to Marrakech at 6pm, but we had obviously dawdled and ended up getting back at 8pm. We thanked our driver and tour guide who had been brilliant and decided to eat at the riad to save ourselves a walk into town. It had been a long day, but had been really worth it - an excellent day excursion from Marrakech.

Day 6: Casablanca to Marrakech

View from the train window

Another major travel day today as we made our way south to the city of Marrakech. We lay in as long as possible at our fancy Casablanca hotel before getting a petit taxi to the train station. The journey was a similar duration to our one from Meknes to Casablanca and cost a similar amount - while the train was a little late departing, the quality and price of the Moroccan rail service has been really commendable. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the company we kept as a young girl in our compartment shouted for the entire 3 hour duration of the journey. This was really the fault of the parents - who had brought no entertainment for her except for a bag of sweets. Even these weren’t enough to keep her silent however as she ended up shouting while eating them and choked on one, making her even noisier. Any hope that the choking experience might have sobered her was misplaced. We arrived at Marrakech station in the late afternoon and made our way to our riad - le Riad de Jardin d'Abdou, another oasis in the midst of the chaotic big city. Here, we waited for Will to join us from London for the rest of the holiday.

Day 7: Hot Air Balloon and Camel Ride

Inflating the Balloon

Will arrived safely last night and was given very little time to recover from his flight as we had to get up at 5.30am today to go hot air ballooning in the Atlas Mountains. The reason for getting up so early was so that we could see the sun rise over the mountains. This was nearly thwarted immediately as the door to our riad was locked, though luckily I managed to find the night manager asleep in the basement and got him to come and let us out and into the minibus that was collecting us. We travelled for about 45 minutes out of Marrakech with two other Brits who were on the same excursion as us.

We arrived at the take off point just as the sky was starting to show the first hints of light. A pre-breakfast

Sunrise over the Atlas Mountains

snack of croissants and juice was offered in a traditional berber tent which looked out to where the balloon was being inflated. Our pilot, Hamed, introduced himself and showed right away that he was a real character, making lots of wisecracks about our impending doom, which in a funny way helped to settle those in the party who were a bit nervous. With sun rise fast approaching we got up into the balloon and got our first views of the Atlas Mountains and the plains that lead up to them. In the distance we could see the lights of Marrakech and very soon we could see the first glimpses of the sun on the horizon. The views were stunning, with the terrain ranging from barren desert to fertile river to mountain range. The highest point on the horizon that we could see was Jebel Toubkal, the second biggest mountain in all of Africa (after Kilimanjaro). We had about 45 minutes in the air and were glad that we had got up so early to see the sunset - another balloon was just taking off as we landed and I’m sure that their experience can’t have been quite as good as ours. Hamed proved his pilot skills as we came in to land by parking the basket straight on the back of the trailer that it had come in - an incredible feat when you think about it.

Once on the ground again Hamed drove us back to where we had started. This was not without excitement however as Hamed decided to get out of the car while it was moving and ran alongside it, much to our amusement, before jumping back in again - I told you he was a character. We then had our proper breakfast in the same berber tent before being shown around the berber house nearby. Quite how genuine this house was (considering that tourists walk through it every morning) I can’t tell, but it seemed to be the real deal and was very interesting.

Up in the air

The next part of our tour was a camel ride. For this we travelled back to the palm groves on the edge of Marrakech. This is obviously where lots of people have their camel experiences as there were men with camels everywhere. We were all given our own individual camel, which were then tied into a line and ridden in a loop around the palm groves. This was a far more sedate experience than my last camel ride (around the Pyramids, which ended up being pretty scary) and was another great experience. Despite it only being 10am, our tour was now over and we were driven back to our riad in Marrakech. The company, Marrakech by Air, had been really good and come well recommended from all of us. Exhausted, we went back to bed until mid-afternoon.

Camel Riding

We have a lot longer in Marrakech than anywhere else, so in the afternoon we decided to have a vague
wander with no real plan other than to find the famous Djemaa el-Fna, the centre of all things in the city. When we arrived it wasn’t particularly busy so we had a quick ice cream and then moved off into the surrounding souqs. It was good to have found where it was however as we came back for our dinner, which we ate on a terrace overlooking the chaos below. Nothing can quite describe what the square is like, but I will try my best tomorrow as we are coming back.

First taste of Djemaa el-Fna

Day 8: The Sights of Marrakech

Inside the Bahia Palace

Having thus far not seen any of the actual sights in Marrakech, we decided that we ought to get cultural. Roughly speaking, the city’s sights can be divided into those south of the main square and those north of the main square. We decided that today would start with those to the south. The first of these was the Bahia Palace. Bahia literally means ‘beautiful’ and the palace was just that, both in its grand scope and the intricate details of furnishing. Unfortunately, it was also full of tourist groups and was by far the busiest place that we had visited, tourist-wise. It reminded me a lot of the famous Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, though it has to be said it wasn’t QUITE as grand as that. From here we walked to the nearby Badia Palace. The similarity in names had confused me as I had assumed that the two places were the same and had slightly different pronunciations. It turns out that they are totally different, and the Badia Palace is several centuries older and in a lot worse condition. Apparently, upon the palace’s completion, a court jester had joked that it would make a beautiful ruin and, having been sacked 75 years later, he wasn’t far wrong. In contrast to the Bahia Palace, the Badia Palace is more about imagining what used to exist rather than what is there now. In its day, it must have been incredible - by far the largest palace that we had been allowed into, but also the most derelict.

Inside the Badia Palace

Keen to see as much as possible before the heat of the day, we moved on to the nearby Saadien tombs, where the bodies of one of Morocco’s main ruling dynasties are buried. They are very tucked away, as the dynasty that followed the Saadiens were very keen on hiding the legacy of their predecessors. As a result, they were only discovered in 1917 through aerial photography. They are now rather faded, but still impressive in their scope and worth the tiny 10 dirham entrance fee.

The Majorelle Gardens

It was now starting to get pretty hot so we got a taxi to the ville nouvelle, away from the walled city, to go to a sight that was a bit different. The Majorelle Gardens are one of the most famous gardens in the world, named after their creator and then maintained by the legendary Yves Saint-Laurent who had his ashes scattered here upon his death. The gardens were very different to anything else that we had come across and were worth a visit to the ville nouvelle for. We had lunch at a nearby restaurant before getting a taxi back to our riad and taking it easy until sunset. That night we decided to go back to the Djemaa El-Fna to eat at one of the street food sellers. The first step towards getting food is to get to the stalls, as you make your way past snake charmers, story tellers, musicians, dancers and people selling all sorts of bits and pieces. The next step is to find a restaurant, as there are hundreds of stalls that just set up for the evening, using a gas bottle to cook with. Every single stall tries to draw you in with made up offers, such as buy one meal get one free, which would never actually materialise. For no tangible reason we settled on stall number 41 and were treated to a real mix of fish, meat and vegetables. It all tasted very genuine and the atmosphere was terrific - a real life experience, unlike anywhere else in the world. Several guys walked around the stalls with dessert trollies and for 30 dirhams we got a big box of assorted desserts given to us. After dinner we had a fresh orange juice for 4 dirhams from a juice stall and then wandered back to our riad through the souqs, having seen a fair bit of Marrakech in one day.

Second taste of Djemaa el-Fna

View over Casablanca from the hotel

Having seen all we had to see in Meknes, we headed to the train station and caught the midday train to Casablanca. Nearly everybody I had spoken to had said that Casablanca, as famous as it is, is not really worth a visit. As Morocco’s main port, commercial hub and largest city I had heard that it is busy, grimy and only really useful as a transport hub. I was however undeterred and willing to give the city a chance - mainly due to its fame, but also because it acted as an excellent interchange between our travels in the north and our travels in the south. We had therefore decided to spend one night in Casablanca.

The train journey from Meknes took just over 3 hours and was extremely comfortable in 1st class (the tickets cost £10 each). Arriving in the late afternoon we got a petit taxi to our hotel, the Kenzi Tower, which is located in the city’s tallest skyscraper. The hotel was a lot more posh than we had been expecting and it is probably the most luxurious hotel I have ever stayed in. After having lunch in the hotel restaurant we went out for a stroll.

Casablanca (abandoned) Cathedral

While there is a medina in Casa, it is not particularly old and is more of a poor district of the city than exotic bazaar. We therefore spent the afternoon walking around the colonial district which is full of remarkably well looked after French-era buildings in an architectural style unique to Morocco - a combination of French art-deco and traditional Moroccan. Casablanca was the centre of the French administration in the centre of what they rather bluntly called ‘useful Morocco’. Before they arrived, Casablanca was a small port but the French brought large boulevards and government buildings. The city found fame during World War 2 as it defiantly offered to shelter Allied troops, even when the French Vichy government prevented the rest of the country from doing so - this situation forms the background to the famous Casablanca film. We spent about an hour looking around the colonial district, stopping to look inside the old cathedral which now lays empty. Considering what I had been told about Casa, I was actually pretty impressed.

Colonial Architecture

Hassan II Mosque

We then got a petit taxi out to the coast, where one of the most dramatic (and under-looked) sights in all of Morocco can be found. The Hassan II Mosque, started in 1980 and completed in 1993 is the third largest mosque in the world and the tallest building in Morocco. Non-Muslims are allowed in on guided tours (of which there were none left today), but we were happy enough to stand outside and get photos of its dramatic position on the cliffs. Costing $500 million, it is a fairly controversial project, but is definitely worth a visit as a tourist. Our taxi took us back to our hotel where we freshened up for our evening’s entertainment, which was our main reason for visiting. While the film Casablanca was entirely shot in Hollywood, an American has recreated the famous “Rick’s Cafe” in the city itself. We half expected it to be a cheesy imitation, but it turned out to be superb - a classy restaurant with a live band and great food. It looked exactly like the cafe in the film and it wasn’t hard to imagine yourself being in the cast. The film played on a continuous loop upstairs and inevitably the pianist played “As Time Goes By” at about 10pm (it was obvious that we were all waiting for it). We really enjoyed the experience and in many ways it was worth coming to the city just to visit the restaurant. After dinner we went back to the bar on the 28th floor of our hotel and had a drink with great views over the city - the Hassan II Mosque standing proudly on the horizon. While we might have struggled to have kept entertained for much longer in Casablanca, our 24 hours here had been well worth it.

Inside Rick’s Cafe

On top of the imperial city of Meknes itself, there are two major sights in the surrounding area that are well worth a visit. The first of these are the Roman ruins of the town of Volubilis, about 35km to the north and the other is the town of Moulay Idriss which is in the same area. We hired a ‘grand taxi’ for the 4 hours required to visit the two locations and have a look around - the taxi cost us 400 dirhams (about £30) which represented pretty good value.

The main street, Volubilis

We started at Volubilis which was once a major Roman town, producing olives and wine at one of the furthest west points of the empire. Unfortunately much of the stone at the sight was taken to build the imperial palace in Meknes (apparently you can still see the ionic columns in the palace - but as it is out of bounds we wouldn’t get to see them). Some of the site was rebuilt by the French and it is an impressive example of a Roman town. The main street with its surrounding shops and triumphal arch is particularly evocative and it isn’t too difficult to imagine life in the town. We hired a guide to take us around, which turned out to be a good decision as he was able to explain many of the mosaics and artefacts that we came across. After wandering around for about an hour our taxi driver drove us the five minute journey to Moulay Idriss where we got another guide to show us around.

Moulay Idriss

Moulay Idriss is named after the famous Moroccan leader who is buried there. It is in a beautiful location, perched on a small hill surrounded by mountains. It was out of bounds to non-Muslims until the 1960s and entry to the mausoleum is still prohibited. It is a major place of pilgrimage for Moroccans, especially during the festival in August, and our guide explained that for Moroccans who are too poor to make the Hajj to Mecca, it is widely accepted that five visits to Moulay Idriss during the religious festival count as a Hajj. Our guide showed us to the only cylindrical minaret in Morocco (all of the others are square, which is unlike all of the other Islamic countries that I have visited) and to the view point over the town. It was worth getting the guide as he was able to point out many things that we would have missed - and as we would have definitely have got lost in the maze of streets he saved us getting lost. With that we headed back to Meknes where we had lunch in the main square.

Inside the palace district

After lunch we visited a small museum on the main square, which was very beautiful and worth seeing, before getting out of the afternoon sun at the riad. In the late afternoon I went for a wander by myself through the Imperial Palace district. As I say, the palace itself is out of bounds, but there are a few things to see such as another mausoleum and the vast city granaries. The granaries, located 2km from the town centre are by far the most impressive sight in the town. They contained enough food to last the city in the event of a siege and were also home to the 12,000 horses of the Imperial Black Guard. The scope of the granaries is huge and it is an incredible engineering feet - the walls are four metres thick and the temperature remains at 18 celsius all year around (even when outside temperatures approach 45 degrees). Next to the granaries is a large man made reservoir where the locals come to meet. I made my way back to the riad and convinced mum and dad that the reservoir was worth seeing, even if the granaries would be shut by the time we got there. We arrived half an hour after closing time for the granaries, but the power of baksheesh meant that a tip to the guy on the gate allowed us to quickly look around (with a guide who had been hanging around) as they turned off the lights and locked up around us. We watched the sun set over the reservoir and then ambled back into town, having dinner on a terrace above the main square while watching the snake charmers and street sellers below. We opted for the 'pastille’, which is apparently a traditional dish for Meknes. It turned out to be essentially a chicken pastie covered in icing sugar and cinnamon - quite a combination. That was it for Meknes. The city in itself isn’t a massive draw - it is in many ways a quieter, smaller version of Fez, though the granaries are incredible. The main draw to Meknes are the surrounding sights of Volubilis and Moulay Idriss and I was therefore very happy that I had included two nights here in our itinerary.

Sunset at the Granaries

Fez Tanneries

If Fez has one tourist sight it is the tanneries, unchanged in their location or methods for over a millennium. We hadn’t had time to see them yesterday so we decided to squeeze them in this morning to get there before the lunchtime tourist rush. The only way to find them is to get to the correct area and trust a local to take you up to the terrace of one of the leather shops that surround the tanneries. For a bit of baksheesh (the tipping that defines Arab relations with tourists) you are given an explanation of the methods of the tanners who spend the day knee-deep in coloured chemicals. On arrival you are given a small bit of mint (“Moroccan Chanel no.5” as our guide jokingly called it) to cover the intense smell. It really is an incredible place and in its own way is beautiful with the array of colours, though is also terrible in the smell and awful working conditions. After our brief tour we had the inevitable leather shop experience that resulted in me and dad buying a bag and some belts, while mum ended up getting some perfume from the adjacent oil shop. In fairness to them, we have been told that the leather from the tanneries is among the best in the world and the price wasn’t too bad (we think).

This rounded up our visit to Fez and we picked up our bags and got a petit taxi (a small taxi that isn’t allowed beyond the city limits) to the station where we took a 40 minute train journey to the nearby town of Meknes. The train experience was reasonably painless and 1st class tickets cost about £3 each, despite a bit of confusion at the ticket office. The train itself was extremely comfortable, with large seats and air conditioning. We arrived in Meknes in the early afternoon and settled in at our hotel, the Riad d'Or.

Sunset over Meknes

Meknes is another of the four imperial cities - the others being Fez, Rabat and Marrakech. It is also the least visited by tourists as Fez has its enormous medina, Rabat is the capital and Marrakech is the famous tourist hotspot. As we walked around its medina, which is a smaller, more easily navigable version of the one in Fez, we were subjected to very little hassle and were free to wander in peace. We walked the entire length of the medina, through the main square and past mosques and markets to the northern gate, before coming back to the hotel again - the round trip took about an hour. It had been a busy day and after watching the sun go down from our beautiful rooftop terrace we descended back into the medina for dinner at a family restaurant called the ‘mille et une nuits’. I mean family restaurant in the truest sense of the word - it was somebody’s house where we sat in the small dining room while our food was cooked in their kitchen and the children played in the living room next door. Moroccan food doesn’t get much more genuine. We still had a lot more of Meknes to see tomorrow, along with some of the sights in the countryside.

Ryad Salama

Day One: Arrival

The family holiday to Morocco started with a very painless flight from Stansted to the city of Fez in Morocco. Will has just got back from Vietnam, so will meet us later, leaving me, mum and dad to explore the cities of Fez, Meknes and Casablanca. We are now in Fez, in the Ryad Salama, a beautiful ryad in the old medina. We ate our dinner in the ryad courtyard and had an early night - exploring is starting tomorrow.

Day Two: The Medina

The medina in Fez is its main draw for tourists. The largest car-free urban area in the world, the sprawl of tightly-knit souqs, stalls and alleyways are home to around 150,000 people. We decided that we would roughly follow the map in our Lonely Planet guide, which in theory covered all of the main sights. To start with, we needed to get our bearings and the easiest way to do this was to head to one of the entrances to the medina, the western gate. A small river runs through the centre of the city and while it is now mostly underground, its past influence means that in general the ground slopes down towards it. Armed with this knowledge, we headed eastwards and downwards.

Henna souq, Fez

The main sight in the medina is the medina itself - its essential characteristics haven’t changed in the last thousand years and it feels like a real time capsule. Having now been to bazaars in Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, the Fez medina is the only one that has really stood up to the romantic image in my head. Having said that, it isn’t a particularly romantic place - we started by walking through the meat district where butchers openly display all of the bits and pieces of the chickens/cows/donkeys/camels that they happen to be dealing with. The smell is quite something. There were a few places that we had to pay to visit - a woodwork museum and a few historically or artistically significant riads, but on the whole we just wandered. This is the best way to do it I think, as you fight against your desire to not get lost and duck and dive around tour groups, donkeys (the main form of cargo transport), carts and kids. Unfortunately, there is scope to become TOO lost and around lunchtime frustration crept in as we couldn’t find any landmarks and we got tired of locals trying to pull us into their carpet shops.

We eventually managed to find a gate (which along with minarets are the best landmarks) and from there walked back towards out hotel. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant nearby - the “Clock Cafe” which is run by an Englishman who serves Moroccan fusion cuisine. I sampled the camel burger, which in all honesty wasn’t too different to a beef burger. Refreshed, we moved out of the medina into the ‘mellah’, the old Jewish quarter. This isn’t too dissimilar to the medina as it is a walled city, but the architectural style of the buildings is slightly different and the streets are slightly wider. Once a major Jewish centre, the majority of Jews have moved to Casablanca, Europe or the United States - leaving behind a few hundred. The royal palace is also in this district, but is out of bounds to tourist and local alike - only the grand gates are on show and these are manned by elaborately dressed armed guards who deter you from taking photos. There are a few sights in the mellah, but we were happy to just wander around and get the general feel - it was a bit calmer than the medina, but still not free of hassle.

View over Fez

Feeling a bit exhausted, we headed back to our riad to relax and wait for sunset. The best place to view the sunset is the Merenid tombs on the hills overlooking the city. The tombs are dramatic in their advanced state of disrepair and the views over the city are spectacular. The medina, viewed as a whole from up high is straight out of the Arabian nights as the sound of the evening call to prayer rises over the dust and smoke and chaos below. We walked back into town and had our dinner at one of the street vendors in the medina, finishing our meal with traditional mint tea while watching the world go by.

Khan’s Palace, Backhchyrsarai

We woke up for our last Ukrainian morning in the town of Bakhchyrsarai (pronounced Bak-chis-a-rai), located about midway between Sevastopol and Simferopol.  The town is the capital of the Crimean Tatars, an Islamic people who are descendent of the Mongols who invaded (and sacked) Ukraine in the 11th century.  The Tatars did not fare particularly well under the Soviets but are currently experiencing something of a renaissance, with many expats returning home.  In the morning we met up with Paul from our tour yesterday and had a walk through the town centre.  It was strange to be passing mosques instead of churches, and the architecture was in general different from the rest of Ukraine.  This was most pronounced at the Khan’s Palace in the town centre, which would have been the centre of government of the Crimea before it was annexed by the Russian Empire - it had been a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire until then.

View from a cave in Chufut Kale

As time was fairly tight (we had a plane to catch at 3pm) we moved swiftly into the mountains around Bakhchysarai to our next location, Chufut Kale.  The word Chufut Kale literally means Jewish fortress and the town is home to another minority Ukrainian group, the Crimean Karaite community.  The Karaites are difficult to define conventionally (though that doesn’t stop people trying) as they are a kind of mixture between Jews and Muslims.  In the modern day, very few Karaites exist (wikipedia says there are only 2500) but in times gone, Chufut Kale would have contained up to 30,000.

Chufut Kale caves

It is a cave city, carved into the rocks and fortified with additional walls.  The views over the surrounding area are superb and it is extremely similar in appearance to the Cappadocia region of Turkey.  At the top of the valley that we walked up we saw a Karaite graveyard where the tomb stones were a mixture of Hebrew, Cyrillic and Turkish text - showing the distinctly mixed nature of the Karaites.  The town itself is very popular with tourists and as we walked back down through the town it started to get busy.  The last sight of the trip was within walking distance of Chufut Kale - a small cave Orthodox monastery.  Apparently there are five of these on the Crimean Peninsular and this is the most crowded, but with time tight we squeezed in just as a service was finishing.  From here Sergey drove us to Simferopol airport where we waited in the tiny domestic departure lounge for a plane to Kyiv where we changed and headed back to London.  It had been a fantastic trip - Ukraine has so much history to offer and the Crimea alone would be a great two week holiday in its own right.  I’m sure I will be back soon.

Orthodox Cave Monastery

Massandra Palace, Yalta

After the fairly grueling process of getting around Yalta yesterday, we were thankful to have Sergey back with us today with his van.  We had met two guys in the hostel overnight, Paul from Canada and Jim from Australia, who we had invited on our tour as we had plenty of room and it lowered our costs.  Our first stops were anywhere in the Yalta area that we had missed.  We started at the Massandra Palace to the east of the city.  This was Stalin’s dacha, but he only stayed there for one night as he felt that a place that was so isolated would be an ideal spot for an assassination.  This did not deter future Soviet leaders and all of them up until Gorbachev would go on to spend their summers there.  The palace had been originally started by a Tsar, who decided he didn’t like it and didn’t finish it - the furnishings were completed by the Soviets in the style of a French chateau (for the good of the people of course).  This was the least dramatic of the three palaces that we visited, but was also the least crowded.

The Swallow’s Nest

From here we went back to the west of Yalta, stopping off quickly at the Livadia Palace again as Jim and Paul hadn’t had the chance to see it.  Just along the coast from Livadia we saw the so called ‘Swallow’s Nest’ palace, built by a German oil baron at the end of the 19th century to help him to convince a girl to marry him.  Unfortunately the girl decided that the palace was too small and said no.  It was knocked off its precarious position on the cliffs by an earthquake but was rebuilt by the Soviets, who dragged the original buildings materials up from the bottom of the sea, as the symbol of the Crimea.  It is probably the most photographed location on the peninsular and is found on the front of lots of Ukrainian guidebooks - though it is a lot smaller in real life than you might think.  Still dramatic though.

Russian memorial at the Valley of Death

This was just about all we had to see in Yalta and we continued along the coastal road to the famous small town of Balaklava, stopping on the way at a Crimean Tatar restaurant (more on the Tatars later).  Just outside Balaklava we stopped at a monument built on a small hill.  The monument is the Russian memorial for the Crimean War, built in the so called “Valley of Death” where the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade took place.  The light brigade, a group of wealthy British aristocrats (named the light brigade because they could afford the fastest horses and the lightest, newest weapons) charged straight into a Russian gun battery, leaving all but 100 of their 700 brigade on the battlefield.  The location is now a vineyard and is called “Golden Valley” in Ukrainian.  We all bought bottles of wine at the small shop beside the vineyard, which jokes that the wine is made with the blood of British aristocrats.  There is very little remaining in the valley to show for the battle, but having Sergey with us was ideal as he pointed out where all of the lines would have been.

Balaklava Nuclear Submarine Base

After one bit of major world history we moved onto another one.  Balaklava was home to one of the largest Soviet submarine bases in the whole Soviet Union.  The base was so important that NATO designated it their third target in the event of the Cold War turning hot.  It is now empty, but the structure of the base (built underneath a mountain) is still there and is a museum.  There are no submarines inside, but it is easy to imagine where they would have been - the whole base looks like the set out of a James Bond film.  From an engineering perspective, the base was quite an achievement as it was able to survive an almost direct hit with a nuclear bomb - protecting up to nine submarines and crews for a month inside.  The museum contained lots of exhibits about life within the base, with English descriptions that were elaborated upon by Sergey.

Sevastopol Panorama Museum

Despite its fame in British culture for the Charge of the Light Brigade (and the headwear that British soldiers in the town had to make themselves to cope with the cold), the submarine base is the main sight within Balaklava.  From here we drove to the town of Sevastopol, which was the main target for the British, French and Turkish coalition during the Crimean War.  The drive was pretty short and we stopped just outside the city centre to see a  'panorama’ museum.  Apparently these were very popular before WW2, but only a handful remain globally now.  The basic concept is that a large, 360 degree diorama is produced, with a platform in the middle for people to stand on and feel immersed in the scene.  The scene at the Sevastopol panorama is a day in the life of the Sevastopol Siege, the key battle of the Crimean War.  It took one painter four years to paint the background wall and models have been placed in the foreground.  I have to say that at times it was difficult to tell between where the model ended and the painting started.

Sevastopol Bay (with Russian naval ships in the distance)

It had been another long day of travelling and we finished up in Sevastopol city centre around the port.  In my head I had expected Sevastopol to be a real dirty, grimy Soviet-esque town, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.  The city, based around a major military port (where Russia has a lease to keep its Black Sea fleet until 2042) is impeccably clean with wide streets and ornate buildings.  The wide promenade was full when we arrived with lots of bands playing music.  The guidebooks say that Sevastopol is the city that Russia most regrets losing after the break up of the Soviet Union and it isn’t hard to see why.  Had we been travelling independently of Sergey, it would probably have been where we based ourselves due to its fairly central location and nice atmosphere.  We weren’t however staying there tonight as we were heading away from the coast for the first time to the Crimean Tatar town of Bakhchysarai, where we were staying with a family in their bed and breakfast.  They cooked us a traditional Tatar dinner (very similar to Turkish food) which we totally devoured.  We are flying home tomorrow, but there is time for a few more sights before we head off.

A large American cruise ship had appeared in Yalta bay overnight and Sergey had been prebooked to spend the day shepherding Americans around.  As a result we were going to be on our own today in Yalta and the surrounding area.  Yalta is a world famous city despite its relatively modest size due to the conference held there in 1945 between the USA, USSR and Great Britain (represented by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill respectively), to decide the fate of post-war Europe.  The conference was held in Yalta because the area is full of the large country houses (dachas) of rich Russians.  Unfortunately, the stately homes are all located in the hills around the town and are difficult to get to for people who aren’t on an American tour bus.

Moorish architecture at Vorentovsky Palace

We started by heading off to the Vorentovsky Palace to the west of Yalta in a town called Alupka (the palace is sometimes known as the Alpuka Palace).  This palace was built for a Napoleonic era Russian general and was built by the architect who designed Buckingham Palace in London.  The architectural style is very unique - if you look at the land facing side it looks like a Scottish castle, whereas if you look at the sea facing side it looks like a Moorish mansion.  It is also famous as the place where Winston Churchill stayed when he was at the Yalta conference - he is said to have quipped that one of the lion statues in the grounds looked like him without a cigar.  To get there we had to catch the number 32 bus from the Veshchevoy Rynok bus station in Yalta - a journey that was made challenging by the sheer weight of Cyrillic (which is hard to read on a moving bus).  Unfortunately when we arrived it was raining slightly and with time tight we decided to wander around the grounds in the drizzle rather than actually go inside.

Livadia Palace, location of the Yalta Conference

From here we got on another bus back towards Yalta and got off at another palace, the Livadia Palace.  This is the famous one, where the three leaders argued about how they would carve up Europe.  The palace, while not as ostentatious as some of the others in the area, is definitely the most historically significant.  Not only did it hold the Yalta conference (arguably one of the most important events of 20th century European history), it was also the summer house of Tsar Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia who spent his last four summers here with his family before their execution in 1917 by the Bolsheviks.  The downstairs part of the palace is a museum dedicated to the conference, while the upstairs is dedicated to the Tsar.  In the centre is the courtyard where the famous picture of the three leaders was taken.  Interestingly there are also a few ‘outtakes’ of this photo shown in the museum where the three men look a lot more casual.  While the museum wasn’t hugely comprehensive, the palace and the Yalta treaty are famous enough to need very little introduction and it is one of those locations where you can really feel the history.  Stepping out into the courtyard where the famous photograph was taken was a lot like stepping back in time.

Dinner in Yalta