Morocco again, but calm

Sticking with the theme of grown-up non-birding holidays, a few weeks after the weekend in Lisbon Mrs L and I went to Morocco. For many years Mrs L was not keen on Morocco, even after my multiple trips, but I kept at it, showed her photos of Wheatears the Atlas Mountains , Berber life, the deserts and the towns, and finally she came around. But it was not to be a birding holiday. Fine. Much as I wanted to take her all the way east to the Erg Chebbi, ideally arriving after nightfall such that the morning reveal would have that "wow" factor, I decided to play it safe and stick with Marrakech. After all I myself have never actually been to Marrakech, it has merely been an airport from where I've headed off in all directions other than north. 

Our lives have a reasonable amount of the frenetic about them, an intensity that I find difficult to adequately describe. It is not stress necessarily, but a relentless need to stay at a very high operating level in a world where everyone else is also on that same plane. Once you work it out, and this only really comes with time and experience, you know what you need to do and you do it, but the energy required to keep it up is really quite something. Mrs L is a teacher, something I know nothing about and am universally told I would be terrible at, but I know exhaustion when I see it. A half term break from the pace was sorely needed, we required calm and quiet. The Palmerai seemed the perfect spot, an oasis of secluded walled villas, far enough away from the hustle and bustle of the city, but close enough that we could choose to experience it if we wanted. 

The pool was heated, and steamed gently each morning when the cover was taken off.

I found the perfect place, a hotel with just a handful of rooms set in a large garden filled with citrus trees and palms. Dar Zemora. More people worked here than stayed here, there was an understated luxury about it. This was not a five star all bells and whistles establishment, but it had a thread of old world steadiness woven through it. Breakfast on the terrace, tea in the afternoon, the fire lit in your room in the evening. Even though a world away from Reid's in Funchal, it had that same something about it, the small details that made the difference. We loved it.

Dar Zemora

For the first few days we didn't do anything. We let the wound-up intensity of busy lives in London seep slowly out. I blogged about it in fact, in this post, which I now see I titled "Coming up for air". It did feel a bit like that. With time on my hands I wrote several blog posts, caught up a bit. I dozed, I wandered, had a dip in the pool occasionally. There were Tortoises in the garden, and Common Bulbuls in the bougainvillea that adorned the walls. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel, seeing no need to move. I am so good at doing nothing when it's an option.

When we felt sufficiently restored we went on three excursions. The first was to a local botanical garden, Cactus Thiemann. In 1964 a young German guy from Bremen who liked cacti came to Morocco and planted one to see how it did. He discovered that cacti grow really well in Morocco and so he planted more. A lot more. The rest as they say is history. He moved his plants from Bremen to Marrakech and went on collection expeditions to source more seeds and plants that he thought would do well here. Rather like Lotusland in California, one of each cactus was not sufficient, instead Hans Thiemann planted rows and rows of the same species, The effect is dramatic. Interspersed with these fields and forests of cactus are similar of Agave and Aloe. Everything is huge, the cacti are in some cases from his first plantings and half a century old. Some of them become trees, it is extraordinary. My kind of place in other words. 

Our second adventure was to the Medina. An explosion of colour and noise. We'd had the option to stay here but decided for the more sedate Palmerai. But it's only a short car journey away and so we went out one evening. Photographs cannot do it justice, it is an astounding place. Jemaa el-Fna Square is massive, the centre piece of the Medina. Covered in food stalls, musicians, snake charmers, performers, story tellers, from it you plunge into a warren of covered alleyways, shops, stalls, restaurants, parlours, goods of every description and type, here is where you find it. Mopeds zip through the throngs with surprising ease, somehow the flow of people continues and there are no collisions. It is good humoured, loud, lurid, colourful, crazy, scented, a seething mass of humanity either intent on getting somewhere or something, or like us, content to meander with no place or object in mind. It would be easy to get lost but we found our way out again without issue after a nice dinner in a rooftop restaurant as the sun set.

Our final foray was the biggest, an all-day trip out to the Atlas. Oukaimeden, Ouarzazate and the Erg Chebbi may have been out of range, but you do not have to go far from Marrakech before you are what feels like a million miles away. Youssef, the peerless manager at Dar Zemora, organised the entire thing for us, and so after a civilised breakfast a car arrived and we were whisked off to Imlil, a village in the High Atlas in a valley that I had never visited. Here we went for a short hike and then had a meal in a Berber house. On one level it was extremely touristy and as such not something I would usually entertain but somehow this did not matter this time. We were together in the Atlas and Mrs L could now see what she'd only previously had inadequately described to her. What a place, so dramatic, so tenuous, you feel as if some things have not changed for centuries but at the same time there are modern elements too. Villages cling to hillsides as if they might slide down at any moment - indeed this does sometimes happen and there is still evidence of the major earthquake in 2023. As people scratch out an existence here it's a reminder of how comfortable life in London is. Anyway, a lovely break from the rat race which of course is very much in full swing again; the fact we travelled in February and I am only now writing this in May confirming how much we needed this.