Fes - not the hat

...that's a Fez, and we haven't seen one of those yet, not even in Fes.

Well, what a place! We'd read so much about it, but nothing can do justice to the Real Thing. The sounds, smells, all the sensory stuff can't be got any other way than to be here and rub shoulders against it.

We'd decided to hire a guide for this. Several reasons: it puts some money into the local economy, it makes it easier to find the must-see highlights and it keeps unwanted attention away, by which I mean the constant hassle we experienced elsewhere from folk wanting to be "helpful". This always involves an unspoken contract: "I'll show you something you don't want / take you somewhere you don't wanna go, then you pay me for my expert guidance." This is a major problem here apparently, and while we're not keen on accepting comments like that without our own experience to confirm them, on this subject we do have some "previous".

So, enter Mohammed. Nice chap, mid-forties I'd guess. Arranged through the site receptionist and waiting for us at the appointed hour. Earlier actually, and the taxi meter was running already...no matter, let's enjoy this. A minute to agree the fee - 300Dh plus the cab each way- and we're off. It's quite a way to the medina, not the 3kms mentioned in our site guidebook, so we're glad to have the taxi.

I'm not going to try to describe Fes medina here. Plenty of other, better qualified and articulate writers have been there before me and the information available could fill a large library. Our experience of it, though, was unique to us and I'm sure others would experience it differently and see different things. It's also difficult to compare it to anywhere else people from our culture might've been. I was put in mind of Mary King's Close in Edinburgh - that semi-subterranean warren of rooms and corridors that used to be streets and alleys open to the sky but have now been overwhelmed by later developements. There are, apparently, 11,000 alleyways in Fes and we saw quite a few of them which are barely shoulder width but are, nevertheless, main thoroughfares. They say a picture says a thousand words, so here's a few thousand from our cameras:

I asked Mohammed if he could explain the story of "Fatima's Hand". I'll not cover it here, but he used this door hinge as an example of how the image of the "5 Fingers" crops up all over the place in Moroccan decoration.

 It'd be very easy to get lost here. Mohammed obviously had a well-rehearsed script but was quite happy to chat about any subject and had a level of knowledge of facts and particularly figures that'd keep even American tourists happy. Without wanting to sound rude, our cousins from the USA seem obsessed with the "numbers" that attach to any topic. I remember getting a bus tour of the Kennedy Space Center that told me as much about the bus I was on as the rockets I was looking at. Whether I really needed to know how many bolts were in the transmission is open to debate...Anywaaay, back to the point of this:

 Car boot-type alley sales are everywhere, and you have to be careful not to accidentally step on something that looks like, to our eyes, just junk.

Every alley has a slightly different "feel" to it but unlike other souks we've been in, they don't seem to be specific to any particular commodity. Everything is mixed up together and in tiny shops that are more like cupboards. Certainly, Sue's got a walk-in wardrobe at home that'd make a good shop here. In fact, thinking about it, we could've brought the contents along and made a bit of cash.......

Some alleys are more residential in feel, but all have an air of graceful decay about them. If there's no-one around in modern dress, then the scene you glimpse is timeless. The medina is  - if I recall the fact correctly - 1200 years old, and you can feel every day of that in the air.

Wide enough for 2 people to pass - just. Add a little something else to the mix, and it all gets quite up-close-and-personal......

These guys are known, if they're mules, as "Medina Mercedes". The donkeys are "Dinkies". There's no other way to move cargo around as there's no room for anything more mechanical than a wheelbarrow. We saw quite a lot of these chaps, some loaded to the point that you had to marvel at their ability to stand up, let alone move.

This chap's making decorative combs from some form of shell or I guess it could've been plastic. I've no idea how long each one takes, but here's a craftsman at work and the fruits of his labours were for sale at 5 dirham each. If you're from the UK, that's 30p....

One noticeable thing is how cool the place is. This is the interior of a mosque glimpsed from the "street". The temperature was almost chilly, in fact, enhanced by the lack of any breeze - like opening a fridge door.
We were encouraged to take photos of whatever we liked, but we couldn't cross the threshold.

Each of these buildings we looked into had the most amazing mosaics, plasterwork and cedarwood carving, all going back centuries. Since it all looked pristine, I asked Mohammed when the last restoration had been, and he pointed out the date carved above a door - 1324. I was amazed and said so. What I didn't appreciate until later was that this date is of the Muslim calendar. Our equivalent would be 1906....

Pretty much the top slot on everyone's sightseeing list must be the tanneries. We'd seen so many pictures of these and read so many descriptions that the only thing we hadn't experienced was the well-known stink that you can't get without SmelloVision. Pictures of the vats of coloured vegetable dyes appear in every guide book and this is what we expected to see -

The camera never lies, right? Well, what you see here is a photo that Sue took of a video screen. We'd been led to the tannery entrance by Mohammed and had it not been for him we'd have walked right past it. Nothing but a tiny door amongst others equally nondescript, there was, if you were alert enough to see it, a small hand-painted sign on the wall. Nothing else, not even the notorious smell gave a hint of what lay at the top of a narrow - less than a broad shoulder width wide - staircase and I wondered about that as we climbed. It's supposed to be an overpowering odour. Makes your eyes water, apparently. Obviously whoever wrote that is a lot more sensitive than us - I can't really smell anything that bad... Mohammed handed us over to the tannery guide who gestured towards a wide balcony and invited us to view the vats. As we moved from the darkness out into the bright sunlight, Sue said excitedly "I've been waiting so long to see this...."

We both gasped in disappointment. Everything below us, vats, storehouses, doors, metalwork, woodwork, paintwork, all brand spanking new. Clean, unsullied and almost monochrome. I haven't mentioned that the medina is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the tanneries have been "restored" as part of that status. The project has just been completed and they're waiting for the king to come and officially open it. Until that happens, if you want a whiff of the pigeon shit they use to cure the skins, go to Trafalgar Square......

To make up for it, we took the opportunity to photograph the rooftops:

Sue liked this view of contrasts - an aerial farm on the roof of a building that could be nearly a thousand years old.

 

 

 

Back inside, there was plenty see and buy, but no "hard sell". This was a pleasant surprise and gave us the chance to examine the craftsmanship and variety without having the proprietor or one of the staff hassling us. This was, unfortunately, in marked contrast to the other emporiums that Mohammed introduced us to....

This carpet shop was in an ancient building, the purpose of visiting it supposedly to admire the architecture. Definitely not to buy carpets. That was Mohammed's line, and we made it clear that we were only interested in the culture, not the commerce. Now, I don't mind a bit of a joke and the real reason for our visit was blindingly obvious from the start. However, we played along and the description of the building and it's features was fascinating, as was the explanation that it was now used as a showroom and sales outlet for a co-operative that supports single women. Unlike our society, an unmarried, divorced or widowed woman in Morocco is in for a hard life unless she can find some means of support. These co-ops give that opportunity. We're all for supporting it...but not as part of a subterfuge. We made it clear from the outset that we weren't in a carpet-buying mood but the escort/architecture expert/carpet salesman wasn't having any of it. He tried every trick he could and, not wishing to appear rude while drinking his tea, we tried again to explain that desert driving and expensive carpets didn't mix well. OK, he could wrap it so well it wouldn't get dusty, or he could ship it home DHL for a mere £150 - which gives you an idea of how much a carpet might cost you. While we now know a huge amount of really interesting stuff about carpets and how they're made and decorated, we've also had our prejudices about Moroccan "guides" reinforced. We were eventually dismissed - and that's the only word for it, really - and as we left I asked Mohammed if we could leave a donation for this worthy cause. His reaction was odd: "No. Not welcome. This is not a charity". As it happened, we'd had, earlier, a demonstration of the weaving technique by a young woman working alone in an attic room. Sue had slipped back unnoticed and given her a 20Dh note "for your baby". A pittance by our standards but a gesture anyway. I still don't really know whether we did the right thing, how it was received by her or how to translate what we experienced overall into something other than a blatant and actually downright rude attempt to get Mohammed some commission on a sale. Without banging on about it too much, the same thing would've happened at the next "craft exhibition" we were encouraged to view had Sue not taken a liking to a silk scarf. The supposed deal with these co-ops is that they're sales outlets and everything is a fixed price "because you kind people are uncomfortable with bargaining, so we make it easy for you and take away the strain of shopping." Believe that if you like, but the scarf would've been part of a larger sale if the jellaba that Sue tried on had fitted. It didn't, but that didn't matter to the salesman - she could have it at 200dh discount if she bought the scarf as well...No? 300dh then. No? How much you want to pay? Make your own mind up about how that works in a Fixed Price Co-Operative...

So like a said at the beginning of this, our experience of the Fes medina and our guided tour was unique and "others would experience it differently and see different things". Now that I've distilled some of my thoughts and feelings about it, I'm actually not sure that statement is true. I believe that if you employ an official guide - and they're all supposedly licensed - you'll see what we saw, go to the same or similar places and possibly feel at the end of it a bit like we did. A head full of interesting facts and memories, and a bit more cynical than when you woke up this morning.....