Behind the Battlements

Rugged stone escarpments soar into blazing skies. Looking up from the foot of the walls is dizzying. Circling the top of these craggy outcrops, man-made ramparts rise as high again, creating a perimeter demarcating the city within.

Walled cities also rise from the inhospitable desert floor, commandeering the terrain, sending a message to marauding tribes, and militarised armies, ‘we will not be defeated.’ Imperious and impenetrable, defying time, Morocco’s centuries old fortress cities are a blueprint of survival. History has not always been kind; they bear scars as a badge of courage.

 

 

 

North Africa held a spell over me for years, each passing year the call strengthened. Tunisia’s Arab Spring while liberating, cast a shadow over Mediterranean North African countries. Libya already a no-go zone, off limits to tourists. Algeria only the stroke of a pen behind. Around the Suez, Egypt bursts in sporadic acts of targeted violence. Borders will come down, closed to tourists for security reasons. Well-meaning advice suggests a godless traveller would be a target, a sitting duck, unwelcome in extreme conservative Islamic jurisdictions. Even so, how could I not go.

On a romanticised imagining of life behind the battlements I am lured into the medinas of Morocco. Medina simply means city or town in modern Arabic. A medina is typically walled, with narrow maze-like streets some less that a metre wide. Mostly free from motorised traffic making them unique highly populated, urban centres. Somewhere inside these imposing fortifications, my rooms wait.

Read the names aloud. Tangier gleaming white sits at the tip of Africa’s northwest coast. Here the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea kisses the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes the kiss is gentle, often times wild, furious, and passionate. Rabat the capital, Casablanca the enchanting, Essaouira the blue and white coastal fishing city. Inland from the Atlas Mountains south to the western desert, Chefchaouen the blue city, Meknes the ancient, Fez the mystical, and Marrakesh the magical red city. Now, tell me you don’t want to pack your bags.

 

 

Etihad’s long-haul begins with Brisbane to Melbourne. Wait. Melbourne to Abu Dhabi. Wait. Abu Dhabi to Casablanca. Arrive. Nothing prepares me for ‘the glitch.’ The last desert leg is eight hours flying time. Depart Abu Dhabi, 1:00am, arrive Casablanca 9:00 am. Gaining speed for take-off at 1:30am a startling explosion from the left wing spun the plane off the runway. Thankfully desert sands bogged the craft, the acrid bite of electrical burnout seeped into the cabin. Wisps of blue smoke confirmed it.

Nothing moved inside or out for two hours, until a tractor with enough grunt dragged the plane bum first onto the runway towing all inside to the terminal. Offloaded through immigration arrivals procedures, passengers were herded downstairs to a holding lounge.

 

The situation update: ‘Your luggage is safe, a new plane will come, wait here.’

We did, for six hours. With eight hours flight time still ahead we were herded, via the immigration departure procedure, back onboard. Also, my home stay accommodation in the heart of Casablanca was cancelled a day earlier because of a family death in the Western Desert. Can’t say I was calm.

 

Casablanca, finally. A half decent night’s sleep in too hard a bed, in too small a room, in a hotel that’d seen too many better days was not a deterrent. Carrying my romanticised notions, I stepped into a chilly sunlit city. Reality did not match expectation. Signs of beauty remain though shabby, looking more like a faded courtesan. Speaking of signs, beautiful Arabic script which I know is read right to left mesmerises, and I stand gazing, willing English subtitles to appease my curiosity. Striking out on foot seeking the Atlantic Ocean, high school French saved the day. Rue de l‘Ocean seems a certain bet.

Not just the sights but the sounds and smells send me into a frenzy, a sensory overload. Debunking myths became a pastime. For example, no doubt you sang loudly with The Clash, ‘Rock the Kasbah,’ which meant to me the wildest nightclub in town. No. Kasbah is the peak, the citadel, the highest physical place inside the medina. There’s no loud music, wild, abandoned singing, no drunken dancing here at the Kasbah. These are extremely conservative Muslim countries, where two people cannot share a room without producing a marriage certificate. Travellers take note.

 

And then there are the souks. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling with trinkets, ceramics, hand knotted rugs from the Atlas mountains oozing into the alleyways, sweeping endlessly before me.  No comfort is to be had from tourism claims, ‘the joy of entering souks is getting lost.’ What utter rubbish. There’s no joy, absolutely no joy in being lost. There’s no comfort realising, that terror-stricken face you see is your own haunted reflection in mirror-chipped  pottery. Then I say to myself, hold on now, I have survived the battering of no-holds-barred frenzied shoppers at Boxing Day Door Buster sales.

My greater concern was getting lost up a blind alley, never to be heard of again. Having to be identified hundreds of years later by my grizzly carbon dated remains. Of course, technically I am never really lost, just somewhere I didn’t expect to be.

 

I fell in love with Islamic tiles, and I could touch them. My fingers traced dazzling designs, entranced by their boundlessly entwined colours. Just try that at the Vatican Museum. Falling into perfumed air of hushed secret gardens, fountains bubble and spray. Walking up a flight of narrow stairs stumbling upon a family seated on the floor eating. Nonplussed, they gesture to sit, and share their food. Finding out just how close I am to Islamic religious observances by Fajr, the first prayer performed before sunrise, amplified, and called from directly above my sleeping chamber.

I stayed with Frenchwoman Corinne in her house on the medina wall in Tangier. From my window, Spain is a stone’s throw across the Strait of Gibraltar.

I met Houda and Ramazan, and Fatima in their renovated ‘dar’ deep inside Fez medina, where I sat on their rooftop terrace overlooking an ocean of satellite dishes facing Mecca. It’s breakfast time, and they have made me a Moroccan banquet fit for a coeliac.

In Marrakesh behind towering red walls, ducking and weaving through an intricate series of twisting and turning dark alleys has somehow led me to a heavy black wooden door. My room is inside.

 

Postscript:

At 11pm on 8 September 2023, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck Morocco’s Al Haouz Province causing widespread destruction. The earthquake’s epicentre was in Morocco’s high-altitude, Atlas Mountains, 73.4 km southwest of Marrakesh.

While remote settlements in the Atlas Mountains were devastated, the earthquake didn’t spare Marrakesh where several walls and other structures in the city’s historic medina district, dating to the 11th century, collapsed or were heavily damaged.

At the time of the quake my friend Youseff, and his family were all at home in Marrakesh, asleep. They were woken by their house falling in around them. Terrified and disoriented they made it into the street, and watched the destruction happening around them. For three days they huddled in a park together with hundreds of others shocked, no shelter, no food, and no water.

For three days I was messaging Youseff via WhatsApp, only silence greeted me. Mid-afternoon of the fourth day, a voice I didn’t recognise answered, frightened, weak, and tearful. Only just hours before he had been allowed to return to his family home.

Aftershocks scared him, he was constantly on edge, and fearful. He couldn’t stop bouts of crying, could not hold food down, and only slept fitfully.

He assured me he would find strength through having all his family together, and there had been no major injuries. They had fared better than many others. Resilience, there’s a lot to be said for it.

 

For more about Moroccan medinas: https://thegodlesstraveller.com/inside-medina-walls/

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