Fish with Whiskey

When the sun goes down in Marrakesh, you should make your way slowly to the main square.

During the day it's choc-a-block full of women and men: snake charmers, fruit sellers, shoe polishers. I'll get back to that soon I promise.


But in the night time, things become more magical in Marrakesh.

Or at least the night scenes make it easier to fulfil our fantasies of far-foreign lands.




And of course, when we gave her the 10 euro note (100 dirham), she was surprised and dismayed that she could not find any change.

"Three hats for 10?"

What can you do?
We were willingly conned.
An oxymoron, that is not at all oxymoronic in Morocco.

Good thing we had Guillermo:

(He didn't buy this one- but the other photos was even worse quality- sorry!)

When we got to the square, the change from the day-time bustle- into an even busier and fuller kind of affair, was startling. And the place was lit up.

Presumably as it has been, for the last 1000 years. 

Argan oil products- for hair and skin. Don't pay over a euro or two for the standard stuff!

It took us a while to work out what was causing all the steam rising off the many newly-arrived carts.



Snails! In a herby broth. 50 cents a bowl.

Andy swears they're better than any he had in Paris!





This kid just looks totally like a baby bird after his snails

It wasn't the only source of nutrients. There were so many fresh juice stores, and so much competition between them for the sale, that we felt bad going all to one booth, and ended up splitting up.




On top of that, and the fairly perpetual shouts of 'Ali Baba!' aimed at Guillermo (or more accurately, his beard), they had rhymes.

Each tent had a number- as practically the only distinguishing feature.

"Whereareyoufrom-kangaroosydney!... one-one-seven-STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN'

Which, I don't know, is that even a good thing when you think about the effect you want your food to have on you?

When we asked a man from a different number tent, how his food could possibly better than that at 117 (where you go straight to heaven!) he even had a rebutting rhyme:
'one-one-seven. Back to Devon'

It needed explanation: 'you know, like in England. You don't want to go there'.

Obscure right?

Can you tell that by this point of the Moroccan journey we were much more comfortable with our roles as 'rich tourists'?

In the end we chose a stall- deciding to eat in the main square itself because of the high tourists numbers, and high flux of food (which was clearly being freshly cooked). These two factors make food poisoning unlikely in my books.


Hmm skewer meat!.

We ended up ordering three times what we wanted to, I suspect more due to a clever move on their part than true miscommunication.

In the end though, it wasn't an overabundance of food, even with the snails already squirming in our stomachs.





We even had room for sweets (although they were all a little unimpressive).

And then wandered the square a bit more.

The experience is less about dining, and more about 'dinner, a show, and maybe a bit of sport or fun to round it all off'.

I'm not sure what's going on here.

This man has some sort of box with a 'trigger', which is basically a strength/manliness test.

Fishing for soft-drinks.

There are times. when we're out of the country, that I miss the Germaness of our life.

And yes, by 'Germaness', I mean all those horrible cliche's and stereotypes that most Auslanders (foreigners) associate with German culture. But I'm refering particularly to the ones that revolve around 'order', 'punctuality' and 'planning'.

I don't miss them often, but ...there are times.

And it might sound strange to you, but one of those times, was when we woke up here:

Erg Chebbi, the small desert of Morocco, right on the border of Algeria.

Our 'desert package' included, among other things, a 'sunrise excursion' through the sand dunes.So it was a mighty surprise to us when we woke up- after a restless and freezing cold night- to find that the sun had already risen.

Worse, the camp looked pretty empty.

We checked the other tents, only to find that Guillermo, our new travelling buddy, had already left. The German couple, and the other small group were also absent- and I started to panic that everyone had gone hiking up a hill (or worse, left!) without us.

At least the camels were still in position.


But then we saw some people walking back towards us- so we headed out onto the dunes. It turned out to be the German and after we all threw around the phrase 'this would never happen in Germany', we realised that the lack of organisation had taken everyone by surprise. They had woken up to see a small group of people already setting off into the dunes, and raced to follow. Seeing them at a distance, Guillermo guessed it was Andy and I, and set off after 'us'.



We decided it was our turn to walk the desert waves.


There were hundreds of small tracks, made by many different tiny animals during the night.
And also lots of larger tracks, made by not-so-tiny, not-so-animals.


Regardless, it was a pretty breathtaking scene.

We caught up with Guillermo...


^Can you see them?

I took a separate path up the mountain to the men, partially to get some snaps of them, but also to avoid 'slowing up the team'. There are times when having one lung seems to be really limiting: mostly when going up a hill or many stairs.

In the end, my path became impossibly steep, and I couldn't make it all the way to the very top.

^Looks close huh?

Not so much:












When we made it back to the camp, everyone was awake, packed up, and waiting for a second chance to board the camels.


So we headed back to the desert edge.




Camel-selfie. It's a new thing for 2015.









There was an awkward moment when one of the berber men talking to us, asked us to come and see something amazing. It was stuff that he wanted to sell, and when we- I beleive politely- told him that we were not interested, he apologised so profusely that we all felt strongly conflicting emotions and reconsidered the tourist-native power balance in morocco.


And then day switched back to night.