Even the silence is amplified - 7 days in Morocco
Murray Chalmers on the sensory overload, contradictions, confusion and joy of a place that proves that sometimes you need to get lost to find yourself.
When Diana Vreeland declared that the eye has to travel she was, of course, talking from an especially gilded position as the Empress of Fashion, bestriding the world of style with the consummate good taste that allowed only she to express hope that the bacchanalian frenzy of Studio 54 echoed pagan Rome.
Mrs Vreeland’s discovery of the kaftan on a visit to Morocco in the 1960’s is itself a story of wonder, as so much of her life was.
Visiting her son Frederick (‘Freck’ to his friends), Vreeland must have felt entirely at home in an environment where day-long parties were the norm and where Mick Jagger would let his children ride the Vreeland’s resident camel, Jamila.
According to Vanity Fair, the Midnight Rambler would sometimes hop on the camel’s back himself for a jaunt around the camel-racing track in the grounds, nick-named the Chamodrome.
A host of haute bohemians
Despite visits from Jackie Kennedy, John Paul Getty and a host of haute bohemians, it must have been quite the thing when Diana Vreeland descended on Marrakesh, where she wasted no time in launching the kaftan as a major DV fashion moment.
As might be expected of someone oxygenated by sensory delight, who famously opined that ‘pink is the navy blue of India’, Vreeland adored Morocco, and it’s easy to see why.
Certainly, the house her son Freck later owned sounds wonderful - described in Vanity Fair as having ‘an outsized, idiosyncratic personality…Frederick and his second wife Vanessa gave instructions that it should be designed with an elaborate game of hide-and-seek in mind’.
Although the writer was describing the house she could just as easily have been talking about the owners, the guests and, often, much of Morocco itself.
People had to get lost…
“We insisted that it should be almost impossible to find one’s way around. People had to be able to get lost” added Freck, inadvertently summing up one of the things that is equally frustrating and beguiling about this magical land.
Morocco is a myriad of contradictions and insane juxtapositions and I firmly believe you get from it what you put in, but it’s essentially a place to lose yourself; such is the sensory overload here that it’s tempting to look on it with just as much fear as awe - often in the same moment and always hitting home when you least expect it, when you think you will never, ever find your way to the sanctuary of your hotel and the life you know.
Marrakesh, especially, is a place to be lost but also a place to learn life’s harshest lesson - that it’s often through getting lost that we can ever hope to be found.
I have never been anywhere as disorientating, disruptive or as resonant with contradictions as Marrakesh and yes, I’ve been to India, Japan, Iceland and Dalston on a Saturday night.
Put simply, Morocco is an absolute mindfuck.
Whilst aware that my rather base, reductive summary of a vast country won’t win me the Jan Morris Award for travel writing, I repeat here the words we uttered at least once a day on our recent holiday to Marrakesh and the Atlas Mountains; it’s a mindfuck.
Weeks after returning from just seven nights in this special land, we’re still talking about it with such reverence and awe that I know it won’t be long before we return. Hell, I could even imagine living there, a stranger in a strange land!
Morocco is somewhere that literally beggars belief - hardly surprising when extreme poverty, raw commerce and the magical call to prayer or purchase seem to punctuate your every step.
It actually took us a while to settle into Marrakesh, not least because we were initially so disorientated by the walk through the medina to get to our hotel that we didn’t immediately trust ourselves to leave our beautiful oasis and ever find our way back.
Forget Google maps…
Taxis can’t get to these narrower streets of the medina, and Google maps fails to function there. Street names are sporadic and to be caught looking at a sign or a map is an immediate signifier of haplessness, or worse.
I knew how extreme Marrakesh could be (I’d been once before, albeit decades ago), so we had decided to go posh in our hotel choices.
It’s been a tough year in so many respects and anyway, I’m a bit of a hotel snob – I don’t love roughing it and I actively enjoy spending ages reading hotel reviews and travel guides.
And, of course, therein lies one of the intrinsic problems at the heart of tourism, especially in an environment where extreme poverty is literally outside the locked, impenetrably sturdy posh Jasper Conran hotel doors you’re lucky enough to sleep behind.
In 2019 Morocco attracted more than 13 million tourists, making tourism one of the most important sectors in the Moroccan economy.
In 2023 Marrakesh was voted in the top 10 of best destinations for international tourists by Tripadvisor. Budget airlines serve the country extensively. Our driver was proud to tell us all of this, just as he seemed overly keen to tell us how safe Marrakesh was.
Be careful after dark…
Online advice seems to be that violent crime is rare, especially against tourists, but that the chance of being verbally hassled by locals is high and that precautionary measures should definitely be taken after dark.
I would say this is true and I feel a bit of a wuss writing this but there were times when we – two adult men, both street-wise, shaven-headed, tattooed and adequately muscled – felt like we were in danger.
Writing about it now seems faintly ridiculous. In fact, when we got to day three in Marrakesh we were already wandering round like the urbane world travellers we so want to be, knowing that the path to our luxury hotel could be navigated by noting certain shops and signs on walls. Danger stranger!
It was then that we had our worst experience, getting lost in the souk at night, on our way back from that amazing hidden restaurant that had had a power cut mid-service and had carried on regardless, the mesmeric call to prayer replacing pop music as the rooftop soundtrack to adventurous tourists like us eating camel for the first time (we actually didn’t, and not just because one of us is pescetarian).
What happens when you get lost in Marrakesh is this: you suddenly realise Google maps isn’t working; you think you remember the way to the hotel: the souk becomes darker and darker and less populated and suddenly the guys on motorbikes appear and the gangs of kids start following you and they’re all asking you where you’re going. But you know if you tell them they’ll probably lead you the wrong way anyway and they’ll all definitely ask for money, and just how many dirhams does it take to guarantee a safe passage to your upmarket digs, mere steps away from such acute poverty?
Many locals play a game where they just point and tell you you’re going the wrong way, even though they have no idea where you’re heading.
And the scary thing is they’re always right - you are going the wrong way but you don’t want them to know that and so you keep walking, emboldened by the fact we’re two adult men, both street-wise, shaven-headed, tattooed and, Christ, I wish I’d worked on my biceps a bit more before coming here because my arms look too skinny, and my legs are tired from all that walking, and I’m a bit drunk in a country which largely doesn’t drink, and I’m gay in a country where it’s illegal to be gay and that’s when you turn into the darkest of alleyways to find that there is literally nowhere to go.
And you turn around hoping they haven’t followed you but of course they have. They always have.
High alert in another world
There’s a certain feeling you get when you feel trapped in an environment you can’t control and I always get a dry mouth, as if my saliva has somehow migrated to my heart, propelling it into such overdrive you feel like you might collapse. Or maybe it’s the extreme heat. Or the dust and the smell of the tanneries and the donkeys and the camels on the spit in the restaurant you just left 10 minutes ago but which now feels like a figment of your imagination.
It’s visceral. It’s real. It’s acute. And it’s profoundly and stupidly exciting because suddenly you remember all your privilege and all the things that make your own life feel secure and even cosseted and that probably 30 minutes away are your beautiful linen sheets in your air conditioned room, filled with antique treasures carefully collected by Jasper Conran, whose father started Habitat and whose mother once said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom.
And that’s when you adopt your toughest stare and walk past everyone and find a tiny restaurant where the man looks kind and you manage to speak enough French to tell him you’re lost and he whispers that you’re minutes away from the main square, giving such precise directions that even we can’t go wrong.
And literally five minutes later you’re in the Djemaa El Fna on a Saturday night, surrounded by people and spice stalls and food trucks, snake charmers, dancers, locals, tourists, policemen, women, other gay men and it’s truly everything you want from life and more.
Life in all its messy glory is here.
It pays to remember that you can still depend on the kindness of strangers.
That’s the thing about Marrakesh. Everything seems heightened: the noise is louder; the spices are earthier; the colours are more vivid, the heat more oppressive, the smells more pungent, the food more celebratory.
It’s all somehow more than the sum of its parts – as if the essence of each thing has been distilled and then scattered across the city through air both acrid and resolutely alive with possibility.
Not for a long time have I felt so lucky to be alive and able to feel joy so unbridled, a feeling more acute when caught between the stirrup of the donkey and the dusty, fetid ground.
That’s why Morocco stole my heart at an age when I mistakenly thought I had witnessed and understood enough of life to coast into a slowed down version of myself.
Even in silence, Morocco amplified everything.
It’s a place of wonder, beauty, movement, stillness and thrall to something higher than ourselves.
Morocco is magic.
‘To touch the past with one’s hands is realised only in dreams, and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelops one at every step’
Edith Wharton, In Morocco. Published 1920, but also used in the introduction to Paula Wolfert’s essential book The Food Of Morocco, published by Bloomsbury.