BRENDA WEBB
An abundance of colour and scent
Travel
Our capital replenishmentSunny Golden Bay set to shineHoliday spots ready for visitorsInto the AtlanticRiding highTwo nights in BangkokGoing TropezBeauty centralExile on easy streetLost in translation
Finding food has never been so hard.
We’re in a rabbit warren of a medina (market) in Sale, near Rabat on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, anxious to explore the produce souks we’ve heard so much about. We’ve seen locals carrying bags, so we know we are close, but asking for directions is hopeless. No-one speaks or understands English, and Moroccan French is so heavily accented that we can’t make head nor tail of it.
We continue wandering through the labyrinth of streets that are so confusing we decide they must have been built to deter invaders – they’ve certainly got us beat. Soon we smell chestnuts or almonds roasting and the sweet tang of spices, and sure enough, we turn yet another corner and are faced with piles of russet-red pomegranates and shiny-orange persimmons.
Thank goodness. We’ve already twisted and turned our way through jewellery, clothing, shoes, fabric, hardware, pottery, rugs, soaps, perfumes and oils and we’ve worked up an appetite.
Unfortunately, that quickly disappears as we reach the chicken stall. Just as I’m admiring the cute fluffy white chickens in cages, a chilling squawking begins, and I look up in time to see a chicken’s head stretched and broken by a Moroccan with bloodied and feathered hands. The unfortunate bird is quickly plucked, gutted and chopped into pieces for the waiting customer while I hurry down the road as the next poor bird is taken squawking from its cage. Chicken is definitely off the lunch menu for me.
Moroccan medinas are a fascinating microcosm of life. This one has been going for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years and still feels locked in an ancient time. You get the impression that not a lot has changed over the years.
Sale is an intriguing city that sits across the Bou Regreg River from Rabat, the capital of Morocco. Conservative and Muslim, it doesn’t attract many visitors, so we get plenty of curious stares and a few distinctly unfriendly ones as we wander the medina.
Set inside five kilometres of massive ochre-coloured walls, Sale was once the most important port in Morocco. Established as a Phoenician and later Roman trading port, it was once occupied by Berbers. Opposing tribes began building on the south side of the river and that is how Rabat was settled, later becoming the capital.
In the 17th century Sale became known rather infamously for its pirates, who ravaged European ships in the Atlantic as far north as Ireland. These days it is known for its ceramics, which are hand-made at the small town of Oulja, a few kilometres up the river. A huge range of beautifully painted bowls, tagines, jugs and vases are made using the traditional Berber facial tattoos as a design. That same design is used in many of the brightly coloured and beautifully patterned hand-woven rugs brought down to the medina by mountain people.
The medina features an astonishing range of goods and the food section is well worth spending time browsing. Locals with a patch of dirt to cultivate sell their produce – some just a handful of lemons or potatoes, others with mountains of parsley, spinach or sage. Sad-looking old women sell single cigarettes while the ever-present beggars present a dilemma to the tourist – to give or not to give. We opt for carrying bags of bananas and giving them away – they’re usually gratefully accepted.
The spice stall is a sensory delight with finely ground spices piled up in sacks beside clumps of root ginger, cinnamon bark and garlic. The dried-fruit range is huge with fat, shiny dates still on their stalks, black prunes, golden sultanas and delicious apricots.
We move on past the vegetable stalls where tomatoes, lemons, plump-purple aubergines, onions, zucchini, red peppers, potatoes, cauliflower and carrots are piled high. Pomegranates are in season and stallholders split the red fruit open to display their magnificent shiny red seeds. Oranges are small but incredibly sweet, juicy, and, like everything here, exceptionally cheap.
We finally find a coffee shop and have some of the best coffee we’ve had in ages. It’s intriguing just to sit and take in the happenings – women wearing traditional dress scurrying by heads bowed, men smoking and playing cards in the nearby park and mangy stray dogs on the lookout for scraps.
As we wend our way back to the town gates we pass houses, where washing hangs drying in the smoky haze and scruffy children kick a ball over the rough cobblestones. We reach the mosque just on prayer time, and it’s an amazing sight as men unroll their carpets on the street outside to pray while the omnipresent beggars wait hopefully.
We’ve filled our backpacks with produce and it’s time to catch the train back to Mohammedia, an hour’s ride south. The French trains are efficient, clean and fast and whiz us through a fertile, if primitive, countryside where goats, sheep and cattle graze under the watch of lone shepherds and a variety of crops grow.
It’s been an interesting and worthwhile stopover.
– The Marlborough Express
Next Travel story:
Aboard a Barbados-bound Bandit
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jonas #1 08:21 pm Jan 02 2012
Liked the article but i found some errors in it; medina = city, not market souq = market
i find it very unbelievable that you saw saw a butcher stretch the neck of a chicken and break it as it is forbidden by Islam and morocco is an Islamic country.
loved the article otherwise, hope to visit some day :)
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