Essential Morocco - Morocco Friendly Travel

Camel Trekking in the Sahara

When you pictured dashing into the sunset on your trusty steed. you probably didn’t imagine there’d be quite so mush lurching involved. Don’t worry: no one is exactly graceful clambering onto a saddled hump. But even if your dromedary leaves you knock-kneed, you’ll instinctively find your way to the summit of the dunes at nightfall. Stars have never seemed clearer, and with good reason: at Erg Chigaga, you’re not only off the grid but several days camel trek from the nearest streetlights.

Atlantic Adventure

Morocco’s Atlantic seaboard takes you from the clamor of the north to the quieter coastline of the south. It’s a landscape where cities give way to dramatic sea cliffs, long sandy beaches, and picturesque fishing ports. Take the ferry from Spain to Tangier, at once a quit essentially Moroccan mosaic and a decadent outpost of Europe. Catch the train south. First to chilled-out Asilah, with its whitewashed charms, and then to Rabat, with its colonial architecture and palm-lined boulevards, Follow Casablanca’s suburbanites taking the spectacular ocean road to take the spectacular ocean road to Oualidia, the St Tropez look-alike with a perfect crescent lagoon.

Mountains and Desert

From Sahara dunes to the peaks of the high Atlas, Morocco you have been tailor made for travellers. lyrical landscapes carpet this slice of North Africa likes the richly colored and patterned rugs you’ll lust after n local cooperatives. The mountains -not the just the famous high atlas but also the Rif and suntanned ranges leading to Sahara oases- offer simple, breathtaking pleasures: nights skies glistening in the thin air, and views over a Fluffy cloud and from the Tizi n’Test pass. On lower ground, there are rugged coastlines, waterfalls and caves in forested hills, and the mighty desert.

Archaeological Site of Volubilis

The Mauritanian capital, founded in the 3rd century B.C., became an important outpost of the Roman Empire and was graced with many fine buildings. Extensive remains of these survive in the archaeological site, located in a fertile agricultural area. Volubilis was later briefly to become the capital of Idris I, founder of the Idrisid dynasty, who is buried at nearby Moulay Idriss.

FEZ MEDINA

The Fez medina is the maze to end all maze. The only way to experience it is to plunge in head first. And don’t be afraid of getting lost. Follow the flow of the people to take you back to the main street. It’s an adventure to the medieval world of hidden squares, enormous studded doors and colorful souks. Remember to look up and see intricate plaster work, magnificent carved cedar wood and curly Arabic calligraphy, while at your feet are jewel like mosaics.

Arts and Crafts

The usual arts and crafts hierarchy is reversed in Morocco, where the craft tradition is ancient and revered, with visual art is a more recent development. Ornament is meant to be spiritually uplifting, while nonfunctional objects and representational images have traditionally been viewed as pointless –or worse, vanity verging on idolatry. While Morocco’s contemporary visual-arts scene remains small, its many beautiful crafts –from carpets and leather to pottery and metalwork –make a quite essential souvenir of any trip.

Visual Arts

Perhaps because it has been relegated to a marginal position, Moroccan contemporary art has particular poignancy and a sense of urgency, expressing aspirations that can be understood instinctively while eluding media censorship.

The new artworks emerging from Morocco are not kitschy paintings of eyelash-batting veiled women and scowling turbaned warriors, though you’ll still find these in tourist showrooms. These form a 19thcentury French Orientalist tradition made largely for export, and contemporary Moroccan artists such as Hassan Hajjaj are cleverly tweaking it. Hajjaj’s provocative full-color photographs of veiled women are not what you’d expect: one tough lady flashing the peace sign wears a rapper-style Nike-logo veil, emblazoned with the slogan just Do It’ across her mouth, while his ‘ Kesh Angels’ series showed women bikers on the streets of M Marrakesh.

Morocco’s visual-art scene put down roots in the 1950s and 60s when folk artists in Essaouira and Tangier made painting and sculpture their own by incorporating Berber symbols and locally scavenged materials. Landscape painting became a popular way to express pride of place in Essaouira and Assilah, and abstract painting became an important means of poetic expression in Rabat and Casablanca.

Marrakesh’s art scene combines elemental forms with organic, traditional materials, helping to ground abstract art in Morocco as an indigenous art form. The scene has taken off in the past decade, with the Marrakesh Biennale launched in 2005 and Morocco’s first international Art Fair in 2009.

Crafts

For instant relief from sterile modernity, head to your nearest Moroccan souks to admire the inspired handiwork, of local Maalem (master artisans). Most of Morocco’s design wonders are created without computer models or even an electrical outlet, relying instead on imagination, an eye for color and form, and steady hands you’d trust to take out a tonsil.

All this takes experience. In Fez, the minimum training for a ceramic Maalem is 10 years, and it takes a zellij mosaic-maker three to four months to master a single shape –and with 360 shapes to learn, mastery is a lifelong commitment. When you watch a Maalem at work, it’s the confidence of the hand movements, not the speed that indicates a masterwork is in the making. Techniques and tools are handed down from one generation to the next, and friendly competition among neighbors propels innovation.

Instead of sprawling factory showrooms, Maalems work wonders in cubby holes lining souks, each specializing in traditional trade. But artisans in rural areas are not to be outdone: many Moroccan villages are known for a style of embroidery or a signature rug design. Most of the artisans you’ll see in the souks are men, but you’re likely to glimpse women Maalems working behind the scenes knotting carpets in Anti Atlas villages, weating textiles along with the Southern coast and painting ceramics in Fez, sale, and Safi.

Carpets

If you manage to return from Morocco without a carpet, you may well congratulate yourself on being one of few travelers to have outsmarted the wiliest salespeople on the planet.

Moroccan carpets hook travelers almost every time because there’s a right carpet for almost everyone -and if that sounds like something your mother once said to you about soul mates, it’s not entirely a coincidence. Women in rural Morocco traditionally created carpets as part of their dowries, expressing their personalities in exuberant colors and patterns, and weaving in symbols of their hopes for health and married life. Now carpets are mostly made as a way to supplement household income, but in the hands of a true Maalem, a hand-woven carpet brings so much personality and Baraka (blessings) underfoot, it could never be mistaken for a mere doormat.

Carpets you see in the souks may already have been bought and sold three or four times, with the final price representing a hefty mark-up over what the weaver was paid for her work. Consider buying directly from a village association instead: the producer is more likely to get her fair share of the proceeds, you’ll get a better deal without extensive bargaining, and you may meet the artisan who created your new rug.