Little
picture spoilt by the movies
By Khaled Diab
Part I: No Moor blues
Part II: Migrating to Marrakech
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©2006
K. Diab/K. Maes |
Othello, Shakespeare’s tragic ‘Moor’ who leads
a Venetian army against the Ottoman Turks and murders his beloved Desdemona, came
home to roost in 1959 when Orson Welles decided to shoot the opening of his
classic film adaptation of the play in the Moroccan port city Essouira (which
means ‘little picture’ in Arabic).
Welles put the picturesque walled town on the
film-making and tourism map. At one point recently, there were at least three
major pictures being filmed there, including Oliver Stone’s Alexander the
Great. A-list celebrities, such as Angelina Jolie, regularly flock to
Essouira, and it was popular with rockers, like the legendary Jimi Hendrix, in
the 1960s.
Without a film crew in sight, we entered
through Bab Marrakech, the town’s main gate. We navigated through the
narrow alleyways with their whitewashed houses and blue and saffron shutters.
Our French-owned guesthouse was a quaint, charming and simple affair, with the
bed curtained off from the rest of the small room and breakfast served on the
roof.
Essouira is popular with expatriate French people,
who have driven up houses prices here massively in recent years, while moneyed
Brits push up property prices in France.
We discovered that the city was also a magnet
for dandy dogs whose elegance and aloofness meant that they could not be tied
down by a lead, while being seen with one’s owner was mortifying and just so
“trop passé”.
These gentrified hounds-about-town bounced
knowingly along, promenading themselves down all of Essouira’s best boulevards.
One even stopped by our table while we were eating lunch and seemed to ask with
its eyes whether it could join us for a bite. When I shook my head and said
“No”, it seemed to understand and, bowing its head, it with drew dignifiedly.
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©2006 K. Maes
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All’s not so well
that begins with Welles
Given that so much of the prosperity of the
town, which was known as Mogador before independence, is thanks to Welles, it
might not come as a massive shock that the city unveiled a square and garden
dedicated to the great director and actor. But Welles has been a mixed blessing
on the town.
While his influence has brought in lots of
money and helped repair the city, it has also brought a certain sense of
artificiality about it. During our exploration of the town, we were disappointed
that many of its beautiful old houses and riads were obscured from view by
hundreds of boutiques selling identical ‘folk’ souvenirs and other touristy
tack that have sprung up to cater for the torrent of tourists.
Once off the beaten tourist track, the more
popular quarters of the walled town – which are disappearing fast, with locals
pushed out to the characterless new town outside the walls – are more
interesting.
The port area is beautiful and dates back to
the Portuguese who set up the town in the 16th century when they
built the famous picture-perfect battlements overlooking the rough, deep-blue
ocean. However, the town only grew prominent in the 18th century,
when Sultan Sidi Mohamed ben Abdullah decided to punish Agadir for its
disloyalty to him and commissioned a French engineer to build most of what we
know call Essouira.
It is particularly splendid at night. After
dinner beside a crackling fire in a restored riad, we sat on the battlement
walls watching the moon shimmer over the still ocean and gleaming seagulls pass
by like ethereal ghosts.
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©2006 K. Diab
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Puke express
Although our experience of intercity public
transport in Morocco was overwhelmingly a good one, our bus ride back to Agadir
was on the ‘puke express’. We were convinced by a smaller carrier to take one
of their coaches because the time was more convenient, on the understanding
that it was the same ‘comfort’ bus the vendor had shown us the evening before.
After selling us the ticket, he piled us on to
a coach that didn’t look quite right. But we were already on the road when we
realised that its air-conditioning was not functioning or was switched off…
Then the throwing up began. First, it was a
little girl, disoriented by the sharp mountain bends and the stale air inside
the bus. The stink which joined the general staleness triggered a chain
reaction of further puking and regurgitating into transparent plastic bags
thoughtfully provided by the ticket inspector.
We asked the inspector if it was possible to
switch on the AC and he said it was… but proceeded to do nothing, except hand
out plastic bags! After several hours of this, the air became almost
unbreathable, and we rolled out of the bus in Agadir gasping and dizzy. We needed
to sit on the kerb for some 30 minutes before we felt strong enough to get on
our feet and hail a cab. Our tummies remained upset for more than 24 hours.
Luckily, we still had a day and a half to
recover. We spent that time visiting a disappointing small, out-of-the-way town
called Taroudannt which was hardly worth the two-hour ride, and generally
unwinding and getting some sun before our return to the winter blues.
Part I: No Moor blues
Part II: Migrating to Marrakech
ã2006 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.