Beyond the tourist veneer of Morocco, authenticity awaits | Travel Stories from The Post and Courier

There is a room in Marrakech where the floor is warm. A fire burns next door. A man feeds the fire and it heats the water and the floor, just as it has since 1562.

If you aren’t careful, this ancient city can take everything from you. Or it can give you new life.

It depends what alleys you walk down and who you walk with and whether or not you know what you are looking for.

The heated floor is in the back of the Hammam Mouassine. Unlike other hammams — or traditional bathhouses — where men and women use the same space but at different hours, this one is part of a larger complex, and this space is for women only.

When we walked in, a group of women were gathered around a low table in their towels, eating a meal. This is a social space and has been for more than four centuries.

We laid on the stone floor and a woman with her hair tied up in cloth, her arms defined by her work, sat on a small stool and poured warm water over my shoulders.

For 462 years, the walls have been three feet thick, whitewashed and tiled. And warm water has poured over women’s backs and the outside world has disappeared.

She scrubbed my skin with a rough mitt, the thing she was trained to do. And generations before her.

As she scrubbed, I was aware of my scars — from recent surgeries, from childhood stitches, from slipping on a hike and cutting my leg on desert stone.

This stranger scrubbed the skin and the scars, and all of it started to peel away.

For 462 years, these hammam women have scrubbed the healed wounds of other women in this room.

She poured warm water over me and covered me in mud and salt. She brought me to the room with the warm floor.

My travel companion, Suzanne Pollak, and I laid there on the floor, looking up at the arched ceiling. Instead of electric lights, there are holes in the roof for filtered sunlight.

The floor seemed to pull on me with a gravitational force — from the fire and the years. The ceiling was grey and stories overhead. My elbows and open palms sunk into the floor.

The woman returned and washed away the mud and the salt. She put shampoo in my hair and started brushing it. I noticed a ray of light coming down like a soft spotlight from the roof. The sun was moving overhead.

Suzanne and I didn’t speak of it until the next day.

We were touring the Merdersa Ben Youssef, a 14th century Islamic college and major tourist site. There were hundreds of people spinning around for selfies and cropping each other out of photos of beautiful tile work and fountains.

Suzanne and I ducked into a small room that used to be a living quarter for teachers. We sat on the floor.

She remembered the hair brushing most of all and as we described the experience to each other, emotion welled up. It filled our stomachs and throats.

Those layers of skin scrubbed off made us fresh but vulnerable.

Tourists streamed by outside our little room and did not come in, even though the heavy wooden door was open.

The walls were three feet thick and white. A small open window let filtered light in. A pigeon stopped on the sill for a moment and looked at us.

Alms giving

I carried two coins in my left hand as I walked. Moroccan coins are the size of quarters but as thick as nickels. They have a nice weight to them.

I moved one coin against the other with my thumb and flipped it. Then again and again until it was a kind of rhythm that counterbalanced each step.

It’s something I learned to do in Ethiopia: to carry coins, so that when you see someone next to the wall with a hand outstretched you have something to give.

Give as many coins as you have. A 5 dirham coin is worth 50 cents, 10 dirhams worth a dollar. The mental dirham to dollar conversion is easy; just remove the zero and you’re close enough.

When confronted with the question of whether or not to give to someone who is begging, my philosophy is to give when you are lucky enough to have something to give.

So the coins were calming for my fidgety hands and they were something else: a way to be comfortable in the streets knowing I didn’t have to divert my eyes or ignore someone in need.

Don’t make a show of it. Place a coin in the hand. Keep walking.

As we walked down the streets of Marrakech, a wooden door was open and the smell of cooking meat invited us in.

The room was dark, except for light streaming onto the floor from windows near the ceiling.

The room felt more dug into the ground than built, and inside was an oven that had been burning for centuries. A man fed firewood into it.

Next to the fire were clay pots full of marinated meat, called tangia. People prepare the meat and then carry it to the oven, which is built below the hammam to heat the floor and the water. While the meat cooks, they bathe and get scrubbed and socialize.

It’s a dish only in Marrakech.

As the fire cooked the tangia and warmed the water for the bathers, a man plucked at a three-string, skin-covered instrument on his lap. He was not playing for us, he was playing for the passage of time, for the smoky air, to fill the room. At his feet were metal castanets, sitting there for any visitors to join in the music.

Gnawa music traces its roots to West Africa. It’s healing music, prayer and poetry music.

The music looped around itself, repeating. The smoke veiled the musician, and I don’t know how long I stood there listening.

I walked back out into the sun and the street, smelling of roasting meat.

As I walked, a woman sitting in a doorway held out her hand and I absentmindedly gave her a coin. As the coin touched her palm, she cupped my hand in hers. She held my hands tight so that I had to look at her. I had to bend down close. I don’t know what she was saying but it was a blessing. An empty baby stroller was on the step next to her. I found myself saying, “I love you.” I don’t know why I said it.

I caught back up to Suzanne. A Moroccan man stood close to me and said that he did the same thing. He carried coins. He learned it from his father, who would fill his pockets with coins before he left the house every day to give. It’s the third pillar of Islam, charity, he said. Alms giving.

Later, Suzanne told me that I had been with the woman on the step for a long time and she wondered what we said to each other.

“Maybe she knew you are going through something,” she said.

14 million tourists

Morocco is one of those places in the world that has been hosting visitors for thousands of years — as the end or beginning of the Silk Road and now as the destination of 14 million tourists last year, despite a devastating earthquake and the war in Gaza. That’s more more than 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. 

That amount of tourism means two things: there’s a lot of infrastructure for visitors, but there’s so much infrastructure for visitors you have to work extra hard to see beyond that into the real culture.

Toward the end of our trip, we sat with Sadik Rddad, founding member of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Center in Fes and upcoming author of a book on travel writing about Morocco.

He said in order to understand Morocco, you have to unlearn everything you think you know about it.

This is not a place to be seen through the lens of the Middle East, or France and Spain, or even Africa. This is home to a certain approach to Islam, born of a combination of the animist beliefs of the natives, the Amazigh, and the Muslim Arabs who invaded the Maghreb between 647 and 709 A.D. (I’m using the term Amazigh, because the better known term Berber is considered derogatory and people have stopped using it.) They were the first non-Arab people to convert.

This cultural mixture is also influenced by the Sudanese and West African people who lived as enslaved people. Layer in some French colonialism, and you have a stew of cultures that cannot be defined as a single Moroccan monolith.

Instead, when you walk through the alleys of Fes, notice the cacophony of cultural signals: tribes, sects, regions, all on display in clothing, tattoos and language.

Savor the food. Eat the kabobs of liver and fat at Grillade Adil in Fes. Taste the variety of olives that grow perfectly in that climate. Try mechoui and tangia at Chez Lamine in Marrakech and buy dates from the Saturday market in Erfoud in the Sahara Desert. Eat pigeon pastilla dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon. Wash it down with a glass of sweet yogurt raib.

Go to the public hammam instead of the hotel spa.

Slow down when you arrive in the village in the afternoon, as people sleep after lunch and the women sit in the shade of a tree talking.

Sit with the men in the coffee shops as they smoke Gauloises cigarettes and look out onto the street.

Fresh roadside peas

As we were driving out of Marrakech, we stopped to see La Mamounia, the famous hotel. We planned to stop for a cocktail in the evenings before, but Charleston connections run all through Marrakech and our social life was full.

So we pulled up at 10:50 a.m. and as we tried to enter the gate, we were told to wait until 11 a.m. when non-hotel guests are allowed in.

And then we saw it: the slowly gathering mass of tourists who wanted to do the same thing.

When the hour struck, a few people were turned away for wearing shorts. There’s a dress code in this hotel, made famous by Winston Churchill and Alfred Hitchcock and word home from a generation of travelers who loved the grand hotels.

Suzanne heard about it from her father growing up. She had imagined it since childhood and wanted to see it for all the years in between.

Inside, writers and actors have signed thank you cards for their stay that are now framed and hung.

The hotel has the weight of marble. A darkened bar and conversation nooks. Luxury shopping. Intricate tile work and the sound of fountains.

Our original instinct was right. This is a place best enjoyed over a cocktail, sinking into the velvet chairs.

We drove into the mountains that feel like a steep line drawn between Marrakech and another part of the world.

Small villages were built like stacked blocks into the sides of the mountain, filling in the spaces where the river curved. The rest was colored in by green fields and orchards. The houses were built with stones and bricks and covered with a mixture of mud, straw and salt.

A man washed his motorcycle on the edge of the river as another man talked to him.

“This is the life in Morocco,” someone told me the day before. “We are not aging too quickly because we are not aware of time.”

On the side of the road, the back of a station wagon was open and inside was an espresso maker. Cups and spices and little stools were pulled from the car for passing travelers to stop and enjoy the rolling mountain valley.

Three men were selling peas, just harvested.

We pulled over.

We sat with the men on rocks on the side of the road and filled our laps with pea pods.

We looked across the road at a walnut tree full of fresh spring leaves. I slid my thumbnail down the spine of the pea pod to open it and ate the peas one by one.

The men laughed and smiled at us, and we used Arabic to greet and thank God for the moment and for each other.

“This is better than La Mamounia,” Suzanne said.

We did not want to eat their entire harvest, though I could have. I would have happily sat there the rest of the day, eating peas and wondering about the walnuts.

But we had a country to see.

Our guide Mohamed Ait Bahadou bought two large grocery bags of peas.

We said laughing goodbyes, and the men told him to take care of us so we could see each other again.

Movie set

On Oct. 24, United Airlines will begin non-stop flights to Marrakech from Newark, N.J., making it easier than ever to get to this popular destination.

There’s a reason we are drawn there. Morocco feels familiar. It’s been in the background of so many movies, a stand-in for the Middle East; for a dusty planet in a galaxy far, far away; and a gladiator arena in ancient Rome.

It was Somalia in “Black Hawk Down” and Iraq in “American Sniper.”

It was Egypt in “Cleopatra.”

Scenes in “Indiana Jones” were filmed in Morocco, and two James Bond movies were shot there.

The third season of “Game of Thrones” was shot in Morocco, some of it on a set made of wood and painted paper in the Atlas Studios outside of Ourazarate.

Morocco gave us a visual approximation of the world, thanks to generous tax credits, government stability and lots of movie-making infrastructure.

We drove through a valley and I looked up and saw the ridge where two brothers laid on their bellies and fired a hunting rifle. I was surprised I was able to recognize it. Below was the curve in the road where a bus carried Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who was shot in the arm by the bullet, inciting the events for the rest of the movie.

In a twist of irony, the most famous movie about Morocco, “Casablanca,” was filmed in a studio in California.

Like everything everywhere, technology is changing the need for real life. The work hasn’t dried up, but locals hired as extras and camera operators said the amount of time film crews spend on the ground has been less and less because CGI can do so much.

For now, Morocco will continue to be in our subconscious, built into the background of movies, shaping our image of other countries.

Sahara Desert

We drove south with the Atlas Mountains growing on the horizon until we reached the edge of the Sahara Desert, pronounced in the Arabic way with emphasis on the first syllable.

I read once that you have to control your mind in the Sahara because it is a place where your thoughts can run away. It feels as if there is no soil for your roots, no water to keep you alive, no memory or legacy as the wind sweeps away your footprints in the constant movement of the dunes.

But people do live here.

The nomads eat bread with olive oil and tea for breakfast. As they move their animals during the day, they eat dates and drink milk from the sheep and the camels.

The children use five gallon water jugs to sled down the dunes.

And the owners of the camps where tourists gather have wells to tap into the shallow underground aquifer and solar panels and gardens full of carrots and tomatoes and cucumbers.

This was my first time visiting the Sahara, and we barely dipped a toe into it.

I have always been aware of it. It’s one of the first school lessons that made me truly feel the curvature of the Earth. We learned about the Saharan dust clouds — some the size of a continent — riding the trade winds, changing weather patterns in Europe, the Caribbean and the eastern United States as it moves.

As we moved deeper into the desert, first through black sand and rock, and then toward rising orange dunes, the sand filled the air like a fog. The sky was clear blue directly above us, but the dust was all around, as if we were at the bottom of a deep bowl.

Century-old date palms stood in the haze, thin and tall.

In the distance, dust rose behind a line of rally trucks participating in the Rallye Aicha des Gazelles, a women-only race from the desert to the ocean.

The staff of a hotel prepared a long table of honey-soaked pastries for runners in the Marathon des Sables Legendary, a seven-day, self-sufficiency stage race often described as the hardest foot race in the world. Racers carry all their gear in backpacks and run over dunes and up mountains.

The Sahara is full of adrenaline; humans meeting the challenge of the desert, seeing the silence and indifference as a dare. 

We were picked up on the side of the road by the owner of one of the luxury camps set up to give people a taste of this incredible place. He drove a Toyota 4Runner, and we could feel the joy as he pushed the accelerator and tore through the openness.

He brought us to the base of the dunes where camels were waiting to carry us the rest of the way.

First, I was told to stop calling them camels. “They are dromedary,” the man walking in front of us said when I asked if there was a camel market in the area.

My dromedary was as calm as a fairground pony. His hair was full of dried grass that the man kept picking out. He pressed his head against the man’s shoulder as we climbed another dune.

The landscape sculpted itself in cresting waves of sand. When I picked it up in my hand, it was fine and slipped through my fingers as fast as an hourglass.

Suzanne and I sat on a dune and looked out into the desert. We watched the sun become engulfed by the layers of dust in the air.

Two women back at the camp complained that the sunset wasn’t spectacular.

And I thought about the miracle that we were there at all and how easy it is to miss the miracle and feel entitled to it.

Wind storm

As night fell, the wind picked up. The moon was almost full and the walls of the bowl of sand grew higher so that all I could see of the sky was a patch of black and the moon.

The sand blew across the swept path to my tent until there were drifts and I could see how quickly the Sahara would reclaim anything humans created. How much is buried under the sand?

I covered my face with my scarf.

The wind blew, and the sand moved like snakes. It reminded me of the way strong wind moves snow across the roads.

That’s what my mind had to do in order to comprehend the desert. I had to put it in terms of what I already know in order to not feel the entire weight of it.

The wind battered the tent all night. It wasn’t a steady wind. It was swirling and gusting. It stopped for a moment, so I could hear the famous endless quiet of the Sahara. Then it would start again.

I didn’t sleep much, so when the light came through the tent walls, I put on a sweater and scarf and sat on the chair outside my tent to watch the sun rise.

I’ve never seen a sunrise quite like it. It was like a black-and-white photograph. The sand was a scrim, and the sun was a perfect circle behind it. It was as easy to look at as the moon. I was thrilled and disoriented to see the sun that way.

The woman from the day before came out of her tent nearby and I shouted out, “You have to see this. Look at the sunrise.”

“I know,” she said. “I saw it yesterday.”

Suzanne emerged from her tent and we watched the rest of the sunrise together.

We remarked on how this was the direction we faced on so many mornings when we sat on the wharf in Charleston and watched the sun come up.

Without saying so out loud, we both thought about the time between the sunrise in Charleston and Morocco and became aware of the rotation of the Earth and our orbit around the sun.

As we left, it began to rain.

We were near the village of Merzouga, where our guide Mohamed grew up, and he invited us to visit his mother.

I wear a beaded bracelet put on my wrist by a Maasai woman who we picked up hitchhiking in Kenya, and he recognized the pattern when we first met. His mother had a similar pattern made into an earring for his protection years ago.

It was a flicker of nomad culture that translated from one side of Africa to the other.

She had a beautification tattoo on her forehead, once common among the native Amazigh people in this part of Morocco and into Algeria. 

She was a nomad for most of her life but now lived in the town of Erfoud, about 25 miles from where we spent the night.

She made us sweet mint tea and a plate of cookies and asked her son when he would be home for Eid al-Adha, the holiday remembering the day Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of his faith.

We said goodbye and she followed us out. Near her door, she had a large unfired clay pot. She filled it with water for anyone who wants to drink. Then she put some water in a bowl for the birds.

“She remembers the days when she was a nomad and does not want anyone to suffer the way she suffered,” Mohamed said.

First customers

As we traveled through Morocco, I was reverse aging.

Between the hammam, the fresh food, and walking for hours through alleys and up ancient tiled staircases, the years faded away.

We ended our trip the way it began, in a hammam. But this one was different.

It was in Fes, far outside the tourist areas. It was for locals; $2 for a scrub and massage.

A man sat near the entrance tending the fire, sitting on a stool next to a pile of firewood and greeting people as they came in.

Men went to the right. Women to the left.

The woman at the door was surprised to see us. She didn’t want trouble. Maybe we should pay our tip in advance for the scrub women.

This was a neighborhood bath house. The women who come here know each other and have always known each other.

We smiled sheepishly and she led us into the first of three rooms, each a different temperature.

The ceilings were 16 feet tall, and the walls were light blue tile and white painted cement.

I tried to reassure them that we would be good guests. I told the woman I spoke a little Arabic, but it wasn’t enough to participate in any of the gossip and shouting that echoed off the walls as the women relaxed. I bathed in the voices as much as the steam, so loud in that windowless room.

There were stone platforms in the middle of the room. Light poured down on us from holes in the ceiling.

Afterward, we sat with the women and drank tea. We used every bit of hand gesture and mix of languages and funny pantomime we could muster.

As the country deals with a prolonged drought, hammams around the country have been asked to close a few days a week to conserve water.

Our guide waited for us outside and said the women had such a good time with us, he should bring more tourists.

He said waiting outside the hammam for us brought back memories of 30 years ago when women couldn’t go places by themselves and their husbands or fathers brought them and waited.

But that was 30 years ago. Times have changed.

No words

As we boarded the plane for home, I noticed the man in front of me was carrying a leather bag that said Marathon des Sables. He looked clean and rested and I couldn’t find any evidence that he had just tested the boundaries of his own abilities.

I asked him if he finished the race. He lit up.

“I did,” he said. “Did you?”

No. I’ve just heard about it.

And then I searched for a good question, something that would allow him to tell his story and tell it well without taking away from it.

Instead, I said, “How was it?”

“You have to do it once in your life. It’s a true adventure,” he said.

Then I sensed that he wanted to stop talking. He wanted to sit in the experience a while longer before it was taken away from him with words.

“There’s no words to describe it,” he said. “You just have to do it.”