| Datum: | 19-01-2017 Sale and Rabat, Marokko Part 4 | | | | In this blog I tell a bit more about our time in Rabat and Salé
Overall impression
Morocco is a world of contradictions. Big differences between rich and poor, dirty and clean. But wherever you go, the people are extremely friendly and helpful. Because we have spent some time here, we have a quite an insight into Moroccan life.
From the boat, you hear a cacophony of strange noises: seagulls screeching, the whistles of the guards, the bell from the tram and the cars, passing over the modern bridge, horns, sirens, the drumming of the drummers, practicing under the bridge and the music from the restaurants on the quay. In between you hear the voice of the muezzin calling for the prayer from the mosque.
The traffic goes criss-cross, loudly honking, to and fro. It is clearly an atmosphere of “live and let live”. When traffic is quiet, the traffic lights work, but during the rush hour they are off (!), like “find out for yourselves”. On the large roundabouts you often see traffic controllers, hiding under a parasol. Every now and then, they blow on a whistle like mad, but most of the time they just stand there, doing something close to nothing. The pedestrian crossings in the Netherlands are very clear, you can cross them with confidence, which is certainly NOT the case here, you cross the road here risking your life. Cars don’t keep their lanes, zigzag from left to right and the use of a direction indicator is alien to them. You often see the indicator on the right, while the car cold-bloodedly turns left! Only one thing is clear: the tram always has priority! People more often walk on the road than on the sidewalk, if any. It is not surprising, by the way, with all those holes and sometimes a pole in the middle of the sidewalk. You see bikers and mopeds manoeuvring through the cars. Taxi’s just push their way a little extra more. Trucks, highly piled with all kinds of stuff, drive, wobbling, through traffic (really scary now and then). Mopeds, loaded with plastic bottles, pushcarts with high piles of fruit (mandarins with the branches and leaves still on) and carts with donkeys pulling them. It is dirty, dusty and smells of carbon monoxide: “PDFilter? Never heard of!” You see a lot of old Mercedes’s which would be declared unfit for use in Holland long loooong ago.
Rabat is a modern city. Most of the streets are on a grand scale with modern buildings. You find parking attendants everywhere who take care that no parking inconvenience will occur. If someone wants to drive from a parking place, they force oncoming cars to stop. In this way it is a regulated, although a somewhat chaotic organisation. You see a hodgepodge of people, smartly dressed men and women in three-piece suits with an attaché briefcase, alternated with people dressed in more traditional clothing. They walk around very busy talking, apping, texting with their cell phones. Where would they be without their cell phones! High palm trees, big beautiful tortuous trees, that get trimmed neatly and little green parks that are nice and clean. Apart from this, you see different mosques on which you find a sign, next to the entrance “entrance prohibited for not-Muslims”! This is pure discrimination, in my opinion! You won’t find a sign like this next to the entrance of a church anywhere in Europe!
People try to find money any which way they can. At the traffic lights they clean your car windows, sell packages with handkerchiefs, cigarettes or chocolate snacks. You see a lot of beggars on the street, sitting on a piece of cardboard, some with a wooden box with a slot, where you can put in the money, beggars who show you their child to gain your sympathy, but also a lot of handicapped. The social security her is literally of another world. Because we take the tram a lot to the same places, you often encounter the same people and after a while you start to recognise them and sometimes we give them some coins. One of the tracks of the tram passes a so called ‘slums’, shielded by a big wall, but still fairly well visible. Houses with rooftops from corrugated sheets, who, by the way, all have a satellite dish. They may have little to eat, but TV is a must! They hang out the laundry to dry in a little open field amongst heaps of garbage. There is a stop that is called ‘opéra’, but the corresponding building is abandoned and looks run-down. This neighbourhood varies: apartments which are guarded, under construction or in decay. It is sad to see how the differences between rich and poor alternate so quickly. You don’t see that much garbage in the marina and the broader streets of Rabat; it is neatly picked up or swept away. But in the small side streets and also in Salé it is the most ‘normal’ thing in the world that virtual mountains of garbage are lying about next to containers or along the road. They literally just throw everything on the street. Walking from the marina along the river in the direction of the coast, you find that more and more modern housing estates are built. The adjoining boulevard, where there are some modern shops, is heavily guarded. If you stroll on to the coast, you have a beautiful view of the river with small, sometimes on dry land lying little fishing boats, and on the other side the Kasbah of Rabat. Along the coastal way in northern direction of Salé you’ll find a various streetscape. Large residential areas with high buildings, big modern villas (the 2nd home of the more wealthy Moroccan), some of which look really very…er… special. The boulevard, which at first looks very nice and beautiful, with green beds, small benches and neatly asphalted roads, changes slowly into a bad road with nothing else but a sort of dump-area next to it. Again here the difference between the rich and poor quarters. Let’s please keep it this way! Is what this screams out. But…. The view over the sea is fantastic, most of all when the sun goes down!
In the past weeks we have eaten in many a different eatery and drank tea there, of which the smaller establishments please us more: simple, good and most of all cheap food. For a well stacked plate of food, containing rice, fries, salad, sauces or dressings, bread and meat and a bottle of soda we pay 80 Dirham (€ 8,00) for the two of us.
In the restaurant close to the Carrefour in Rabat, by now we get recognized and sometimes they want to take a picture with us! In the beginning we drank tea the Moroccan way, but this is really too sweet. When Ayoub made the tea, we already noticed that a lot of sugar went into it, at least 8 cubes! No wonder there is so much diabetes here! Now I always ask if I can get the sugar on the side, so that I can measure it out myself.
There are a lot of cats on the streets, but they really don’t have a bad life here in Morocco. They are often fed and they can always find something anyway in the heaps of garbage and even at the more luxurious restaurants in the marina.
When we had just arrived in Morocco we adjusted our clothes to something, we thought, was fitting for these surroundings. Three quartered or long trousers, T-shirts instead of singlets, no short skirts etc. Until the moment that Ayoub told us that half the Moroccan population walks around in sexy clothes all summer. And there we were: completely unnecessarily sweating, walking around in our long trousers and long sleeves.
Sightseeing in Rabat and Salé
Of course we went to the obligatory sights to see; can’t miss them.
Kashba des Oudayas
Has its origins in a fortress, where religious warriors were encamped. Through the ages a palace and a mosque were added. Since 2012 this fortress is put on the World Heritage-list and it looks like they are starting the restauration. Impressive building with high walls and enormous doors. Through the Moorish gate you enter a tangle of streets, flanked by white-and-blue limed little houses. We arrive at the 17th century “Plateforme de Sémaphore”, a large terrace with a beautiful view of the sea and the entrance of the river Bouregreg. Next we walk back through the gate out of the fortress and have a view of an enormous pair of graveyards on the way back. Part of it you find inside the walls and part of it outside. Maybe the difference between poor and rich again? We walk on to the beach and there, on a terrace, I enjoy a Moroccan tea and Fred a ‘café Americano’. We see some very brave people in their long djelabbas carefully paddling.
Chellah de Rabat
From the station in Rabat we walk to Chellah (about 15 minutes), it is just outside the centre. You follow a long road that raises slowly (you notice that immediately), passing along large buildings.
Here you find the remains of a Roman harbour town and a 14th century graveyard. The fee is only 10 DH (€1,00). As soon as you go through the doorway in the wall, you walk through sort of a wild garden to the terrace. Here we seat ourselves on a bench and take in the beautiful view of the complex. There are not many visitors and there is a calm and peaceful atmosphere. One path leads to the Forum and other ruins, like that of the Jupiter-temple and the pool of the nymph. What the Chellah is primarily known for nowadays are the many storks that have perched here. Every now and then you hear the markedly rattle of the storks’ beaks and you see the big birds flying around. They even built a nest at the four corners of the with beautiful soft green and blue tiles decorated minaret.
We are tired of walking and want to take a taxi back to the tramway stop. The taxi driver wants to charge us 50 DH for this; for a drive of under 5 minutes! We are not going to pay this, of course! We get out of the car and then walk back. After about 50 metres the taxi is back alongside us and now he wants to take us for 15 DH. We get better at negotiation, don’t we? What are we talking about, anyway, these amounts are so small!
Tour de Hassan and Mausoleum of Mohammed V
From our boat we have a view on the tower on the other side of the river. The Tour de Hassan is a minaret of an incomplete mosque. It should have been the largest minaret, but because of lack of funds it never got finished. The height is only half of what was originally planned. The mosque also wasn’t finished and now you only have a couple of walls and 200 pillars to look at. The mausoleum on the other hand is very impressive, with guards in front of every gate.
At the gates in the walls you’ll find guards on horseback. One afternoon we decide to take a look and, oh what a surprise!, another festive holiday in Morocco! Visiting the Hassan tower and the mausoleum is ‘par excellence’ a Moroccan outing for the family, because it was very busy. We walk in between the pillars, where many a Moroccan climbs on to, to make a selfie. Seated on a bench we overlook Salé and the marina. When we walk through the park back to the tram, we see families sitting on the grass, eating sugar-coated nuts, that the small stands sell.
Medina van Rabat and Salé
Adjoining the Kasbah lies the medina of Rabat, surrounded by a great wall. As soon as you pass under the gate, you see a lot of different little shops, the kind you see in every medina. The Rabat one is much more of a tourist attraction than the one in Salé, that is why we find the latter one much more fun to walk through.
The medina of Salé is within walking distance of the marina and you can enter it from different sides. If you take the entrance in a side street next to the tram stop “Gare de Salé”, you encounter all sorts of sellers with fruit and vegetables. Fruit that looks much better, by the way, than what you see in the supermarkets. So we here buy our mandarins, fresh mint for tea, and a very exotic looking piece of fruit. After that you get the stands with meat and fish, but you won’t see us buying anything here, the hygiene leaves much to be desired. It is fun to walk through the zigzagging little streets and alleys. There are not many tourists here, so we get a lot of attention. If you take the entrance close to the tram stop of the marina, you first enter a ‘normal’ street, with all sorts of smaller business, varying from little restaurants (where we had a few nice meals), matrass makers, clothing shops, moped repair shops etc. When you walk on, you automatically walk into the smaller alleys with dozens of small shops. In one of those shops I bought a stock of crochet wool (14 balls of wool for under € 10.00!). We also bought our tajine here for only € 3,00 and an aluminium plate for the stove. At the seaside of the medina you walk along the wall and can sometimes throw a look through one of the holes. Here you see the fortress of Rabat with in the foreground the burial grounds of Salé.
Various things
Our bread machine has gone and we have to look for a new one. Which is, again, quite an undertaking, since everybody bakes their own bread here, without a machine. But in the end we found one.
Also, my tablet computer has given in, but again, we found a replacement. Washing Day on the boat means getting the work done together. I fill the bucket with lather and laundry and Fred shakes the specially designed washing-bucket (with a lid) a few times to and fro. Rinse and dry. At the end of the day everything is sort of clean again!
The weather
We have seen 4 seasons in the past 2 months. In the beginning it was quite sunny, warm, interspersed with periods of heavy rain. After that a long period with sunny weather, but quite chilly from time to time. But hey, it’s December, what do you think? The new year started colder and the temperature went pretty far down. During the day you could enjoy the sun, if you were sheltered, but the afternoons got chilly. After the second week of January we hear stories about heavy snowfall everywhere in Europe. So as we were thinking to avoid this, no way! It hailed in Morocco, it’s getting time to move on.
Boat chores
Our own gas bottles can stand propane and butane. A Moroccan bottle always contains butane, which only works at temperature above zero. Because two of our bottles are empty, we bought a Moroccan gas bottle at a gas station. This one contains twice as much as our own bottles. Now that we have received different kinds of gas-bottle-connections and a high pressure tube, we are now able to transfer gas. The full Moroccan bottle is now put upside down on our empty bottle and thus the liquid butane flows into our own bottle. Now it’s wait and see how full the really are,
the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
The plan to sail out with Ayoub and Aicha fell through, because we had engine trouble. We could not get the engine to start. Fred took the side board away and was lying all cramped up to reach the starter. After some frantic efforts to get the damned thing working, he disconnected it. Meanwhile, someone from the marina came to ask if we were still planning to leave that day. After I told them of our troubles and that sailing out was no longer an option, he suggested to call a mechanic. Not much later the man arrived and reconnected the starter (how silly to do that!), because he wanted to ascertain if this was the defect that was causing the trouble. Not much later, he came to the same conclusion (small wonder!). Starter disconnected again and the mechanic would take it with him to see what was wrong with it. Next day he came back with a mended starter (new content). The work and the mending for the sum of 700 DH (€ 70,00). After testing it seems to be working well again, thank god.
Kit
The ship’s cat enjoys himself very much on the boat but does want to expand his territory a bit when we stay this long in one place. More and more he jumps off board and when he goes on the prowl on the pier he jumps on board the other boats with naturalness. At first only on ‘abandoned’ boats, but by now he goes to ‘visit’ Petra and Martin on the “Bravelander”. He gets to know the birds that land on the piers (white herons) and the many seagulls. On a certain moment, a red cat ‘enters’ the pier. They turn around each other and Kit makes it very clear this is HIS territory. But the red cat is cheeky enough to jump on board with us….when we are inside and the hatch is closed.
One day it takes very long before Kit comes back from his daily rounds. We decide to look for him, but can’t find him anywhere. We turn the whole boat inside out; maybe he has hidden himself in some corner or other. I begin to worry by now and all sorts of doom scenarios come to mind. For hours and hours we search, even on the quay and other piers. Then suddenly the owner of a boat, a few places further away from us tells us he has seen Kit around one of the boats. *SIGH!* On the mentioned boat we find Kit, huddled and shivering with fear. Something must have startled him. At last I get a hold of him and with the help of Petra I wrap him in a big towel and bring him back to our boat. As soon as he is on-board, he hurries inside. No outside show for him for the time being. Kit is a sweet, social cat and we are both very attached to him. Thank god he is back again. The first days after his adventure he is much quieter and stays on board more, but after that he is back in the routine. Tour about the boat, tour about the pier and back on board. We even don’t have to call him by now, he just comes back on his own initiative.
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| | | 29-01-2017, reactie van joke laene | Leuk weer jullie zeer uitgebreide verslag over Marokko te lezen. Het gaat er toch anders aan toe als hier in Nederland. Veel dingen worden duidelijker naar o.a. jullie verhaal over het toelatingsbeleid in de marina veel strenger. Geniet van deze andere cultuur. De thee lijkt me wat minder met als die suiker maar verder klinkt het prima. groetjes uit een bewolkt en fris Rijswijk
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| | | | 29-01-2017, reactie van Anuschka | Beste Caroline en Fred,
Heel leuk om telkens weer jullie blog te lezen....nuttige informatie ook!
Kijk uit naar jullie volgende berichten!!
Veel plezier en geniet!
Vriendelijke groet,
Anuschka
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| | | | 15-02-2017, reactie van René Schwab | Hallo Fred en Caroline, Anita en ik vonden Rabat prachtig. We hadden een hotel in het mondaine gedeelte van de stad, dicht bij de Soukh. Poort door en je stapte een totaal andere wereld in. Hassans Tower al bezocht bij avond? Moet je doen. Als je het nog niet hebt het gedaan, kijk op mijn site, --> Reizen --> Marokko en de eerste foto, dat is hem. Al geweest? dan oud nieuws.
Groeten en succes met je gasflessen!!
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