Taroudant, Morocco

After our little side-trip to Paradise Valley we headed due east from Agadir, through the broad, mostly flat Tifnoute Valley.  The Assif Tifnout  (Tifnout River) that flows though the valley irrigates a patchwork of green fields and supports lush vegetation on either side of the river, but not much beyond, where the barren hills once again dominate the landscape.

We stopped in Taroudant, a little city with a big market, where we had a great time 'window shopping,' and bargaining for leather slippers, hassocks and a wallet for D.  The shop keepers were either sincerely disappointed with the deal, or feigned dissatisfaction to make us think we had done well.  We will never know.  After all they with centuries of trading, bargaining and bartering for everything from slaves to salt, are the experts.  We are less than novices at this game.  But it hardly matters as whatever we pay for what we buy is worth so much more to them than it is to us, and gives us so much more than just the article itself.  It gives us fun and lasting memories of this place, these people, and our time among them. 

In our travels through the rocky red and often barren landscapes we have discovered something new: shiny sparkling blue, green, white and black blossoms adorning prickly pear and dry-stick shrubs.  Even the rocks are gayly decorated with the ‘fleur neuveau,’ the ubiquitous plastic bag.  Especially close to towns, but even in the remotest areas we see them, littering the landscape, flying like birds in the wind, sitting on a shrub, tree, pole or house.  The all-pervasive, ever-lasting, scourge of the essential plastic bag.

Sadly, the attitude towards garbage here is also one of ‘throw it where you will,’ and entire fields or valleys or riverbeds or streets are thickly strewn, even ‘paved,’ with stinking, rotting garbage and ugly plastic bags and bottles.  We often see goats and sheep piking their way through the garbage, looking for a tasty morsel to enhance their meagre diets of parched grass and dried shrubs.  Everyone here is a skilled scavenger.

But in the countryside we also see large flocks of sheep and/or goats, sometimes grazing in quite fertile grassy valleys, and sometimes scrabbling about looking for food in landscapes of dirt, sand and rocks.  At times in impossibly high and steep terrain (who lives up there and where?).  Also, more amusingly, and amazingly, goats perch high in the branches of the argan trees, eating the rather tough leaves or, more enthusiastically, the juicy berries.  In several regions the goats’ taste for argan berries has been capitalized on by the people, often women’s cooperatives, for its usefulness in the production of cosmetics.  It works like this: the goats eat the berries, on the inside of which are hard nuts.  The goat only partially digests the nut, breaking down its hard outer shell.  The women hand pick through the goats’ droppings to collect these partially digested nuts.  These are then cleaned and cracked and pressed into argan oil, which is used for cooking – and cosmetics.  It’s highly prized for both, but especially for cosmetics, as it is said to have anti-aging effects.  And so, from the goat’s ass to the French woman’s face.  From goat shit to glamour.  A fitting tribute to Moroccan ingenuity and capitalism.

We are, I am sad to say, quite fed up with the French, who we once again find rude, arrogant and unfriendly.  We have stopped saying ‘bonjour’ to them as they so seldom respond.  They pass by without so much as a smile, nod, or any sign of recognition of f fellow human being.  They present such a stark contrast to the Moroccans, whose hands must surely get tired from waving at all the tourists, and who do not fail to greet and smile with such genuine warmth.  How they have managed to suffer through their years of French rule is beyond my ken.  

And so to Taliouine, a little town quite literally in the middle of nowhere, but somewhere to stop.  Apart from the old kasbah, it was not particularly interesting.  But it was memorable in as much as it was where we encountered our first, and so far only, somewhat drunk and definitely surly Berber auberge manager come waiter, who demonstrated his impatience with and disdain for tourists as we sat huddled in the freezing foyer around an inadequate fire in a little metal stove, too cold to retire to our even colder rooms and beds, by turning off the lights so we couldn’t see the maps of where, inshallah, we would be going as soon as we woke up.