The Bizarre Truth (25 page)

As I headed from my room to the pool, I had at least fifteen interactions with employees. Each one wanted to escort me somewhere, steer me toward a restaurant, or get me into the gift shop. Half of it is New Age hucksterism, with employees earning a few cents if they can maneuver you into some other part of the hotel where you can be separated from more of your money. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why this all seemed to feel so unusual, especially considering that I have been to more than my share of cities with overly pandering hotel staff. They weren’t making fun of me, but it seemed there was an inside joke going on that I just couldn’t quite figure out.

Want a refresher course on the right way and wrong way to travel? Head to the hotel pool, where you’ll stumble upon ugly Americans, ugly Brits, ugly Aussies, ugly Germans, and ugly Italians barking at pool attendants, stuffing their faces with the endless sea of Westernized buffet fare. Hamburgers, lasagna, and pizza—you name it, it’s there at any one of the half-dozen hotel restaurants. Here’s a travel tip: Moroccan stew, chock-full of lamb
innards and brains, served on the street, is one of the safest dishes you can eat in this country. It’s fresh, cared for by hand, and battle-tested for generations. What will leave you praying to the porcelain gods are sliced tomatoes at the hotel buffet, or worse, Americanized food cooked by people without the faintest idea of what it’s supposed to look or taste like, or how to properly handle the ingredients. Needless to say, the majority of my fellow hotel guests complained of the Moroccan stomach issues by day three, while I bounced around feeling like a million bucks.

As they ate themselves into pathogenic bacterial oblivion, I sipped on light and sweet iced mint teas, knowing the evening would be filled with lots of phenomenal food from one of the world’s great food centers. I also snacked on a platter of fruit, which made me fall in love at first bite with fresh Moroccan produce. Lounging poolside that day, I made it my mission to eat as much fresh Moroccan fruit as I could handle.

To my taste, Morocco grows the world’s finest fruits and vegetables. The agrarian communities at the base of the Atlas Mountain chain are filled with rich soil, with ample waterfalls streaming down from the highest peaks, transferring decayed, volcanic mulch to the valleys below. Plantless rock formations tower ten thousand feet high, and in the crooks of their arms lie piles of the most fertile soil imaginable. These valleys, often many degrees warmer than the surrounding areas, create microclimates perfect for farming. Driving through the mountains, you see palm trees, plants, and rich vegetation sitting at the bottom of two rock formations, lush and dense like an oasis, and everything ten feet above the tree line is solid rock without even a blade of grass to be found. Odd, but the radiant heat rebounds off those rock faces as well as back into the lush ravines, making it even more beneficial for the growing of fruits and vegetables. In one valley, you find nothing but sweet onions; one mountain over, tomatoes; one more over, oranges. The list goes on and on.

Locals will carry tree-ripened apricots a half mile up from the valley floors to the roads and highways coursing along the mountainside, selling handmade baskets filled with fruit for a few pennies each. One bite of this succulent fruit and there was no turning back. We’d sit in the car snacking on apricots for hours. This fruit was perfect; no blemishes, mealy spots, or bruises—incredible, considering that this fruit is legendary for its instability. I’d pop these tree-ripened apricots into my mouth and spit out the seed in one fell swoop. It was completely addicting, like powering down a bag of peanuts at a baseball game, and I couldn’t jam the second apricot in fast enough. This perfection carried over to the tomatoes, pineapples, grapes, melons, and nearly every other food we encountered. The quality is inextricably tied to their fertile soil, as well as their organic, sustainable approach to farming. However, “organic” and “sustainable” aren’t buzzwords in Morocco. They don’t need to turn down chemicals or make a safe choice about their farming practices; it’s just the way things work there, and always have.

Of course, Morocco isn’t just about the fruit. After my afternoon lounge fest, I left our hotel that night around five, making my way to the Djemaa El Fna. The Djemaa El Fna serves as the city’s bustling market center, complete with snake charmers, street performers, and food vendors. Behind that, you’ll find the Souk, a thousand-year-old marketplace reminiscent of something you would see in a dime-store novel illustration or an Indiana Jones movie. Vendors set up daily and are very mobile, so even if you’ve been there a few times, each visit will be different from the last. It is also a shyster’s heaven, and running scams is almost as big a business as hawking wares. The Djemaa El Fna and Souk both attract grifters of the highest order. They can sniff out a sucker like police dogs hot on a fugitive’s trail. Women sell tin bracelets at a nearly 1,000 percent price hike to anyone dumb enough to believe it’s real silver. Con artists stalk fanny-packed
tourists. One false move and bam! There goes your wallet. I’ve heard stories of locals showing tourists around the market for a few pennies, eventually leading them to their family’s shop, where they give some elaborate sob story about an ailing cousin laid up in the hospital. Next thing they know, they’re heading back to Orlando with a stunning sixteenth-century rug (often a cheap knockoff) rolled up under their arm. If you spend enough time in the market, you’ll see this happen all around you, and while I don’t like to laugh too much at others’ misfortune, you can easily pick out the most vulnerable tourists and watch the whole thing go down before your eyes.

The Djemaa El Fna is nearly vacant in the late afternoon—when the temperature reaches well into the hundreds. At this point, it’s just me, a few juice-cart vendors squeezing all kinds of fresh fruit, and the occasional snake charmer playing their
ghaitahs
, who seem to operate in their own little world. Over the next hour, I watched as hundreds of carts rolled into the square and linked up, cart to cart, to form “streets” of stalls. Vendors set up wooden tables with foot-high stools, essentially serving as mini-restaurants. As vendors finish setting up, wives and kids arrive with wheelbarrows filled with ingredients. Full-service restaurants with twenty or thirty menu items, from fried fish to
bistilla
, the country’s justifiably famous pigeon pie, are re-created on a daily basis.

Tourists certainly wander this part of the market, but it’s no tourist trap. The majority of patrons are Moroccan and work in and around the Djemaa. In recent years, the surrounding area filled up with hotels, a few restaurants and bars, a couple of shops and drugstores. This modernized shopping and eating environment caters to the out-of-towners, with the locals finding everything they need—from lunch, to a haircut or a dentist—in the Djemaa. Non-Moroccans will feel like an interloper, but experiencing the Djemaa is a must, especially because this is where you’ll find some of Marrakesh’s best food.

I found one guy cooking up large pieces of boiled lamb and
cow in oversized, bubbling vats. He boils lungs, feet, intestines, and heads, pulls the meat from them, plops it down on a piece of butcher paper, adds a little shake of seasoning (mostly cumin and salt), serves it with a hunk of bread, and you’re good to go. Another vendor grilled paper-thin slices of lamb and pig heart marinated in chilies and spices; another placed chopped organs inside pieces of fresh intestine, grilling them like sausages. Then, just down the road, another man grilled small local lake fish rubbed with turmeric and served it with fresh tomato salad and lime. This may have been the most elegant dish that I ate in the city, and it cost no more than a dime.

With every step I took in the Djemaa, I garnered harsh stares. Eyes followed me with every move, in much the same vein I’d experienced at the hotel. I soon realized it wasn’t the fact that I’m an American, nor that I’m generally more talkative and animated than the average person. It’s because they saw me as one of those “people from around the hotel pool.” In the Djemaa, I ate meals with the sons, brothers, and often even the employees who work in those hotels. I’m here to tell you there’s a hatred on the Moroccan street about what goes on behind those hotel walls, but tourism drives much of the economy, so they just grit their teeth and bear it. Walking around the Djemaa El Fna, I felt like a character out of a bad Kipling poem, the tension and resentment toward white Europeans and Americans palpable at every turn. Aside from my dealings with the Berbers, who were some of the kindest, most loving people I’ve encountered anywhere on the road, nearly every interaction I had in Marrakesh was strained. They accept our money, let us stay in their hotels and eat in their restaurants, but they don’t like us. There’s so much hullabaloo these days about the world’s animosity toward Americans, and I know we’ve made our fair share of enemies, but I’ve found that people are generally kind and accommodating no matter where you are in the world. Thus far, my experience in Morocco is the first and only time in my life I’ve felt otherwise.

This didn’t stop me from enjoying myself. After three or four dishes in the Djemaa El Fna, I ventured into the Souk. Navigating this series of congested streets and alleys typically feels like stepping into a
Where’s Waldo?
book, but at night, many booths and shops are vacant. Visiting the Souk in the evening is something every traveler ought to experience. With most stalls closed for the evening, you can meander down the streets without too much harassment from vendors trying to sell you T-shirts or fake suede handbags. I ventured into a few of the stalls that remained open, purchasing fabulous beaded leather slippers for my wife. I happened upon some incredible dried-fruit vendors, hawking hundreds of varieties of nature’s candy: fist-size strawberries, sweet and chewy dates the size of golf balls, raisins and piles of salted nuts, which made for some delicious Moroccan gorp to keep around the hotel room. As I wandered back into the streets, I was smacked in the face by the heavy, mouthwatering scent of roasted lamb. My nose led me through the streets, but I just couldn’t find the source. When it comes to food, I’m blessed with a sixth sense. I just know when something is good, and that smell alone compelled me to return to the same spot on the very next day.

I achieved my goal of making it out of the Souk in one piece, with the bonus of finding the next day’s mission, so the next morning I marched back to the scene of the scent. The same street that had looked like a ghost town the previous night was now vibrant and alive, with cart after cart serving a different lamb dish. At the top of what I dubbed Lamb Alley, a bread baker turned out loaves of crusty fresh bread, which he in turn sold to the other seven or eight vendors in the alley. There’s wheeling and dealing everywhere you turn, with the stalls working together to assemble a well-rounded meal for their patrons, most of whom they share on some level. The guy serving up roast lamb down the alley gets bread from the baker, they both serve tea ferried from a third booth, and so on. Somehow, at the end of the day they have a way to figure out everyone’s share of their profits.

I hit up the next vendor in the alley, who serves mashwi, or whole roasted lamb. Mashwi is the most expensive item in the alley, and is literally roasted underneath the stall itself. Underground clay ovens the size of elevator cars are accessed through a narrow hole, which resembles a manhole cover on the street. Fires are lit in the ovens and dozens of lambs, tied to ancient, cured pieces of wood, are lowered into the oven the night beforehand, where they lean away from the fire itself and slowly roast over low heat for twelve to fourteen hours. The meat takes on a dark honey color, without a burn or scorch on it, just perfectly cooked whole lamb. Given that the vendor’s family has been in this business for centuries, it’s no surprise that they have the process nailed. In fact, many stall operators date their trade back hundreds and hundreds of years, and in some cases nearly a millennium. I asked one olive merchant how long his stall had been there and he pointed up at the mosque tower, which is almost 900 years old, and said, “Since before that.”

As you work your way down lamb alley, the cuts at the various stalls progress from luxury to leftover to, finally, gnawed bones. Truly. Store owners, wealthier merchants, as well as a handful of tourists don’t even bother making it to the end of the alley. The stuff at the top of the alley was the best. I couldn’t resist plowing into the meat, which was devoid of that fatty flavor typically associated with mutton, despite the provenance of the older animal. From the mashwi, we continued on to a stall vending only the braised lamb shanks. Next, there was a stall serving roasted sheep’s heads, followed by a stewed lamb tripe merchant. I don’t know whether it was the roasting techniques, the heat of the day, or the citrus juice and herbs rubbed on the meat before roasting. Maybe I can chalk it all up to the romance of eating the lamb at the Djemaa El Fna, but I couldn’t get enough of anything I found on this little pitch of a roadway buried in the back of the Souk.

By the time we reached the alley’s last vendor, I couldn’t even imagine what pieces of the lamb I had yet to see. This stall, run by
a peasant in rags, this simple humble stall, consisted of only a beat-up wooden card table, no chairs, and a stack of six recycled tin bowls. This man operated his business off the bones left behind at the other stalls by diners as they left, essentially turning garbage into soup. He used pieces of fat, skin, connective tissue, and any other scraps of edible parts—and believe me, every part is edible—boiling them with water, spices, and some type of lentillike bean I’d never seen before. Since he had only a few bowls and spoons, once a customer finished, he’d dip their bowl and spoon in a pot of dirty water, wipe it clean with a rag that hadn’t seen a washing since Churchill ran England, fill it back up with the thin “bone soup,” and serve it to the next customer. Local shopkeepers and middle-class regulars ate mashwi, day workers and laborers could cobble together a few pennies for a shank or a bowl of the pluck, but here at the other end of the alley is where all the beggars and the indigent masses could fuel up during the day. It was such a humbling experience watching these men line up for their turn at one of the bowls that I had to try it. I could never forgive myself a year or a month later, sitting in some swanky boite in some modern city leading my spoiled and coddled Western existence, thinking of Lamb Alley, if I never tried the bone soup. So I did. And you know it was indeed thin, and tinny, and tasting of that minerally quality that overcooked bones always provide. It was tough to think about the cleanliness of the dishes that I was slurping out of, but walking back up the alley I didn’t feel like one of the “pool loungers” anymore.