Thursday 12th July–Fes

Last night’s sleep was beautiful, the bed may not look like much but it is comfy. We were downstairs in a relatively chipper mood at 9am to meet our local guide. This guy was good, very knowledge and overly fond of using the word ‘please’ in almost every sentence. We climbed back into our black party bus – our first stop was a quick look at the King’s palace (just the gate), a quick walk through the Jewish quarter (nothing notable) and then a drive up to a military fort with a viewpoint over Fes. We could see already that this city is huge – apparently it has the biggest pedestrian area in the world with over 9500 streets.

    

After all the necessary photos we clambered back in the bus and were driven off to a local mosaic school where we were shown the mosaic making process. Clearly all the people here are very talented – we watch them at the pottery wheel, cutting tiles into shapes, hand painting the finished products. Then of course we were shepherded into the gift shop afterwards! A couple of people bought thing and then off we went again, this time diving into to labyrinth of the medina (old town).

    

And this place really is a labyrinth – so many streets, so many shops selling so many different things, so many people and so many donkeys! I was glad we had the local guide to show us the way. He took us to lots of different places, clearly ‘friends’ of his but then that’s the culture here. We passed a few monuments/mosques before heading to a tannery. Upon entering the tannery they give you a bunch of mint to combat the smell – I sniffed my bunch a lot but I can’t say it helped much, the smell was still pretty awful. From the balcony we could see everyone at work tanning and dying the leather and afterwards the salesman tried their best at selling us bags, wallets and leather jackets.

    

After some more wandering we headed to lunch – more beef with cous cous, seems to be the standard thing here! We were mostly just excited for the air-conditioning, Next some more wandering, with a stop over at a pharmacy selling all kinds of remedies, oils and perfumes. I liked it here, it was fun smelling all the different products. I bought some Moroccan Oil and some green-but-really-pink henna+oil lipstick, shopping success! Then on to look at some more men weaving scarves and rugs… we were a bit shopped out at this point so nobody bought anything! 

At around 3.30pm the tour officially finished and everybody headed back to the bus – Andy was keen to do some more walking though so we stayed behind. He had fun bargaining for some pointy leather shoes, I mostly just wanted to be back in the cool hotel. Luckily for us Andy had a GPS app on his phone, making the 2km walk back relatively ok – we would have been hopelessly lost without it!

Back to the hotel at around 5pm. At 6 o’clock I met with some of the girls downstairs – we were off to try some ‘Hammam’, a spa experience popular with the locals here. Three of us grabbed a taxi and headed to a recommended ‘upmarket’ place (the local Hammam was a little bit too daunting). We payed approximately $18AUD, disrobed completely except for our underwear (topless) and walked in… we could see already we were the only tourists there and nobody really spoke English – there was lots of smiling and pointing by everyone. Our experience there lasted for about an hour and a half and involved a shower, a sauna, a complete scrub, another shower, a full body clay treatment, another shower, another sauna and then a cold Jacuzzi. It was actually quite amazing, I’m so glad I did it… it felt like a very local experience, apparently locals come to these things once a week. And so cheap! The full body scrub was particularly amusing, we could see all the dead skin rolling off – I don’t think any of us realised we were so dirty!!

We were back at the hotel around 8pm, time enough to go upstairs, wash our hair and get pretty again. I took the opportunity to wear my newly bought lace dress and the heels I’ve been carting around for 6 weeks but have never worn (my last chance!). Dinner was pasta and wine next door again, neither of which were very good. It didn’t matter, I was too preoccupied stroking my extra smooth (and tanned) legs, it’s was exciting! Back to the hotel for a relatively early night of 11pm – one more day of the tour left!!