According to Nicola - Majestic Meknes

Meknes Meknes Meknes....  What an incredible place!  The smallest of the four imperial cities, Meknes sees an undeservedly low amount of tourists (mostly in the form of day trips) which allows it to maintain complete authenticity.

A very brief history of Meknes - back in 1672 when Moulay Ismail was Sultan, he decided to make Meknes his capital and subsequently had many extravagant things built in order to establish this claim and his position.

Then when he died an impressive mausoleum was built in his honour, which only added to Meknes' grandeur.

The cafe culture in Meknes is unbelievable.  Each road is pretty much full of coffee shops, that spew their solely male clientele onto the streets.  Every hour of the day they had a good crowd, but come 5pm until late they were taken to a new level, with zero available seats and being completely enshrouded within clouds of smoke.  Now it must be said that whilst we pride ourselves on finding the cafes/food stalls etc. that only locals would visit and throwing ourselves in the deep end, these cafes were mostly too intimidating for us!  Just walking past the cafes created an audible hush...  So we managed to find ourselves a local joint tucked into the corner of the main square as a compromise.  Whilst being completely local, this cafe (a half tent with chairs and a coffee machine) was on its own and not on the road so we didn't draw too much attention to ourselves...  A perfect place for people watching and mint tea.

We also found a great place for our morning nous nous with the milk being poured at the table which we thought was very fancy (but that turns out to be the norm in the North).  And surprisingly it was the cheapest so far.

On the walk there we discovered a new kind of fried semolina bread called harsha which proved to be the perfect breakfast given we could eat it at the cafe with our nous nous.  It's made in giant slabs and cut to the size you want before being weighed and smothered in honey.  The price to deliciousness ratio here was ridiculous!

Something we had yet to fall victim to in Morocco was the old carpet shop trick.  Apparently Brim subconsciously thought that now was as good a time as ever so when a man in the souks told us "No no no... Not that way, much more interesting things this way!" he obediently followed, to have us promptly plonked in a carpet shop.  Don't get me wrong, some of them were extremely beautiful, but we aren't really the carpet buying types.  Nor were we interested in "just a small one" after we explained we were carrying all our worldly possessions on our backs!

Meknes is to thank for providing us with another tick on our Moroccan eating list - stuffed camel pancreas.  Having seen the raw versions of this in the meat markets (read about these here!) earlier I knew we were in for a treat!  We found a hole in the wall (quite literally) grill man who had a gigantic sausage looking thing in his cabinet and after some sign language confirmed it was the delicious treat we were looking for.  A thick slab was cut off, grilled and shoved in some bread - pure meaty goodness.  It tasted like a Moroccan version of haggis as there was heaps of semolina through the mince, giving it a light, fluffy texture.

We finally sampled Bastilla (a pigeon and chicken mix with cinnamon and almonds wrapped in layers of filo-like pastry) and the local tagine speciality Kamama (lamb with sultanas, sweet onions, cinnamon and ginger) however have once again proved to ourselves that nothing can beat street food - a bowl of chickpeas in broth with a shake of cumin and chilli was far more memorable (we could have eaten about 60 serves for the price of those two dishes!).

Now just to bring this post back down to my level I thought I'd share with you the 'poo man incident'.  Pretty much literally that...  On our way to see some of the sights we had to cross a very small, manicured park.  This park is surrounded by roads, is a taxi hub, has mandarin vendors all around it and is the only way through to a certain area of Meknes - the point I'm making is that it's not a quiet, private or isolated place.  Stood in front of us as we came around a corner was a bare arsed man, casually wiping his bits whilst standing upright after laying a turd on the middle of the pavement.  Enough said!

In case you missed it - Significant Insight from the Significant Other - Madness at the Meknes Meat Market

Significant Insight from the Significant Other - Madness at the Meknes Meat Market

For its size, the meat market in Meknes is amazing.  Taking only five minutes to cruise through, your senses are bombarded with a million different sensations and I saw some of the most incredible and most disturbing things I've seen so far in Morocco.

There were guts and bits all over the floor, headless chickens with blood dripping on your feet if you weren't careful, smells that prevented me from moving until I pulled myself together...  I love a good meat market but boy did this one push me to my limit.  Apologies for the lack of the photos (although I think you will be thanking me), but when you're trying to dodge miscellaneous meat bits on the ground and at head height, getting the camera out is the last thing you think about.  Here are my highlights...

The Automated Chicken Plucking Machines

I knew what these were, we'd gone through the chicken market in Marrakech where you kind of got what was going on but couldn't quite see because of so much happening, but I heard the familiar bzzzzzz sound identical to a wood chipper and just couldn't stop myself from looking... I don't think I really need to explain what I saw!

The Acrobatic Butcher

Whilst wandering in my state of bewilderment, I absent mindedly decided to look at an unmanned stall and saw the most incredible thing.  The butcher who worked there made a run towards his counter, hurdled over it with the assistance of a meat hook acting as a swing and landed perfectly back inside his hut, to then look at me with an almighty grin.  I had to pick my jaw off the (scarily colourful) floor and scurried after Brim to try and explain what he had just missed out on.

The Hanging Animal Heads

Pretty self explanatory however there were an awful lot of them and we had finally hit the North where camel is eaten more regularly.  I came face to face with a poor dead-eyed camel at one stall but it must be said that the hunks of meat on offer looked divine.  Around the corner were rows of freshly decapitated sheep and goat heads hanging on hooks, amongst hind cuts with tails intact and rings of intestines.

The Hacking Axe Man

This one still makes me shudder.  I don't know what was being hacked up other than it contained a lot of bone and the sound it made was horrifying.  I was petrified walking past that a shard of bone was going to come flying at me.

The Massacred Meat Mess

Hrm.   Going past a stall I saw a bloody pile of some cut of meat.  It was huge, like 20-30kg huge and I couldn't work out where or what it belonged to.  I was leaning towards it being some weird cut of beef where a hip was still intact and then some organs as well. As I got closer I realised that there was hair still on some on the meat where it hit the ground and a huge pair of lips...  This poor meat mess was a gigantic camel head where the skin had mostly been peeled away, leaving behind an almost unidentifiable meaty mound.

Aren't you glad there were no photos!

Read about the rest of Meknes here - According to Nicola - Majestic Meknes

Fishy Business in Essaouira

Essaouira.  The Wind City of Africa, a place that's perennially popular with hippies after Hendrix dropped in for a while, a place that's "quite chill", bla bla bla bla bla bla bla.  I've heard and read way too many iterations of and extensions on these phrases in relation to Essaouira so this post won't bore you with that tripe.  What I will bore you with is fish, glorious fish, the sole (ho ho ho) reason that we visited the city.

Wind city?  Pfft.  They obviously haven't been to Geraldton.  Way more interesting.

Hendrix?  Well it seems as though he's been all along the Moroccan coast.

Hippies.  Really?  That's a positive?

And "quite chill".  Who comes up with this shit?

With that out of the way let's talk about the fish, or seafood to be more accurate.

The Dock

Our Australian brain told us to wake up early one morning and we'd be right in the thick of the action as the boats came in.  Who were we kidding, this is Morocco.  Some boats were only just going out as we got down to the dock.

After a couple of hours down at the dock a few big boats came in with mainly just crate upon crate of sardines.  It was around 11ish when things really got interesting.

There are three main places in Essaouira to source your seafood.  From one of the sanitised seafood stalls between the medina and dock, from the fish market within the medina and fresh as fresh, laid out in all its glory, on the dock itself.

Here you find your standard fare - squid, mullet, bream, prawns, cuttlefish, sardines.  And also your not so standard - moray eel, monkfish, stingray, baby leopard shark looking things.

The stench of fish guts and the threat of gull poop (of which I fell victim twice) did not deter, this experience was a highlight of Morocco.  It's difficult to find places that are as raw and interesting as fish and meat markets in countries like Morocco and this one did not disappoint.  You get a strong feeling of gentrification throughout the Essaouira medina however tradition remains intact down at the dock.

We had a crack at buying some fish at the dock but were a bit too frugal for our own good.  Instead we headed for the fish market.

The Fish Market (on Avenue de I'Istiqlal)

This place is slightly less raw than the dock itself.  Still a lot of fun though.

Over a couple of meals here, where to get the best price you barter for your seafood of choice then take it to one of grills at the end of the market, we had bream, pink snapper, goatfish, sardines, sole and stingray.  All gutted and cooked with bread, salad, spicy sauce and wedges of lemon for 110dh in total (about $15 for two lunches).

The setting is a little more (hmm) rough and ready than the fish stalls but what more can you ask for for that price.

And the verdict?  Everything was cooked to perfection and each of the fish were lovely in their own way.  The sole and snapper in particular were v good.

 

The stingray however?  Dad had always told me that you don't eat stingray.  He was right.  It was the ocean equivalent of something from a river being 'muddy'.  It's actually difficult to see how you could possibly make something of it.  We will not be revisiting stingray.

I just wish we had more time to work our way through the rest of the market's offerings.

The Fish Stalls (Place Moulay Hassan)

These are sort of reflective of the sanitisation that's taken place within the medina walls.  Here people hustle you like you've never been hustled before to either go with one of their set menus or pick some things from the "fresh" fish displays, have it weighed and then cooked at their grill to then be brought to you with bread and salad.  Cloudy peepers on some fish suggested that they weren't as fresh as promised.

For 90dh (a bartered price that caused the tout to crack the shits) we had a red mullet, a serving of baby cuttlefish and six scampi.  The mullet was good, the cuttlefish a touch overcooked and four of the six scampi were mushy.  In hindsight we should've only eaten at the fish market but we had to give the stalls a crack.

What did give us a wee bit of joy was watching a couple of Asian girls next to us eat roughly the same amount but instead pay 320dh for the privilege!

Overall

Essaouira is a seafood lover's dream and an adventurous eater's dream too.  You could spend an infinite amount of time there trawling (oh stop) though the fish markets and never get bored but we only had a few nights and I believe made the most of the spread available to us.

A couple of other fun facts about Essaouira:

• The ratio of cats to people here is off the charts!  And they are the finest, healthiest, shiniest looking cats that you've ever seen 
• We were asked "hashish?", "good smoke?", "you want spacecake?" a ridiculous number of times

Barrie-ometer of "Feel" - eels up inside ya...

Wish we'd never left, Mirleft

Mirleft, the place where time stands still and slips away uncontrollably at exactly the same time.

Mirleft's a little town in Morocco with not more than a couple of main streets, access to five beautiful yet different beaches and doesn't have much more to do other than relax.  No really, there's pretty much nothing to do.  Which is exactly where its beauty lies.  And given that it exists in a little pocket of the world with endless days of clear sunshine and where the mercury never rises too high or drops too low, you're perfectly positioned to take advantage of its nothingness.

After five months away, Mirleft is the only place where both of us have managed to relax and the first place that we've been sad to leave as this time we can't imagine that our next stop could be any better than our last.  Which is probably why we extended our stay twice.

Our general daily routine involved waking up when our body said it was time to then wandering in to town firstly being greeted with a smile and a wag from Beach Dog then smothering ourselves in our loyal cat pack followed by saying good morning to our donkey friends and then maybe passing a pack of grazing goats and sheep if we were lucky.

After starting the morning off on the right foot, it was nous-nous time, twice over, with the Maroc equivalent of peanut butter and jam, amlou* (ground almonds and argan oil) and the thickest, fruitiest honey you've ever had.  So good.

After that it was time for a bit of this action.

And before we knew it it was time to enjoy one of Mirleft's ever changing sunsets.  So here are more sunset photos than you ever knew you wanted to see.

After the sunset we'd hang out back at our accommodation watching stumpy little bats flap around in front of us and before long the guys at Cafe des Pecheurs were placing a steaming hot tagine in front of us that seemed to get better each night.  It was the guys at Cafe des Pecheurs that served us up this little beauty too - Ball Deep

And that was a day in the life of us in Mirleft.

Now here's the part where I should tell you about our day trip to Sidi Ifni, how amazing the natural arches at Legzira Beach are or when we went up into the mountains to buy cactus honey from the Berbers but as each day passed our motivation to do anything diminished further and further.  So much so that we got to the point where we had to bite the bullet and leave otherwise people who come to Mirleft on their yearly Winter getaway would see two familiar faces from the year before, that never actually left.

Goodbye beautiful little Mirleft, I hope we reacquaint ourselves some day. Insha'Allah.

PS if you do make it to Mirleft there's only one place that you should consider staying - Aftas Beach House

*this amlou didn't seem to have honey added to it like most normally do. 

Ball Deep

The one you've been waiting for.

Whilst wandering through the streets of Mirlift I received a little bit of inspiration of how to accomplish a food dream of ours that we've had for a while.  As soon as I got back to our accommodation I went and spoke to the restaurant owner at Des Pecheurs and asked if I could get my hands on a particular cut of meat could he cook it for us.  He gave me a bit of a strange look then laughed and nodded yes.

The following day we set off on the hunt for the not so highly sought after cut.

My inspiration had come from the open air butchers along one of the roads in Mirleft, where plums hung proudly, ripe for the picking.  We walked up to the first with just a smidgen of adrenaline pumping through our bodies but after some pointing, and extremely inappropriate fondling by the butcher, we were just laughed at and sent on our way.  Bollocks...  But we don't give up that easily!

Onto the next butcher.  After similar gesticulation, this time with me doing the fondling, the butcher whipped two goodies out of fridge and placed them on the scales.  We weren't ballsy enough to take both, so chose the plumpest one along with a few bits of beef to go with it and off we headed with a brown paper bag filled with that night's dinner.  On Des Pecheurs' owner's recommendation, tagine was on the menu.

The hours ticked by that afternoon and as each passed our nervous excitement built.  Before we knew it a head lamp flickered around the corner and coming towards us was the tagine with our names on it.  And, if you hadn't already guessed, it contained a rather hefty Rocky Mountain Oyster, a fruit of the farmyard, half of a bull's manhood.  Yes, a big dirty testicle.

After a quick bit of digging, I fished out said testicle to the gasps of a couple of Sydneysiders.  We're much less civilised in the Wild West you see.

It was time to grab the bull by the, well, ball, I suppose.  It made a juicy little squelch as I cut it into pieces and Nix and I dove in.

It was cooked to perfection in a beautiful, oily, beefy sauce.  The gelatinous, fatty, soft exterior gave away to a texture that was something like a slightly course pâté, something similar to soggy breadcrumbs and very much like the flavouring of an entire slab of beef jammed into one tasty morsel.  Oh, and it was particularly nutty of course.

Needless to say, the flavour and experience was everything we'd expected and everything that we hadn't.

The rest of the tagine was delicious but the headline act stole the show.

Do we need to have a bull's testicle again?  Probably not.  The flavours and textures were good but not great.

Would we eat testicle again?  Probably.  If someone told us that sheep's, goat's, frog's, camel's testicles are the superior testicle then we wouldn't hesitate.

Where to from here?  Maybe something of the phallic variety we think but for the time being when we get asked, "what's the most exotic thing that you've eaten?", testicle has moved to the top of that tree and will proudly sit atop it for a while.

I hope you've made it this far and if you have I hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed eating it and writing about it.

Barrie-ometer of feel - click me!

Our Journey to the Sahara

After a ten hour bus trip that involved us almost bringing up our breakfast and many Moroccan's bringing up theirs, we arrived in the middle of nowhere, were driven through backstreets to our mud brick home for the night and quickly had a massive pot of absinthe tea and a tagine in front of us. All was good.

Then after a good night's sleep we had a quick breakfast before we were introduced to our guide, two camels and their handler and off we walked through the back "streets" of old M'hamid, in search of the Sahara.

We walked for a couple of hours through palm trees and ancient kasbahs before stopping for lunch and resting in the heat of the day. 

We then set off in the direction of our camp for the night through pretty strong wind that was thick with sand and after a few hours made it to that night's stop. While the guys set up camp and fed the camels, we headed up to the top of the dunes for a very surreal sunset out over the desert.

That night was spent around the campfire gazing at more stars than we ever knew existed and I then managed to convince Nix that sleeping under the stars would be a good idea. It was.

Nix got her first real introduction to roughing it on this trip and came through with flying colours, number twos out in nature are her new favourite thing.

The next morning we set off again, this time conditions were perfect. We walked through some pretty interesting, moon-like landscapes, came across some wild camels and were just able to lose ourselves in our own thoughts for a few hours.

It was then time to stop for lunch before the 4x4 picked us up and we undertook the most audacious off-road driving I've ever seen to get us to the main event. There was no track and the bloke driving was just taking directions from the guy in the passenger's seat and we were driving through and over the top of dunes, almost getting bogged on countless occasions. The view on the way was a good one.

After a couple of hours of driving Erg Chicaga appeared in the distance and slowly crept closer and closer. There are smaller dunes scattered all around Erg Chigaga and where we'd walked the previous day but this set of up to 300m high dunes just pop up out of nowhere, it's truly amazing. After half an hour it was on us in all of its immense glory and after dropping our bags and having a quick tea (during which a camel popped its head through the door to rapturous laughter) we set off for the top of Erg Chigaga's peak. What a work out that was however the view from the top was unbelievably rewarding and worth the struggle. I'll let the photos do the talking here.

That night we just sort of basked in the pleasure of that incredible sunset.

The next morning we began the journey back to our mud hut and stopped in to check out a real life oasis.

Unfortunately we were brought back down to earth pretty quickly when our bus back to Marrakech that left the following morning at 6am was delayed by snow, yes you read right, snow, in Morocco. Four months in Europe and snow didn't look like delaying us but we get to Morocco and we end up having to stay in accommodation that is best described as a hole. That was made up for by being invited around for a traditional couscous dinner at one of our guide's houses. V good!

Thanks Mum and Dad!!