Marrakech

Acrobats, musicians, dancers, wild animals, story tellers and mini-doughnuts are all things you might expect to see and likely remind you of a late-August afternoon spent wondering the grounds at the PNE. Add the call to prayer, fortune tellers, snake charmers serenading cobras and rattlesnakes, leashed monkeys doing backflips for change and row upon row of food stalls offering up delicacies such as sheep's brain and cinnamon/ginger tea and you know you aren't at Hastings and Renfrew anymore but rather that you have arrived at Morocco's most well-known square: Marrakech's Djemaa El-Fna.
 

As you approach the square from souk laneways which all seem to end there your senses are slowly taken over by a way of life that has attracted thousands of people, both tourists and locals alike, every night of the week for hundreds of years. The sound of heckling vendors trying to sell you touristy kitch is replaced by the sound of berber percussionists, the smell of two-stroke engine exhaust from scooters that zip through the narrow pedestrian laneways of the souk is replaced by the smell of dinner sizzling away on a grill and wafting from the food tents in a haze of smoke so thick you can taste it.

Djemaa El-Fna might not be the ideal place for two convalessing guys with apparently sub-par gastrointestinal fortitude to make their final recovery but on both of our two nights in Marrakech, Gord and I found ourselves drawn to the centre of the action. We decided to pass on the sheep brain this trip and instead settled for Moroccan lentil soup, grilled chicken and a plate of fries. Vegetables seem hard to come by in this country and as a result, both of us will likely have to have our essential mineral (and cholestorol !) levels checked upon our return to Canada. Although the bazaar (and the bizarre) typically carry on well into the night, neither of us had the energy to witness it all unfold and instead retreated to our rooms in a 350 year-old Riad to read, rest-up and organize for the trip home.

Morocco has been a fascinating country to visit and I would highly reccomend it to others who may be curious as to what the Kingdom has to offer. At many of the sites, on many of the roads and even in many of the hotels, Gord and I were the only people around and it truly felt as if we had the place to ourselves. Morocco is quite compact by African standards but it packs a lot in to its borders: from ski hills (yes, you can ski in Africa and not just on sand) to desert, tropical oceanside resorts to lush cedar forests and villages with mud buildings to cosmopolitan centres of commerce. The people here have been extremely friendly and contrary to what we had heard, very low-pressure in their sales approach...except for that swindling carpet salesman of course.

5 bucks says this guy doesn't have a dentistry degree

Djemaa El-Fna...alive and buzzing with activity