This is Marrakech

I had no preconceived ideas about Morocco
except that there would be sun.

It’s not that I wasn’t curious, or had gotten lazy, rather that the time before this holiday – like most every period before a holiday - required an intense, almost manic, attention to work to make space for time off from it. 

Sun was promised. That is all that mattered. Google, the omnipotent god of our times to whom we bring all our supplications and in whom we invest an almost unlimited amount of trust, assured me that there would be sun. So, on faith, we abandoned the gloomy, January skies of England for North Africa.

When we were growing up in California every winter we were inundated with people like me. We called them snowbirds. That was before we knew that the average person gets less than half of the daily vitamin D they need unless they use supplements. And, that this deficiency only increases in Northern climates where our skin isn’t exposed to the sun for much of the year. 

Four hours later, we flew low over the squat, level roofs of Marrakech. In the bright Saharan sun I wanted to press my face against the plane's plastic windows and leave it there to melt. I don't know how to describe the colour of blue the sky was but I know that it is only this colour in North Africa. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described it best in his Theory of Colours: "This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful...Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose."

We stayed in an ecolodge about 15 minutes outside the centre right on the line between where the city ends and where the desert that

runs to the Atlas mountains begins. The hotel is owned by a conservationist which is obvious when you wander the grounds planted with both native plants but also plants from similar climes around the world. The beds sunk deep instead of raised and manicured with non-native plants in the western style. Every morning you could hear the methodical swish, swish of the gardeners sweeping the paths with palm frons.

Every morning the day began deliciously crips with the chill only burning off for a few hours at midday where it reached the low 20's before dipping back into shadow and chill again. But still - the sun.

Waxing eloquent about the food is easy - fresh orange juice from the groves every morning, fresh lemon, cumin and fish. Couscous and tangine. Delicious wines.

How to describe Marrakech? Cairo on depressants? Khartoum on speed? For a traveller, there's enough to fill a weekend but you wouldn't want to have to while away your days here. Although many people do. Morocco is the sort of place where people speed to toward and then, time slows to almost a standstill - as epitomised in the 1942 movie Casablanca. Then, of course, it was Europeans looking for traffickers to continue their journey from Europe whereas today is desperate Africans and Middle Easterners selling sunglasses on Jema el-Fnaa to pay off traffickers.