A few hours into the bus ride, we neared tall mountains that seemed to be snow right to their base. These were the Atlas mountains and I certainly hadn’t brought clothes for that climate. It’s now the desert or the sea.
Near the base of the mountains sits a massive collection of clay buildings, mostly surrounded by a tall clay wall. Marakesh. This is where I’m staying tonight. The taxi driver who brought us from the bus into town said pointed out that it’s a 500km trip to the desert which severly reduces my chances of making it on this trip. I might still head out there just to look, without actually making a trip onto the sands.
We wandered the streets of Marakesh, taking pictures of the tall spire of the mosque from many angles. A 3 year old girl laughed in delight when she saw me taking pictures so I took one of her and showed her. She pointed at herself and kissed the screen. Her mother got embarrassed and called her away. I tried to talk to the mother and her friend, who was solving maths problems in a notebook, but got little besides names, ages (the mother was 17!) and that the friend was a maths student. I got the impression that it wasn’t good custom for a man to talk to a woman in the park.
We ended up in an old palace, intricately tiled in every room with myriad designs. More impressive were the patterns carved right into the clay arches and around the ceilings. Some were coloured and some had stained glass fitted into the holes. I noticed that the carvings are all angled downwards, presumably to give depth when looked at from normal head height.