Aug 19 - Azrou Shopping Extravaganza

Azrou is a small town set near cedar forests and mountains, famous for its wood and stone crafts. The town’s name means ‘big rock’ after the natural formation seen in the picture. People who visit here come for the hiking and trees, but it’s not the type of place a tour group would ever take you. The touristy area of the town is set around a big square, surrounded by shops and hotels, with restaurants on an adjacent street.

First stop is for a rather late lunch at the local patisserie. We visit all the shops on the periphery next and somehow get roped into going to one shopkeeper’s house to see his additional wares. K and I are extremely leery of this, as we follow ten steps behind through some side streets – what if this guy is luring us out of the busy streets to be mugged? It turns out all he did want to show us was more wooden things. I buy some little boxes.

The final shop we visit on the square was a carpet shop and we bumped into the same family from Wisconsin who we’d seen the day before at the pottery shop in Fez. Small world, eh? We chatted for a long time, to the increasing irritation of the shop-owners who had been in the middle of selling them carpets. Score one for us – it was OUR TURN to waste a carpet-seller’s time!

We hadn’t even reached the shopping extravaganza part of the day which I referred to in the title. Our final visit was to the government artisinale type thing, where they sold all sorts of touristy items at set prices. It was here that we got the shock of our lives – even POST-bargaining, we were paying pretty excessive amounts for everything we’d been purchasing up to that point. So, the appealing prices, the fact that there were actual marked prices, and the fact that we wouldn’t have to bargain to get the hope of a decent deal, led us to buy more there than we could reasonably hope to fit in our luggage. Plates, boxes, daggers, necklaces, thimbles, mirrors… you name it, we bought it. I limited myself, as I knew I was most constrained in terms of what I could physically carry. I would be traveling by myself through Spain and England later, and I didn’t want to kill myself trying to lug home souvenirs. A and K begin shopping for extra bags.

As we were on our way to find a restaurant, the final prayer session of the day had just ended, and the streets were flooded with ppl leaving the mosque (see pic). As we wended through the crowd, one guy managed to position himself such that he was on one side of me, while his hand was on my other side, where my purse was. I was extremely disturbed, walked away quickly, and gave him a look. This was the near-pickpocketing incident to which I referred to in my blog.

Dinner was rather gross and they tried to rip us off – we really didn’t choose the right restaurant. Plus, we were really sketched out by the fact that random young guys kept joining us at our table and trying to market themselves as hiking guides. We had already asked the hotel to help us find a guide and our Lonely Planet had warned us sufficiently about false guides.

We finished off the night by going to our first internet café in Morocco, and it was here that I posted my first blog since Spain. Returning to the hotel, the owner introduces a prospective guide to us – one of the very ppl that had tried to sell himself to us at dinner. We are extremely distrustful and decide to try the number in LP for official guides, or go it ourselves.

Next - Aug 20 – The long dusty hike to the dead tree