Marrakechuncovered

The Restaurant at the End of the

WorldSpring 2013

Villa DeliciousGarden party life at

Villa Dinari

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number one spring 2013

Marrakechuncovered

in this issue

4 The Restaurant at the end of the WorldBy day Jmaa el Fnaa is a hectic market place; by night the biggest open-air restaurant in the world

7 Handmade memoriesIn a tiny shop in the Medina, Kamal Boukentar is the last handmade football maker in Morocco - and possibly in the whole of Africa

8 L for LeatherThe 4L Rally tackles the deserts and mountains of Morocco in the veteran little French workhorse, the Renault 4L

11 Tame the Ouka MonsterThe Marrakech Atlas Etape is a grueling mountain climb that tests the metal of even the toughest cyclists

Villa Delicious 10You feel you are attending a

garden party with friendswhen you stay at Villa Dinari

Welcome ......to the first issue of Marrakech uncovered

Who do you turn to for the advice about the best places to eat, the most interesting places to visit, those little hidden corners? Locals, that’s who. People who love where they live and know their cities like the back of their hand.

And that’s who provides the information and articles for Marrakech uncoveredEvery couple of months we’ll bring the best of tales about Marrakech – right to your email address. So if you would like to keep up with life in the Red City simply send us an email with ‘Marrakech uncovered’ in the title line and we’ll make sure you get your regular copy.

But now it’s time for you to delve into our city.

We hope to see you soon, Inshallah!

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The Restaurant at

IN 2008, PAULA WOLFERT’S BOOK, COUSCOUS AND OTHER GOOD FOOD FROM MOROCCO, WON THE COOKBOOK HALL OF FAME AWARD, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER ITS PUBLICATION. At the time, Mo-roccan cuisine would probably have seemed pretty exotic. These days fancy food trucks and posh catering carts may be blocking the highways in Europe and the US, but Morocco’s biggest street food heaven hasn’t moved in a thousand years.

Camel’s head, sheep’s testicle, calf ’s feet and plenty less exotic treats – all to be had at Marrakech’s famous open-air restaurant.

the end of the

World

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By day the bustle of henna art-ists, potion sellers, fresh orange juice vendors and red-robed water sellers; by night the curling smoke of a hundred barbeques spirals over the larg-est open-air r e s t a u r a n t in the world. When dusk falls, hand-carts are wheeled into Jmaa el Fna and unfolded to reveal portable grills, tables, benches, pots and pans. While the mounds of food are pre-pared young men in long white coats work the crowds trying to convince you that the succulent dishes served at their stall are the absolutely top-notch best; “Deliah Smith created our menu”, “All our fish comes fresh from Sainsbury’s”. And Sainsbury’s would proba-bly be proud of the fish the stalls served, dipped in flour seasoned with salt and saffron before being deep-fried in bubbling oil until crisp and golden

Something to suit every pocketThere are stalls to fit every taste

and pocket; a bowl of harira, a traditional rich tomato and len-til soup with beef or chicken, seasoned with ginger, pepper, and cinnamon, or b’sarra, white bean soup with olive oil and garlic; add a sandwich served in a

khobz, a small, round flat loaf with the top nipped off to form a pock-et, filled with freshly deep-fried slices of liver dribbled with a green chilli sauce, or a hand-full of mer-

guez, thin spicy sau-sages, and you will be set up for a stroll around the

souks. (Keep an eye open for the really esoteric mixture of merguez, hard-boi led egg and tuna fish.)

K e b a b shops appear on almost every street corner around the globe these days, but in Mar-rakech ven-dors snub the effete pressed meat served elsewhere in favour of slices of real lamb, glis-tening with dribbling fat, sprinkled with cumin and salt as the cook hands it over to you wrapped in

a paper cone. Chicken with preserved lem-ons, delicately spiced with kas-bour (fresh green coriander) and

served with piquant olives; bro-chettes of lamb and liver, seasoned with red pepper and cumin, care-fully grilled over charcoal, which spits and smokes as the luscious fats fall on to it; beef or lamb ta-jines, cooked with raisins, prunes and almonds, have their conical tops whisked off by the waiters, just as the lids of elegant silver salvers would be at the Savoy. (Al-though you may want to leave the tajine of sheep’s or calf’s feet and the sliced camel’s head to the lo-

cals to enjoy, and it would take a certain amount of culinary cour-age to sample a cooked sheep’s head or bowl of sheep’s testicles – cooked, of course.)

Steaming snailsOn the west side of the square,

a row of chefs steam mounds of snails in battered enamel bowls. The menu is simple, snails or snails,

Vendors snub the effete pressed meat served elsewhere in favour of

slices of real lamb.

Jmaa el Fna, The Place of the Dead, The Mosque at the End of the World, North Africa’s most vibrant and exotic square, the ancient heart of Marrakech, where snake charmers, storytellers and acrobats entertain the passing crowds.

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but as the little gastropods served in a tantalizing broth are a gastronomic institution in Moroc-co, it isn’t always easy to get a seat at these stalls. Apparently wonder-ful for the digestion, locals drain the broth after having their fill of the snails. (They also often carry a safety pin to wheedle the little devils out, but a toothpick is usu-ally provided.)

Vegetarians might not savour their best gastronomic experience, but it can delicious. Hard-boiled eggs are chopped and mashed with potatoes, with the inevitable

sprinkle of cumin, (served alongside salt and pepper on every stall). Bright vege-table salads, glistening piles of savoury chick peas spiked with fresh-ground black pepper or bowls of lentil stew cooked with finely chopped onion and garlic; fried aubergine with a hot g r e e n pepper s e r v e d a l o n g -side a pile of fresh cut and fried potatoes, all washed down with a glaringly orange Fanta.

Delectable sweetmeatsYoung boys man-handle small

handcarts or struggle with large wooden trays laden with glisten-ing sweetGmeats through the densely packed crowds. Delecta-ble as the pastries may look, aren’t always that sweet. If your taste is for fruit for desert, try, carmose, prickly pear, and the vendor will carefully remove the skin for you.

For a simple wandering snack, strings of sfenj donuts are held together by a strip of leaf to make carrying easier. They are delicious

with a coffee, and come either sweet (with egg beaten into the batter) or savoury. Also useful for a back-up snack on long journeys.

If you haven’t washed your meal down with a drink at the stall, a glass of fresh orange juice will be squeezed before your eyes at one of the many carts around the edge of the square. You might

also find raisin, pistachio and pomegranate juice, which have a mys-

terious flavour of their own. The Technicolor yogurts sold in big glasses look more off-putting that delectable, but raib, a home-made yoghurt with a milkshake consist-ency slides down the throat deli-ciously.

The beautiful chaos of the food stalls is entertainment in its own right, but when you have eaten your fill there is still the raucous street entertainment of Jmaa el Fna to keep you from your bed. •

Gastropods are a gastronomic insti-tution in Morocco.

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THIRTY PATTERNSMost people probably just

assume that a football is made from a basic design, but other than having being round,in common, there are a lot of patterns to choose from

The majority of modern footballs are made up of thirty --two panels. (For the 2006 World Cup, FIFA introduced a 14-panel football, a style that will be used until at least 2014.) An original football can be made up of ten different numbers of pieces from four to thirty-four, and each of those will have three or four different designs, around thirty

Handmade memoriesTo buy a handmade leather football is almost impossible, unless you go to a tiny workshop deep in the souks of Marrakech Medina

La Clinique du Ballon, 14 Talâa souk tihane Marrakech. Tel. (+212) 0666 01 56 88, Email: docballon@hotmail.fr

Kamal Boukentar sits on a rush-seated chair outside his work-shop, deep in the souks of Mar-rakech Medina, painstakingly sewing three panels of leather together with an exactness of stitch that makes you think it has been sewn by machine. On a shelf in the tiny workshop behind him, barely bigger than a couple of kitchen cupboards, is the ultimate in the fine art of football making, a ball of seventy-two pieces, probably one of only two in the world, one made by Kamal, the other laboriously sewn by his father, Mohamed Boukentar, forty- years ago. These days Kamal Bouken-tar is the only handmade leather foot-ball maker in Morocco, and one of only a handful left in Europe.

“I can make an eighteen-piece football in one day,” says Kamal, “but that one took me ten days of solid work. It’s purely for display, to show just how intricate a ball can be, and there is no price in the world that would get me to part with it.”

Mohamed Boukentar opened the shop in 1965, and was one of about twenty makers in the Medina at the time. “During the seventies my mother, Lalla Aicha, worked with him, and is

the only woman ever to have hand-sewn leather footballs in Morocco. I began in 1984, when I was twelve, and it took me a week to make my first ball.” It may well be a coincidence, but that ball was bought by Michele Plati-ni, who played for the French national team when they won the European Championship in the same year.

When we meet, Kamal is work-ing on a model from the 1930s with eighteen panels. As the ball comes to-gether like a complicated inside-out puzzle, it is drawn together after the rubber bladder that inflates the ball has been inserted. Fortunately, Kamal doesn’t go as far as using a pig’s blad-der as they would in the early days of football. In its natural state, the leather is pale beige, but after three carefully rubbed-on coats of olive oil, it attains the rich brown colour and muted sheen of memories of games played by men with short haircuts and knee-length baggy shorts, and who didn’t feel the need to kiss and cuddle each other whenever a goal was scored.

Despite being a sporting work of art, Kamal’s footballs are never likely to see a football pitch. “Most people buy them for decoration or as gifts, but I like it when an older man buys one because it reminds him of when he played football as a boy. I’ve got an original pair of 1930s boots on display and sometimes people tell me what it was like playing in them. Heavy and uncomfortable, by the sound of it!” •

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In 1998, six French students from the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce in Rennes, set off in three Renault 4L cars to drive through Morocco and deliver educational materials to impoverished children and schools along their route.

This year the rally celebrated their fifteenth trophy, and each of the 1,300 cars, carrying two people aged between twenty and twenty-seven, delivered ten kilos of food and forty kilos of school materials. Over eighty tons of educa-tion supplies were handed over to the Association Enfants du Désert, and for

the first time in the rally’s history, the participants also donated twenty eu-ros per car, to help build a school. It became known as the student version of the Paris to Dakar Rally.

In mid-February, four cars set off from the University of South West-falia, left their home in Soest, near Dortmund in Germany, to take part in the rally, driving through France, Spain, the heat of the Sahara and the bitter cold of the High Atlas Moun-tains in winter, to Marrakech, a round trip of seven thousand kilometres.

“It took us a year of very hard work

The Renault 4L was the French workhorse; a family car, a woman’s car, a farmer’s car, a city car. Now it helps raise money to educate desert children in Morocco.

L for leather

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to get the project together,” said Tobi Hügemann. “We were split into two groups, one to raise the 36,000 eu-ros we needed to buy the cars and pay all the expenses, and another of mechanics, who are engineering stu-dents, who spent three days a week for eight months finding the cars and then almost totally re-building them. But we also had to work on our de-grees, so it meant that we had to dou-ble up on our study time when we weren’t working on the project.”

With their great adventure ahead of them, they pointed themselves in the direction of Poitiers, where a failed fuel pump needed a roadside repair but a damaged wheel bearing just south of Bordeaux cost them dear. With a deadline of six a.m. two days later to reach Algeciras for the special-ly reserved ferries to take them over the Straits of Gibraltar into Morocco and the unexpected repair and hotel bill eating into an already strained budget they were nearly of the rally before it had even begun.

“We barely slept that night, wor-ried that we might not even get to the ferry, but the mechanic at the ga-rage was great. He found some sec-ond-hand parts and worked late to get the job done. The drive through Spain was one of the most nerve-wracking I’ve ever experienced, but we got to the assembly point at Algeciras in time.” Which they shared with 2,500 other people – and not a toilet in site!

In AfricaThe adventure really began when they drove off the ferry at Tangiers, (which is probably what the cleaners on the four ferries also thought when they surveyed the results of a night without toilets for their six hundred passengers.)

“It was incredible,” comments

Lukas Twittenhoff. “We were in Afri-ca. It was such an amazing culture change, but that had been part of the adventure for us, to go somewhere so different from what we would usually experience.” But they soon discovered that Africa isn’t always hot, and the summer clothing they’d taken didn’t give them a lot of protection from the bitter desert nights or the minus ten degrees they experienced driving over the High Atlas Mountains.

Mountain pass “We were driving over a mountain pass and we could see cars coming toward us covered in ice,” says Max. “A few snowflakes started to fall, and the French drivers in front of us were ter-rified. They went so slowly that at one point we began to slide backwards. It was the same in the desert; we’d charge through the soft sand to keep moving while they would drive so slowly that they began to sink.” And the stalwart German team laugh at the memory of the French, who seemed to spend more time at the side of the road cooking a meal than actually driving.

Maren Rump is the only girl in the team, but played her part equally and had no problem with being the soli-tary female. “It was a bit strange the first time we went off-road, and I think we were all a bit nervous, but we soon got used to it, even though at times, when you were driving through a dust storm thrown up by over a thou-sand cars, you weren’t too sure where

anyone else was around you.”The route sidled south along

the coastline from Tangiers, skirt-ing inland above Rabat and passing through Meknes, Midelt, Erfoud, Mer-zouga, Tighremet and Quarzazate, be-fore arriving at Marrakech. The nights were spent sleeping alongside their increasingly grubby Renaults, the workhorses that carried everything they needed for the eleven day rally; food, drink, sleeping bags, clothes and spare parts – and a camp chair each so as not to totally deprive them-selves of a semi-civilised life.

Cars sold on A two-car team from the university completed the Rally in 2012, selling on their cars to this year’s team, who added two more, which will in turn

be sold on to another group who will continue the new ‘tradition’ next year.

“It was a wonderful experience,” reminisces Tobi. “We worked so hard for a year, not just on the project, but also to make sure our studies didn’t suffer. But it is such an incredible event, not just for the rally itself, but for all it does to help children with their education.” •www.4ltrophy.com

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Villa Dinari It’s delicious, and as I lie in my island-size bed in my elegant room of soft shades of grey, it occurs to me for about the zillionth time, “How come I’m on my own yet again in such sump-tuous delight, when I should have an endearing little deary to be romantic with?” As ever, there’s no answer – so much for the itinerant journalistic life.

The villa didn’t start out life as a holiday hideaway from the beautiful chaos of Mar-rakech. The original idea was a family home for Heather, her husband Abdellatif and their five year-old son Adam, within striking distance of the city, something comfortable but compact. After months of searching, with hopes and wallet never quite connect-ing, the good fairy waved her

magic wand when a friend of Abdel’s rang to say he had seen a piece of land that he’d better look at immediately, before the owner realised he’d left a zero off the end.

“We’d never, ever have be-lieved we’d find a piece of land this size within our budget, so we jumped at it,” says Heath-er. “We just couldn’t let it go, because it meant we could have the house we wanted and large gardens, which are really important to me.”

Starting smallThe first construction was

a small cottage and a swim-ming pool so the family could enjoy weekends away from the city while they designed the house and laid out the gardens.

“One of the difficulties when you have guests is that

neither they nor yourselves can always have privacy, so we decided to combine two styles of house in one. The main house is very modern and has large rooms and plen-ty of space, but we decided to incorporate the traditional style of house, the riad, that you find in the Medina for the guest rooms. A riad has a gar-den in the centre with rooms running off it, but we decid-ed that each room would also have its own private ter-race so everyone could have peace and quiet and then get together in the main house in the evenings. But it was never intended as somewhere for paying guests, we just want-ed our friends and family to be comfortable when they visited us.”

When Heather Benhrima tells me that staying at Villa Dinari is a home-from-home experience I think that she might be kidding her-self a bit. This is about as unlike a home-from-home experience as you can get – at least as far as a home-from-my-home experience goes.

Villa Delicious

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And this is probably what Heath-er means when she says it’s a home-from-home experience because the apparently casual layout of the guest rooms, both attached to the main house and carefully placed through-out the beautiful gardens, totally lack the sometimes oppressive formality of a hotel. Even when Villa Dinari is full you feel more like you are having a garden party with friends than stay-ing at a chi-chi country B&B.

And, boy, it is chi-chi, but in the nic-est possible way.

Stylishly differentEach room is totally different and

brings together Heather’s beautiful combinations of colour and fabrics (so it’s no surprise to find that she runs a very successful clothing de-sign business) and Abdel’s many years as one of Morocco’s top guides, who conducts the elite of the interior de-sign world on shopping forays into the depths of the Medina (and who is charmingly discreet when questioned about his A-list clients).

I’m fortunate that my early spring visit has days warm enough to lounge by the pool – but not warm enough yet for a dip – and jumper-chill eve-nings ideal for sitting in front of the big log fire in the living room. Heather joins myself and the other six guests for an aperitif, to ready our appetites for a tantalizing monk-fish pastille,

parcels of filo pastry, and a chicken Makfoul, a wonderful sweet and savoury tajine. (Ab-del is at that moment sitting by another fire, but that one is at a desert camp under the star-sparkly sky of the Sahara)

“When we decided to build the garden rooms we wanted to create pockets of privacy so if, for example, a couple were spending a ro-mantic weekend here they would be undisturbed in their accommodation and could have a candle-lit din-ner in the garden, if that’s what they wanted, and still be able to mix with other guests and enjoy each other’s company. That’s also why families and groups seem to enjoy staying here, because they can be together as much as they like and yet still be able to slip off for a bit of peace on their own without leaving the villa.

Garden partyAnd we go back to the feeling of

being at a friend’s garden party. There is plenty of space to be alone, but the beautifully laid out gardens with pockets of tables and chairs almost invites you to schmooze.

“I think it’s that informal ‘garden party’ atmosphere, particularly during the warmer months (in other words, most of the year), that Abdel and I enjoy

so much. We usually join our guests for a drink in the evening and we often find that people have so much in common that we feel that we are just having a drink with friends. I’m sure many hotel owners say that, but it’s true. I’m always learning some-thing new, and for us it’s a pleasure to help guests with information about things to do that will help them enjoy their holiday.”

Work calls and I pack my bag for a trip into the High Atlas Mountains, their peaks shimmering with snow off in the distance through the window of my room. It emphasises the charm of Villa Dinari for me; a place of calm between the frenetic Medina and the wilds and hard slog of the mountains.

www.villadinari.com

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MARRAKECH ATLAS ETAPEM A R R A K E C H T O O U K A M A Ï M E D E N

C H A R I T Y B I K E R I D E - S U N D A Y 2 8 A P R I L 2 0 1 3

For more information about the Marrakech Atlas Étape visit www.marrakech-atlas-etape.com, where you can pick up a

copy of our magazine, with all the latest stories and updates.

Marrakech Atlas Étape is supporting Education For All, a Moroccan-based charity that helps give girls from remote villages in the High Atlas Mountains the opportunity of a college education. There is a saying, ‘Educate a boy and you educate the man; educate a girl and you educate a family, a communi-

ty, a nation’; this has been the premise of EFA since its inception in 2007. We hope to continue this invaluable work for the years to come, and all profits generated by the Marrakech Atlas Étape will go to help the girls

under Education For All’s care to create a future for themselves, their community and their country. You can learn more about Education For All at efamorocco.org

An étape is an organised mass participation cycling event that allows amateur cyclists to pit themselves against mountain roads and high passes. The most famous is the L'Étape du Tour, where around 8,500 riders tackle the same route as a stage in the Tour de France – but the most gruelling is about to happen!

The Marrakech Atlas Étape Starts in the exotic city of Marrakech and climbs through the High Atlas Moun-tains to the ski resort of Oukaïmeden at 2624m, an altitude gain of around

2129m. The Ouka Monster is higher in altitude gain than any of the classic climbs in the Tour de France.

This is an inclusive event with two routes to choose from: 140km and 60km. The full ascent will challenge the serious amateur or even profes-sional rider, as well as passionate and determined cyclists who just want to experience this monster of a climb and the exhilaration of a forty kilo-metre high-speed descent. The second route is achievable by almost anybody who has reasonable fitness and would like to take part in the event. •

Tame the OUKA MONSTER!For the serious cyclist an étape is the true test of their skill, their endurance, their stamina. The first ever étape in Africa will soon set off from Marrakech.

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The exotic, the romantic, the intriguing.The exotic, the romantic,the intriguing.

Personally selectedPersonally selectedbyby

www.villadinari.com