Meknes

We visited Meknes en passant, on our way to Fes. Although I quite liked the place, I was negatively impressed by the lack of toilets at the tourist places. Additionally, as we were travelling by car with our entire luggage and we left the car in a parking lot, I had to take the laptop with me while visiting the town since I wasn’t brave enough to leave it in the car. This is how Meknes became the town which was visited with a rather heavy backpack. Not too comfy
:-(

After having avoided lots of cheeky persistent false guides trying hard to sell their services (one of them told us plainly that ‘he was famous’ – I couldn’t help but laugh in his face), we ended up accepting a more reasonable one and went exploring – first the Medina (of course) and the souks (markets) and, in the afternoon, on our own, the medersa Bou-Inania (religious school) and a museum of Morocco’s traditions.

We were told that, in each Muslim medina, there are five important elements which are always present: the mosque, the well, the Koranic school, bakery and public bath.

We were tricked into visiting a place where various types of carpets were woven (some of them by women, other by men). Impressive but … no, not really. We were not interested in buying carpets and our guide was, of course, disappointed as no commission was coming his way. Of course we had made clear to him from the very beginning that we didn’t intend to buy anything but … well, he tried.

Fes is less than 100 km away so I was very relieved when, sometime in the (late) afternoon, we were back in the car and on our way to Fes, the last town on our list.