Hibiscus, Home and Hamman

We are back with sweetheart. She brought a chum with her last week who could only stay until yesterday as she has to be in work tomorrow so we have had a frantic 5 days trying to cram in the whole of southern Morocco before delivering her to Marrakesh airport at the crack of dawn.
I was pleased to see that the hibiscus hedge is flowering and I had not missed it and that the white roses are now in flower. The spanish bouganvillea is wonderfully recovered. Moha said he dug it up and trimmed the roots back. I told him he had green fingers and he blushed.
It was chum's first trip to morocco and she came to it with new eyes and took loads of photos of the house seeing things I would not notice so I have posted some of them.
Chum is a lotion and potion lady so she and sweetheart went to the local hamman. It is an interesting contrast of cultures that even though they went from sunbathing at the Palais Salaam pool in skimpy bikinis which would be anathema for any well bred Roudani girl to wear in public they were clearly shocked and discombobulated by having to remove the tops of said bikinis in the hamman in a public room with many other women and children and then be scraped down by a similarly deshabille attendant.The black soap and scraping were clearly bracing to the skin and chum expressed some concern that her newly aquired tan may be scraped off. (She need not hav e worried she clearly tans easily). They also appear to have paid insufficient attention to the attendant so that they were not always expecting the buckets of water sloshed over them.  In Marrekech they went to the spa at the hotel for a much more expensive and westernised experience. They unanimously declined a further hamman and retained the bikini tops for what turned out to be a very gentle massage. Their skin did look good after all this pampering though.

Hibiscus or bust?

A former colleague asked me yesterday if I had bouganvillea. I assured him we did (Moha has emailed that the spanish bouganvillea is recovering - I had drowned it). He expressed surprise we had roses and envy of the hibiscus hedge. Well we do have roses and these pictures taken on our last day-March 9th show that they were coming into flower. The hibiscus hedge was in bud and we had anxiously been watching it develop hoping it would flower before we left. We are back on Tuesday. Will it have flowered ,finished and be over when we get there or will it be in flower/

Argan

The Argan tree is to the Souss valley as the great crested newt is to Flintshire. That is to say it is a globally extremely rare species which  is locally so common as to be unable to move without falling over one. At least the argan trees stay put and do not require roaming areas.
Nevertheless the future of the argan tree needs some consideration. It is found only in the Souss valley around Taroudant and north towards Essaouira and nowhere else in the world. It has spiny leaves of rapacious sharpness and deep roots penetrating 30ft or more below ground. This means it is ideally suited to arid conditions and can also act as an "elevator" plant for the whole eco-system drawing water to the surface. With the advent of irrigation  farmers are looking to clear argan trees and replace them with orange groves which are a more reliable cash crop. All undeveloped land for sale in the area is described by the immoblier as "with argan trees".
The flying goats are a vital part of the argan agricultural cycle. The argan tree has berries containing an extremely hard stone. When pressed this stone yields oil which is the valuable commodity of the plant. It can be used on salads or as a dipping oil or increasingly in cosmetics. The oil is extremely difficult to extract and and some point in the mists of history some bright spark discovered that if the goats are allowed to feed on the tree they will eat the berries but excrete the stones seemingly whole. However these excreted stones are just sufficiently digested that when recovered they can be pressed for oil. The mind boggles as to what set of circumstances made anyone first attempt this process.
Nevertheless there are numerous woman's co-operatives  in the area sorting the goat dung and producing argan oil. It is an extremely labour intensive process taking between 8 and 16 woman hours to produce a litre of oil depending which cooperative you believe and needing a large number of trees to do so. It takes over 30 times the number of argan nuts to produce a litre of oil than the number of olives and so argan oil remains a somewhat exotic rarity. Despite all this labour litre bottles sell for only about 90 dirhams (£7) and it can be bought from any co-operative, roadside stalls or the market.
I myself am not fond of argan oil finding it rather too pungent for my taste. There is an argan "museum " off the main square in Taroudant which I have never visited suspecting it to be like the chinese jade and silk museums - a small display attatched to a huge shop, but we are returning next week with sweetheart and chum and maybe chum would like to visit??

Flying Goats

The BP ad popularised the concept of "flying goats". This phenomena is native to the argan area. Originally it would have been particular to the argan nut season but now it happens wherever tourists may get close to a flock of goats. Book a trip to Taroudant from Agadir and indicate you want to see flying goats and miraculously you will pass some. Drive north on the coast road to Essaoura and  there is usually  a guy with his goats in the trees near a convenient parking spot. Give a tip and take some photos. These are some we took for years ago; the kids were made up we were paying them as they were not as commercially minded as their elders.

Driving lessons

we are used to dual control cars for learing to drive but beloved was quite taken by the two steering wheel concept. Sweetheart and I are atrracted by the ability to over-ride his "short-cuts".



Driving school car with twin steering wheels