High Speed Ahead

All the way up from Kenitra we saw a major civil engineering project running parallel to the motorway. Beloved correctly surmised that this was a High Speed Rail Link being built. It is the first High Speed Rail Line in Africa.
The original 2010 report announced that the track would be operational by the end of 2015. The first stage will link Tangiers with Kenitra and the second stage extend the line to Rabat and Casablanca. The rail journey time from Tangiers to Casablanca will reduce from 5hr45min to 2hr10min.  

The funding is $585 million from the Moroccan government, $1.2 billion form France, $122 million from the King Hassan II Fund for Development, $1.5 billion in loans, and the remaining costs being met by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE.
There are questions as to whether the money would be better spent on education and health care but I suppose that governments like to put there money into big projects where they can see what it's been spent on.
 Certainly, even behind schedule, Morocco is way ahead of the UK in HSR and they will have 183km on the opening of the first stage. The UK HS1 is ony 114km. (HS2 will add another 225km to Birmingham by 2026 if target times are met).The rolling stock was delivered in July in accordance with the original completion date but must only be being used on the standard line for now.

Asilah

Asilah was one of the two trips Thomson offered us 25 years ago.It is another of the 17C Portugese ports. Sweetheart bought a drum there so it must have been in the run-up to Ashurim, the drum festival.
Nowadays the village has expanded with lots of apartment and holiday "resort" expansion, those on the outer fringes often abandoned half complete at La Crise. Some seem to be equivalent to Towyn's caravan parks but with wooden shed-like structures instead of caravans; one appeared to be owned by Maroc Telecom, presumably for staff.
The medina however seemed much the same, pretty alleyways with blue doors and windows kept very clean.

There were more tourist shops and cafes but they were not overwhelming and the town appears to be trying to emulate Essaouira in that there are a number of artists with shops and studios.

 Beloved and I had an inconclusive discussion, which essentially I lost as we didn't buy, as to whether there was any suitable artwork for the salon walls now that  we had got the hooks left by the frenchman removed from the Tajlick. We regained our composure over a particularly good fish lunch opposite the medina gate.

Lixus Mosaics

You won't see any mosaics in Lixus. The one that got left and appeared in the 1990s "Blue Guide"  was destroyed when local kids dug it up to try and sell. The mosaics recovered from there are currently in Tetuan Museum for protection. Perhaps they will be returned when the Golf Resort gets going.

The Garden of the Hesperides

Nowadays Morocco's citrus production is concentrated in the Sousse valley around Taroudant and we saw no orange groves on our trip to the NW; but from classical times until recent history they were grown there and exported through Tangiers which is why small oranges are not called "mandarins" in Europe but "tangerines".

Hence the Louka estuary is important in the Hercules myth. This dates from a time before Greece had citrus fruit.  (They were only introduced to southern europe in the middle ages.) Hercules is sent for his 11th labour to steal 3 golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. Tradition placed Lixus on the 1st bend of the Louka where it still stands and the palace of Antaeus on an island in the river with the garden of the Hesperides behind it. There are no islands now. Save for the river itself, which is tidal, the whole area has silted to marsh and water meadow where cows are grazed.

Antaeus could not die as long as he was touching his mother Gaia, the earth. Hercules managed to kill him by holding him up over his head so no part of him could touch the ground. There is a classical bronze of this recovered from Lixus in Tetouen museum which will presumably be returned when the Golf Resort is built. 

The grove was tended by the Hesperides, the daughters of Atlas and variously numbering 3 or 7 depending on the version of the myth. These are the daughters of evening and take pleasure in singing.

The golden apples feature large in two other greek myths. Melanion drops three, one at a time, to slow Atalanta who stops to pick them up in a footrace so that he can marry her, (all previous suitors lost and were put to death); and Eris gave one to Paris to award to the most beautiful goddess. He accepted Aphrodite's bribe of the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, leading to the abduction of Helen and the Trojan war.

 

                                         

In  Norse mythology they are the source of the Norse Gods' perpetual youth.

The myth of the magical apple-isle of the West has persisted into northern - european mythology and folk tale, in particular as Avalon, and also perhaps for the naming of Applecross on the approach to the Western Isles.

Another strand of scholarship equates the Garden of the Hesperides with the Sousse Valley and the Golden Apples with Argan fruit but although I would like to be living in it I find it less persuasive.

Lixus - The Garum Factory

The reason the posh houses were at the top of the hill was that a river level Lixus had an extensive garum factory. Garum was a sauce essential to Roman cooking similar to sauces used in Thailand and Vietnam today , but stronger and more pungent. It was made by taking anchovies and the innards of other pelagic fish and layering them alternatively with salt and leaving it to ferment in the sun for about 3 months. The clear liquid left on the top was drawn off, bottled in amphorae,

 and sold as the best quality garum and the paste, called allec, left at the bottom packed up as a garum substitute for the poor. The actual garum could vary in flavour by adding herbs to the mix but in cooking it was used to make other sauces by mixing with herbs, wine, honey etc. It seems to have been an ingredient in every dish except sweetmeats.
Garum is high in nutrients and monosodium glutamate and umami flavouring. You can buy a similar sauce from Sicily should you wish to try it called Colatura di Alici.
The factory at Lixus had 150 separate troughs carved into the rock to ferment the garum.

 I had thought the sauce would be made from caught fish but in Lixus it was made mainly from anchovies and they seem to have been at least partially farmed. There are a large number of fish ponds

 and a complex system of cisterns and underground tunnels to the river so that the water was renewed at high tide and seawater could be stored.

 The smell must have been awful. presumably this was a job done largely by slaves or the very poor.  
Anchovies are still important in the area today and are served in all the restaurants together with bread and olives whilst you are waiting for your food.   

Lixus

Larache is on the opposite bank of the Oued Loukos to the remains of ancient Lixus. These are largely Roman although the town was first settled by the Phoenicians in about 800BCE before becoming part of the Carthaginian Empire and thence the Roman Empire. The tell is only about one fifth excavated although there is a small dig at the summit now . There is a small amphitheatre, the first in Africa, seating about 800, with a baths next door.

 At the top of the hill away from the fish smells below is are a number of high status villas and a small christian church from  about  200CE. The mosaics have been removed to museums in Tetouan and Tangier.

At present entry is free but the guardien explained that from the end of this year it will be enclosed with access solely from the new expensive golf resort to be built nearby and a museum complex to be built to get the finds back on site. Clearly conservation has to be paid for, but a Golf Resort???!

Larache

We got back to a heatwave and no phone or internet. In March we'd paid for another 6 months internet in the morning before we left and the line had gone down that afternoon. It took a few requests in person at Maroc Telecom but when we finally got an engineer he said the fault was external , went away, and returned no more than 10 minutes later with the line restored. We suspect paying our bill led the exchange to disconnect us.
Anyway we are fixed now and have set off on a trip up to Tangier complete with dongle. We have not been there for 25 years on a trip with sweetheart and both grannies and thought we'd see how it had changed. We were intending to go later but saw a weather forecast for torrential rain whilst we'd be there and brought the trip forward to miss it. The weather is much pleasanter in the North, mid 20s. It had been 40C in Taroudant, unseasonally hot and much too hot coming from autumnal Wales.
We are currently in Larache, a pleasant resort south of Tangier. In colonial times this northern part of Morocco was under Spanish not French control so everyone speaks spanish and little french and the architecture reflects spanish art deco/ mission design. 
There are some nice gardens/promenade over the cliffs 

and towards the olld Portugese 17C fort,

 a pretty fishing harbour, and some nicely restored buildings around La Place de Liberation, universally referred to as "Plaza Espanol".

 Add in some really good fish restaurants and what's not to like?