Day 6 Casablanca to Marrakech
Must remember to put earplugs in at night……
Everyone loved having Casablanca, the movie, up on the wall last night, and it was really lovely to see Mark do that for everyone. We stayed up a bit longer round the camp fire chatting with our tour leader and the two couples going round to Nairobi and Cairo, who seem lovely. Our tour leader had spent virtually the whole evening applying for two visas with one of the passengers who has seemingly ignored the eleventy billion times we were told to do this from the UK.
Anyway, we hit the road at 7:30 this morning (well, actually 7:37, one day we will all be ready on time) to get to the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca before 9am if possible. Despite it being foggy all the way into Casablanca, as soon as we got out of the truck it has been clear blue skies all the way. The only way to see inside the mosque was a guided tour at 10am, as we needed to be back on the truck at 11:15.
The allocated timing for everything at the moment is genuinely bonkers. Let’s do the maths…. (math if you’re reading this from the States) Supermarket stops to pick up lunch for a couple of days are usually 30 mins, which in theory sounds quick, but perfectly doable. However, you get 18 people off a truck, one by one and into the store and you’ve likely lost 5 mins already, x 2 for getting back onto the truck as well. So now you’ve got 20 mins left. 1 min through the till each and realistically, only as long as there are 10 tills operating and everyone is shopping in pairs, the maximum time available to buy lunch for 3 days in a supermarket you’ve never been in before, where the layout is unknown and everything is in Arabic, is 10 mins.
I digress, but only slightly as the time available to see the mosque was remarkably similar. If you only wanted to look round the outside grounds, this was free from midday, but a hefty full day’s budget for us to go inside. As we couldn’t go in for free and this is supposed to be one of the largest and most beautiful mosques in the world, we bit the bullet and bought our tickets. But of course we then had 44 mins to kill until the tour started. So……
We raced over to Rick’s Cafe (which is also closed until midday) and then walked back briskly to the mosque via the Medina.
The Medina in Casablanca is a working local one, nothing like Fez or Chefchaouen. There are buildings in ruins, graffiti, food and flea markets in equal measure.
The graffiti on the walls in the Medina is all in one single style and appears to be very tribal (not in a positive Masai Mara kinda way).
I certainly didn’t expect to see so much of it.
The mosque by contrast is an oasis and a world apart from the corrugated iron townships near the airport that we saw on the drive in.
In the “my god’s bigger than your god” competition, this mosque scores in the top 10, dwarfing the blue mosque in Istanbul, for example, with a ten fold higher capacity.
The ceiling is made of cedar wood, weighs 1100 tonnes and slides open in 5 mins to ventilate the building (it closes in 3 mins apparently). The chandeliers are all huge and all made of Murano glass. The columns are granite covered, everything that looks like it is made of marble, is. There are 360 speakers so everyone can hear the prayers and a laser mounted to the minaret, visible for 30km, pointing to Mecca.
Zellige tiling is everywhere…..
I lost count of how many marble fountains there were to enable 105,000 people to get in, wash, and then pray.
A brief summary of the tour guide says that Hassan II apparently visited Casablanca and decided he would have his mausoleum built there. I assume he’d never visited Naples. Anyway, he then changed his mind and decided that Casablanca would benefit from a grand mosque instead. Work started in 1987 and was planned to last 13 years, including reclaiming 2 square kilometres of land from the ocean, reflecting the words of the Quran that said that Allah’s throne is on the water. For reasons unknown to us, Hassan II then thought he might die before the whole thing was finished and put double the workers on the job to get it finished in 1993. In between all the marble and granite are expansion gaps to withstand an earthquake and the whole thing cost £800 million at the time it was built, estimates to build it now run into billions. Ticket sales generate £8m each year, all of which is needed for the upkeep.
I asked our guide how the people of Casablanca feel about the mosque, are they proud to have such a building in their city, or……..? The response was that it is a most beautiful building.
So now another change to the plan, with no gentle introduction to bush camping tonight, we’re going straight to the one with facilities outside of Marrakech, giving us a bit more time in the city. As we’ve been to Marrakech before, our plan is to go into the Atlas mountains and be taught how to make tagine by a berber grandmother.
Location for our tent tonight was a no-brainer, the glove showed us the way……
