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I am the world’s least adventurous person. I never go anywhere on holiday that I have not been before – not because I have been to so many wonderful places that when holiday time comes around I simply flip through my mental Rolodex and choose one to revisit, but because everywhere I have been has disappointed me, and now, with my optimism blown, I would rather relive old disappointments than search out new ones. That way, at least, I can save my holiday from the misery of false expectation.
I’ve been to New York. Feh, so they have shops. I have been to Tokyo. Feh, fish. I have been to Hong Kong. Feh, smog. Monte Carlo? Pah, money. I have yawned and scratched my arse in Rome, Venice, Florence, Pisa and Siena. I have seen Naples, and nobody died.
Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Granada, Munich, Berlin, Geneva, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Cairo, Alexandria, Tunis, Nairobi, Mombasa… Feh, feh, feh, feh, feh, feh, feh and feh!
kasbah bab ourika
Zanzibar, Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Pretoria, Goa, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Melbourne, Darwin, Adelaide, Singapore, Mexico, Grenada, Jamaica, to Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama… If I really think about a list, I’ve probably snored and fidgeted my way through 100 countries, and pushing 1,000 cities. And I don’t even like travelling. Imagine how many places I might have been to if I did.
Travel only broadens the mind if the mind starts off narrow. Wittgenstein never went anywhere. And how broad and enlightened do you think a conversation with Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes would really be?
Travel is for people who have yet to discover – like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – that there’s no place like home. People who travel endlessly are like people who jiggle their legs while sitting at a table: they have to keep moving to confirm they are alive because not enough is happening in their brains for them to be certain.
Through a mutual friend I was contacted by a company called Black Tomato, which does super-exciting bespoke holidays for travellers who need that little bit more, and asked if I would like a free holiday. I said, no thanks, that’s cool, I’m good. I’m actually one of those customers who needs a little bit less. A knotted hanky on the head, a book and a deckchair is all the bespeaking I need, I said. As long as the deckchair is in my own back garden.
dining at bab ourika
“No, come on,” they said. “It’ll be great. We can send you to Panama to stay on one of the San Blas or Bocas del Toro archipelagos on the Caribbean coast, which are still free of the tourist hordes, then maybe a few days in the Unesco-protected old town, which has a touch of the Havana about it, with great little hidden-away bars, jazz clubs and…”
“Boring!” I shouted.
“Or what about Colombia, then? You could stay in Cartagena, a fairytale walled city of cobbled streets full of the ghosts of buccaneers and pirates and hip hotels like La Passion and Agua, then travel out to the Rosario Islands for some chilled-out beach time, great diving and…”
“Boring!”
“The Finnish lakes? We could you put in a lodge for a week on a private lake deep in the pine forests, boat and lakeside sauna provided, and maybe lay on a local chef to come and prepare lunch and dinner daily if you…”
“Boring!”
“Transylvania? A guesthouse on a Count’s estate high in the Carpathian…”
“Boring!”
“Atlas Mountains? Kasbah Bab Ourika, 45 minutes from Marrakesh. A mud-walled building, Berber cooking, secluded swimming pool, meals served in the garden, stunning landscape…”
“No diving?”
“Not in the mountains, no.”
“No jazz bars, nightclubs, parachuting, heli-skiing, temples, ruins, adorable people, authentic markets, horse-riding, necklace-making or bungee-jumping?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
views over bab ourika
I was cheating. I’d been to Morocco before. So I wasn’t breaking the “nowhere new” rule. And, as with any Arab country, the risk of being kidnapped by al-Qaeda and beheaded live on the internet is so high that you dare not leave the hotel. Ideal.
Bab Ourika was perfect. There were no cars, no television, no phone, no air conditioning (the mud walls and breezy courtyards effortlessly sucking the horror out of the 40-degree days), just views all round of green and red foothills and purple peaks, an empty pool (empty of people, not water) and nobody there but us, and the venerable parents of the Old Etonian owner, and some friends of theirs. So there was no shouting, no bombing, no tattoos, no hip-hop piped to the poolside nor whistling iPods… just the sound of people with nice round vowels reminiscing about Rhodesia.
And the cooking by two chefs called Mohammed and Abdul (what on earth would the third have been called, if there had been one?) was terrific: steaming, heady tagines, pastillas of stripped bird dusted with icing sugar, and those crazy briks the Maghrebis love, the pastry all folded over round a runny egg. Sugar and spice and fruit applied to meat and chicken as enthusiastically as to cakes and puddings, like British food became in the Middle Ages, as the Crusaders, those vain gap-year ne’er-do-wells of yore, returned with delicious tales of the food eaten by the people they’d slaughtered.
You can see more of our Morocco experiences here.
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