Fes - Getting lost in Fez, it's like deliberately trying to get ill in a hospital

 Fes (Morocco)

Getting lost in Fez would be easy if there weren't any Moroccans living there. On my last day I deliberately walked out into the medina with the intention of taking so many wrong turns or perhaps right ones and tried to end up having the internal navigational board light up like a Christmas tree in my mind. I certainly tried  to do this but the quest failed as the persistence  and aptitude of the Moroccan locals to sniff out and make a dirham is much more overwhelming than the desire of a tourist to utilise their boys cout survival skills, (incidentally, I was never a boy scout). I turned up to a hall one day when I was eight or nine but my mum was quite suspicious of the beady eyed sweaty head scout master that breathed far too heavily for a man just tieing knots, you do the maths!

 Fes - Mororcco

In Morocco you get use to standard questions such as  'Hello, where are you from ?'. Sometimes you feel like mucking around and with my type of look it was quite easy to do just that. At other times you drop the  fact that your Australian immediately and either  get the 'Ahh, kangaroo' acknowledgment or have this most embarrasing of replies 'Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi'. Why the hell did we come up with such an idiotic war cry?

 Fes - Morocco

Fes - Morocco

The difficulty therefore is  in attempting to dodge the local entrepreneurs, ready to take you to a terrace for a panoramic view or to a local artisan for a free mint tea because is you don't themnmy friends it's time for negotiation, you are ALWAYS negotiating. in Morocco On the rare occasions this form of negotiation worked in my favour when I was actually interested in an item as by the end of these sessions I was so jacked of saying 'no thank you' that I'd drop my required 'sale' price to what I considered so low as for it not to be feasible and just stuck to my guns, feigning a walk out when I thought the saleman wasn't budging. Nine out of ten times there would be a handshake with the comment or rather insulting question, 'Are you a berber ?', to which I did reply to one guy, 'Yes, aren't we brothers?' ....he didn't get it but I thought the response rocked both our kasbahs. In any case  it was in my artful dodging that I ran into a 16 year old kid named Abdul. His story was that he wanted 'just' to learn English and that taking me to a terrace with a 'panoramic' view of Fez would be at no cost. 'OK Abdul, I'm willing to pay for the privelage, lets just see who has the nuts to hang the longest for the inevitable transaction'.

 Fes taken from the Andalusian side

Shady Abdul and his cousin

Lets say this at the start, Abdul was a nice enough kid and the terrace that he took me to was in the centre of Fez and had a great view of the old city and surrounding areas. I was able to get the exact pictures that I wanted and without his help, well, I would have just been a lost tourist waiting for another Fez local to 'proposition' me. After chatting with Abdul for a little while I was happy to follow him for the rest of the day and let him be my guide and at the end of the day it I discovered that it was the best decision I had made and quite possibly, could have been the worst decision.

 This is an 'actual' thoroughfare! How would you get a fridge through there?