INDEX travel
My Marrakesh
filled with pigeon, sweet almond paste and scrambled egg. For a birthday meal, we had a five-course taster menu at Maison MK (
www.maison
mk.com). Book ahead as it takes only ten dinner guests each evening, with priority given to its own staying guests. We enjoyed perfect service, canapés and mojitos on the roof, dipping olive bread into cauliflower, leek and saffron velouté. Downstairs, we tucked into an amazing beetroot and quail egg salad and king prawn and scallop skewers, minted pineapple lassi and banana bavarois, by which time we were quite merry from said mojitos and a good Moroccan wine, not to mention pre-dinner champagne at the Riad. Expect to pay moderate London prices in these exquisite restaurants; the five-course taster menu was £50 per head excluding alcohol. At La Maison Arabe (
www.la maisonarabe.com), we enrolled on a one-day Moroccan cooking workshop, led by Mohammed, who usually works as an English professor. He was accompanied by a dada, a traditional
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Morrocan cook. In a kitchen equipped to Masterchef standards, we learned the art of making a tagine, a casserole dish cooked in the cone-shaped clay pot of the same name. Having been shown how to make Moroccan bread, we were then taken to see the community oven, an enormous beast housed within a tiny room, into which a surprisingly happy baker shovelled dough given to him by local housewives and establishments. Next stop was spice shop, Planète des Epices. Samples were handed round to be sniffed, including a bag of eucalyptus crystals, which resulted in some clear, if stinging, nostrils.
Back at the kitchen, we
cooked our tagine and tomato and pepper salads then sat to eat our creations accompanied by our bread, now cooked. A fantastic experience and beautiful food (if I do say so myself), all for a very reasonable £45. The workshop is fully booked even in low season, so do book ahead.
Another highlight was a visit
to Les Bains de Marrakech (www.
lesbainsdemarrakech.com). A little piece of heaven, this spa is a warren of exquisite treatment chambers, white chaise longues, soft music, whispering staff and a thousand pinpricks of light cast from dozens of lanterns. We took a hammam, the Moroccan cleansing ritual, where we sat in a small clay room (a sort-of tagine for humans) lathered in a silky ‘soup’, were left to steam for 20 minutes, then scrubbed with a scouring pad to within an inch of our lives. An hour-long facial was followed by a massage and mint tea. Three hours of indulgence in the most luxurious surroundings – a bargain at £80 – left me feeling like a smooth- skinned goddess. Being forty ain’t so bad after all...
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• Sue Wilsher flew with Easyjet from Gatwick to Marrakesh. Return flights start from £76; see
www.easyjet.com for more details. She stayed at Riad Samarkand, where suites cost from £184 per night, including airport transfers and breakfast – see
www.riadsamarkand.com. • The local currency, Moroccan Dirhams, can’t be taken out of the country and can be difficult to change back to other currency even in Morocco. You can also use Euros, but it’s more cost-effective to take out Dirhams at airport and town ATMs. • Hiring a guides cost around £35 for three hours. Tours can be arranged through your hotel or riad. • Be prepared to haggle – and settle – a price with taxi drivers before you commit to any journey. • In the light of last April’s bombing of the Café Argana, you may want to check the foreign office’s advice before travelling – see
www.fco.gov.uk. At the time of writing, the FO was not suggesting travel restrictions to Morocco.
Travel low-down
www.indexmagazine.co.uk
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