crowded and through those crowds a seemingly constant stream of mopeds and scooters, some piled‐high with goods, zig‐zagged their way through the throng, very rarely coming to a halt as their riders exhibited some incredibly well‐practiced slalom stunt‐riding as if they were born to it! In the afternoon we sat in a wonderful vegan restaurant near the Palace El Badi with a view out onto a busy intersection of five roads. Here the true scale of insanity was evident to even the most casual bystander. Hundreds of small capacity motorcycles and scooters vied for the right of way with buses, cars, taxis, horse‐drawn carriages, half‐starved donkeys pulling unfeasibly large loads on rickety old carts, little kids on roller skates and, of course, hundreds of pedestrians whose attitude to road safety was on a par with that of the many pheasants that can be seen squashed on the rural roads of Britain. In amongst this grand‐melee of suicidal driving we were both drawn to the strange ‘rules’ that seem to apply to the
motorcyclists. About 90% of the riders wore helmets of one sort or another, however we never saw a single individual who had actually fastened the chin strap. Then there were the pillion passengers, often as many as three, and in some cases four pillion passengers per machine plus the rider. Not one single pillion passenger wearing any form of helmet and every single person we saw on motorcycles were wearing either flip‐flops or open sandals on bare feet. Often a woman wearing some sort of sari would be riding a scooter with a small child squashed between her and her husband with another small child clinging to his back whilst perched on the tiny wire luggage rack. In at least two instances we saw this set‐up with the addition of the man also holding a baby under one arm! Weirdly, each time there was a near‐miss or the screech of brakes, a smile, a hand to the chest and an acknowledging nod from whoever was at fault seemed to be all that was required to dissipate what in the UK would have engendered a road‐ rage incident.
I can only surmise that, being a quite devout Muslim country, people simply place themselves in the hands of their god and hope for the best. Sadly that trust seems to be somewhat misplaced when the official statistics show the rate of road fatalities in Morocco to be almost four times higher than in the UK! It would be too easy to dismiss the bikers in Marrakech as ‘mad‐bastards’ but here in the UK we still have people who think Crown Green Bowling is an interesting sport and tonight my lovely partner Mandy and I will be talking to a terrifying group of Brownies in Stockport about why they should care about hedgehogs. Ain’t any of us free from the influence of ‘La folie’! Would I recommend people to visit Marrakech? Hell yes, it’s a fabulously evocative place! Would I recommend anybody to go there on a motorcycle? Not on your nelly! Rick Hulse 21
NABD OPEN HOUSE
ISSUE 95
