Anthony Horowitz on Marrakesh: “There really is nowhere else that’s so far away and so near at the same time.” Photo: Alistair Laming / Alamy
..
* Introducing a new monthly column, novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz tells of his love affair with the Moroccan city that has both beauty and character. *
.
London Telegraph, by Anthony Horowitz (Marrakesh, Morocco, March 16, 2014) — I love Marrakesh. I’ve been five or six times and every time I arrive I find it hard to believe that I’m just three and a bit hours from Gatwick. Even the drive from the airport is thrilling… a herd of camels parked underneath a palm tree, the great ramparts of the city dating back to the 12th century, February sunshine and a dazzling blue sky with the Atlas Mountains astonishingly clear in the far distance.
And then you plunge through one of the gateways and the noise, the colors and the smells simply swallow you whole. There are donkeys pulling carts of bananas, tourists in calèches (horse-drawn carriages), young Arab men weaving past on motorised deathtraps. And all this before you’ve seen the snake charmers, the monkeys and the fortune tellers at the Djemaa el Fna – the main square. This is not just another country, it’s another continent and there really is nowhere else that’s so far away and so near at the same time.
I was here to interview the actor Rupert Everett as part of the fifth Marrakesh Biennale, an arts festival that sprawls across the city and well beyond with installations in ruined palaces, empty office buildings, museums, courtyards… even in some of the taxis. The artworks ranged from the weird to the occasionally not quite wonderful but you can’t fault the enthusiasm of the young people – local and international – who get involved. A high point for me was a 60-metre boat, made of wicker, built on top of a hill at La Pause, out in the desert. It was constructed by the Ukrainian artist Alexander Ponomarev and it certainly wasn’t something you see every day. In fact, as I stood there eating strawberries on a tent-covered slope with 200 people and a helicopter buzzing overhead, I felt like an extra in a Fellini film.
Marrakesh. Photo: Igor Mojzes – Fotolia
[Continue Reading at The Telegraph…]
The post Anthony Horowitz’s Marrakesh – London Telegraph appeared first on Morocco On The Move.