Marrakesh Express

“Take the train from Casablanca, going south” sang Graham Nash on his Marrakesh Express, the first hit single from Crosby, Stills and Nash.

It’s an instantly appealing song that became one of my favourites when I was still at school.

 

While Crosby, Stills and Nash would go on to release much weightier material ranging from Steven Stills’ classic Judy Blue Eyes to Neil Young’s many songs of self-pity (he joined them for their second album), it was Marrakesh Express that remained a personal favourite.

 

   I liked it because it offered a vision of freedom, of a place one could escape to (“had to get away to see what we would find/hope the days that lie ahead/ bring us back to where they’ve led/listen not to what’s been said to you”), away from the tedium of rules, regulations and our boring everyday lives.

 

   It was, of course, in retrospect, a grass-fed hippie dream that never held true. And so when the hippies cut their hair in the 1970s and went to work for IBM, Marrakesh ceased to be the sort of flower-power destination which the Rolling Stones would escape to on their way to record with the master musicians of Joujuka in a north Moroccan village.

 

   But while Kathmandu (subject of a great Cat Stevens song) which was also briefly a hippie paradise went on to collapse as a desirable place to visit, Marrakesh found new identities.

 

   It had always been a favourite of French people. (Morocco used to be a French colony and French is widely spoken in Marrakech). It was where Yves St. Laurent would hide out when the pressure got too much for his delicate creative sensibility. More recently the famous French perfumer Serge Lutens built a home in Marrakesh and found inspiration in the city’s gardens. His evocative perfume A La Nuit is the smell of a jasmine-filled garden in Marrakech, late at night, as the flowers are revealing their irresistible fragrance.

 

    Marrakesh is still the place French people go to when they want to dream. It is like the French Rivera without the oligarchs and the rip offs and has much more character.

 

   The Marrakesh that flourishes today is much more the city of Yves St. Laurent and Serge Lutens than it is the city of Crosby, Stills and Nash. Its smells still make you a little heady, it is filled with gardens and there are still people “charming Cobras in the square”, as the song has it.

 

   But ever since the hippies left, it has become an upmarket tourist destination, packed out with great hotels — The Royal Mansour, the legendary La Mamounia — and great hotel brands: the Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, Aman etc.

 

   The newest of these is the Oberoi. Though the group does not use the term, it is for, for all practical purposes, a Vilas property and in my opinion, the best Vilas that there is. It was the last great hotel that Biki Oberoi built and in terms of beauty and luxury, it dwarfs anything he did before this. It has over 80 villas, all with their own pools and a magnificent main building with rooms (where I stayed) that is designed as a grander version of a Moroccan riad with influences drawn from such iconic Marrakesh buildings as the Mederssa Ben Youssef.

 

"And the gardens are gorgeous, combining the Islamic tradition of treating gardens as a representation of paradise along with a more ordered French style of ornamental gardens."

   It is located in what used to be an olive plantation so there are 26 acres of garden and you can get lost between the olive groves and the flower bushes with their huge white roses. As a property, it is simply stunning, designed to take your breath away when you enter its magnificent spaces.

 

   The Oberoi has made a splash in a city that is already full of great hotels. There is the relaxed and laidback Royal Mansour, owned by the King of Morocco. And there is La Mamounia, one of the best and most famous hotels in the world, which recently celebrated a hundred years of entertaining the global jet set from Winston Churchill to assorted millionaires and movie stars. It has been given a contemporary make-over by the French designer Jacques Garcia (known for the Hotel Costes in Paris, though the Mamounia design has more in common with his work at the Metropole in Monaco).

 

   The General Manager is Pierre Jochem who many Indians will remember as the man who turned Delhi’s Imperial around and he is assisted by Stephane Soret, the wine and food wizard who was also at the Imperial.

 

   Soret told me that he liked the Oberoi’s Indian restaurant —and he knows his Indian food — which is run by the London-based chef Rohit Ghai. It has been the surprise hit at the hotel because there is no tradition of Indian food in Marrakech and Ghai was nervous about opening in a country he knew so little about. But it has worked surprisingly well. Even though so many of the guests are French visitors and the French have no record of liking Indian food, they love the restaurant.

 

   At many other Oberoi hotels, they could count on expatriate Indians or Indian tourists to fill up the hotel. But for some reason, Morocco is largely an Indian-free zone. Rohan Ogale, the Oberoi hand who does a brilliant job of managing the Marrakesh property, told me that there were only under 300 Indians in all of Morocco, which I thought couldn’t be true, but apparently is accurate.

 

   Nor do many Indians visit. The usual excuse is that there are no direct flights, which is true but which does not stop Indians from going to say, Venice or Barcelona. You can easily change planes in Dubai or do what I did and fly Saudia (change at Jeddah) which I found excellent.

 

   The real reason, I suspect, has to do with the fact that Indians don’t really understand North Africa. We think of everything as ‘the Middle East’ and rarely venture further than Dubai when we are on holiday.

 

   But Morocco is not “the Middle East”. It is not particularly conservative (it makes its own wine) and its people are a complex mixture of Berbers (the original inhabitants) and Arabs. Judaism is also an important part of its history.  (Moroccan Jews are the second largest ethnic groups in Israel.) It has a grand cultural and musical tradition and Marrakesh is international without the flash of, say, Dubai. (It’s also much cheaper than Dubai.)

 

   And it is beautiful. Much of it reminded me of Rajasthan but the Atlas Mountains that fringe the city are higher and more spectacular than the Aravallis. And the gardens are gorgeous, combining the Islamic tradition of treating gardens as a representation of paradise along with a more ordered French style of ornamental gardens.

 

   Moroccan food is not to everyone’s taste (Indians may find it too bland or too sweet) but the quality of ingredients in Morocco is first rate. At Mamounia, I had fresh Moroccan oysters and discovered, to my surprise, that Morocco has its own porcini mushrooms. (Chef Cedric at the Oberoi told me they also have morels and even local truffles.) Because there are so many restaurants offering so many different cuisines it is hard to eat badly. And now that there is an Oberoi hotel, you can have masala dosas and aloo parathas for breakfast!

 

   Unlike Graham Nash, I did not take the Marrakesh Express. But I did take a car from Casablanca, heading south. I didn’t find the Marrakesh of the hippie dreams. But I found a city that was even more exciting.