Without a doubt, the Jemaa el-Fnaa provided for me the most bizarre and indelible experience of the entire trip. It is a huge open square in the middle of Marrakesh, surrounded by souks, cafés, hotels and other service establishments, such as a post office. To get to the Jemaa el-Fnaa, we had to walk from the rug shop near the Tinsmiths’ Square through a maze of narrow, crowded alleys where we inevitably became disoriented and utterly dependent on our guides’ geographical expertise. I was trying intently to keep up with the guides, but at some point I stopped to adjust my camera to the lighting conditions in the passage, and when I looked up, I was alone, with no members of the tour group visible and no indication as to which direction they had gone. There was a fork in the road, and following Yogi Berra’s advice, I took it. That is, I tried both directions in turn, but found no trace of the tour group on either path. One path led directly into the square, the other went deeper into the labyrinth. Finally I took the path that led directly into the square, figuring that the group must have gone that way. (It later turned out that the group had gone into a spice shop off that same lane, but the group was invisible from the outside, so I had missed them entirely.)
This was a very disquieting situation. Our guides had given us dire warnings beforehand about the dangers awaiting us in the Jemaa el-Fnaa, stressing the necessity of sticking together and not getting lost, and that greatly deepened my anxiety. I had no way of communicating with the tour guides or anyone else since my cell phone didn’t work outside the USA. I had no idea how to get back to the bus or the hotel. For want of anything better to do, I started wandering around the Jemaa el-Fnaa, hoping that at some point I would run across the tour group. But it was a forlorn hope given the vastness of the square and the extreme difficulty of identifying anyone amidst the crowds that thronged it.
Instead of finding the group, I shortly stumbled into a snake pit. This was actually an open area in the square where a crew of snake charmers had spread a rug on which they displayed their menagerie of deadly poisonous serpents. I dislike snakes intensely, but I am fascinated with them nevertheless. I had never before encountered snake charmers and my curiosity overcame my aversion.
If I had had any inkling of what I was getting into, I would have fled the scene forthwith. But either the guides had not warned us about the snake charmers, or I hadn’t heard the caveats. Since then, I have read a bit about the snake-charming profession and learned that it is a sordid and unsavory business. According to one source I consulted,
“…the snakes, having been caught and trapped in the countryside, then have their teeth pulled out. To prevent their captors being injured by them their mouths are usually then sewn almost completely shut. Sometimes their venom ducts are burst with a hot needle in a painful and debilitating way. The snakes you see in front of you cannot eat, are in constant pain and completely unable to defend themselves. They are prisoners and lead a sad and hopeless life. They will soon be unable to move around and will be thrown away, to be replaced with another. The only way this will end is if tourists stop pausing for photographs with these poor, sad, dying snakes. You are simply feeding a tourist industry that needs to stop. It is incredibly cruel.”
It might seem difficult to feel sorry for creatures that in the wild, with all their equipment intact, can kill you with one bite, but I do and I heartily regret having gotten involved with this scam. In my defense I can only plead ignorance. The snakes I saw did not seem to be in pain or defenseless, and the charmers did not act as if they had nothing to fear from them – at least that was true of the cobras. (But that was most likely part of the con.) Occasionally one of them would tease a cobra with his cap to get the snake to strike, but when picking a cobra up with his hands, he was careful to hold the creature in a way that the snake would not have a chance to bite him. I could not tell by looking at them that the snakes were defanged.
The snake charmers had two kinds of snakes, Egyptian cobras (asps) and puff adders. Puff adders are rather stout reptiles, generally about a meter in length as adults; their name comes not from their girth but from the fact that when bitten, their victims swell up like a balloon. Although rather sluggish, they are nevertheless aggressive and ill-tempered, and they are responsible for more fatalities than any other snake in Africa. But the ones I saw in the snake pit seemed much more docile than the cobras, quite sluggish indeed – they might have been drugged – and the men handled them rather casually, so I suspected they were indeed defanged. The cobras were more aggressive and did not seem to be in any way impaired. The charmers indeed tried to get me to handle one of the puff adders, but I declined. (Actually, as I found out later, they were probably not puff adders but rather pythons, which are non-poisonous, but I can’t tell the difference unless one bites me, which I prefer to avoid.)
The cobras, by contrast, seemed active and alert, remaining in their typical “threatened” posture, upright with their hoods spread, most of the time while I was present. I was careful not to get close to them, photographing them with my zoom lens.
After finally escaping from the clutches of the snake charmers, I wandered around the Jemaa el-Fnaa for a while, increasingly dismayed at being alone and adrift in such a place of peril. Nevertheless I did have some pleasant moments, such as an encounter with a shoe-shine boy who gave my shoes the best shine they ever had.
After about an hour of traipsing around the square, I heard Karim, our Moroccan guide, shouting my name from a sidewalk restaurant which I had just passed by unknowingly without seeing any of our group seated in plain sight — which is a lesson in the difficulty of finding people in a crowd. The guides, as well as Sandie, had become quite alarmed to find me missing, and Karim had sent two of his assistants to search for me. Our tour director, Manuel, gave me a thorough scolding for my ineptitude, but I was merely relieved at not having to find my way back to our hotel, the location of which I had no clue, on my own.
After a decent lunch, we finished our sojourn in the Jemaa el-Fna without any further misadventures, and then re-embarked on our bus to return to the hotel. On the way out I was able to get some nice pictures of the square with its pinkish-red buildings softly saturated by the November afternoon sun.
By this time we were all fairly well exhausted and needed a good rest before embarking on the next arduous adventure, which was to be a camel ride at dusk on the outskirts of Morocco, followed by a farewell-to-Marrakesh dinner in a palatial restaurant — to be related in the next post.