The man on the left was playing a ghaita, a reed instrument similar to a recorder. M orocco is a yearlong festival of music, dance and culture. Add to this its labyrinthine marketplaces, beaches on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, southern deserts and oases, high mountain passes, verdant valleys, cities teeming with life and solitary expanses of countryside - this North African country offers a dream vacation spot to suit almost every taste. Just under the Strait of Gibraltar and Spain and stretching down to the Sahara Desert, Morocco is a bridge between Europe and central Africa, both culturally and geographically. The population is overwhelmingly Muslim without being strongly fundamentalist or anti-Western.
Government is by a benevolent monarchy.
But merchants in the souks, or marketplaces, of the medina, or central quarter, of the larger towns like Fes and Marrakech or people in rural kasbahs and markets are always multilingual. The fifth annual Fes Festival of Sacred Music drew me, along with a tour group, to Morocco in early June, with its heady mix of Muslim, Christian and Jewish religious music from around the world. Throughout the land, in cities and the countryside, there are koubbas, or tombs of Muslim saints or holy men. Some can be visited, but most are closed to all but members of the Muslim faith. After the music festival in Fes, our group went for a short visit to Marrakech, a city of gorgeous gardens, great restaurants, more shopping and a chance to see fantasias - spectacularly garbed Berber tribesmen galloping on horseback and firing their muskets into the air.