In late 2019, during our first 3 months of Peace Corps service in Morocco, we had to participate in an intensive Community Based Training. We each lived with a host family and learnt Arabic for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. In those 3 months, we were allowed to leave our sites for leisure travel only 3 times. For our first day out of site, my friends and I visited the holy, beautiful city of Moulay Idriss.
Moulay Idriss is a town in the northern part of Morocco, built on 2 hills and named after the country's first major Islamic ruler. His tomb is located at the center of the town, it has a mosque and is beside the town square. Moulay Idriss is about an hour walk/10 minute (50MAD) car ride from ruins of Volubilis, which we also visited. To get to Moulay Idriss, you can either drive 40 minutes from Meknes (the nearest big city) or a take a taxi - you can pay for just your spot and wait for the taxi to fill up or buy all the seats to have the taxi to yourself.
Due to the fact that the city was built on a hill, all the houses are tight-knit, with narrow alleyways up an incline to the top of the hill. The varying paint colors and coming across donkeys make an otherwise physically strenuous walk pretty interesting. |
We were pretty excited and exhausted by the time we got to the top of one of the hills but the view was worth the climb.
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| Karen and I |
The photos below are from a side window looking into the mosque on our walk back to the city square.
We then walked through the market square, checking out vendors of street food and artisanal goods.
On our way out of the market, we stumbled upon a little restaurant and had our best experience of the excursion. The owner's name was Aziz and he said he could make whatever we wanted. From scratch, he made us beef Kefta (meatballs seasoned with local herbs, on a bed of chopped vegetable stew), served with bread and Berber tea (not regular Atay, which is usually green tea).
Aziz had a photo of a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer who had befriended him during her service and he asked us to take pictures to send to her. He was so funny, sweet and kind. He called me Fatima, I called him David... and we were all friends by the time we left.
VOLUBILIS
After lunch, we hiked for an hour to explore the archaeological site of Volubilis. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to it's outstanding universal value. It cost us 70MAD per person to get in.
According to our lovely friends at Wikipedia, "Volubilis is a partly excavated Berber city... commonly considered as the ancient capital of the kingdom of Mauretania in the 3rd Century B.C." It was ruled by the Romans for a hot second (don't look to me for historic details) but eventually fell back to local tribes, became the capital for Idris I (buried in Moulay Idriss) and was eventually devastated by an earthquake.
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| Arch of Caracalla (Triumphal Arch) |
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| Exterior of the Basilica |
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| Humza |
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| The Capitoline Temple |
Some of the ruins also had mosaic floors and this is my favorite. It is called Mosaic of Bacchus encountering the sleeping Ariadne from the House of Ephebe
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We had a great time and I would highly recommend anyone visiting Morocco to stop by both Moulay Idriss and Volubiliss for a few hours.