Marrakesh desert escapade – and PURE Life Experiences

Marrakesh, Morocco, and a local woman making bread in the desert. She takes a pre-formed round, puts it into a clay oven, pulls it out and oh is it good.

The gal is at PURE, a gathering of about 800 travelistas, suppliers and buyers (travel agents, travel professionals). They take us out into the desert, surrounded by palms. I lose my eyeglasses, sand coloured, not a hope of finding them.

Back at Es Saadi, it is just about possible to see a large painting of Marilyn Monroe on one corridor wall.  Oh the incongruity of it. Room 2017 (block two, upstairs) feels like an old palace, complete with two old-look Roman columns right in the room. Look out, and you see a marvelous cool garden where literary types could have walked (think Anthony Burgess and Earthly Powers). Look in, and some of the wall decorations are, frankly, weird…

Before the desert escapade, there was a conference on story-telling. It does not matter how much money people have, they do not want to be ripped off, said one pundit.  Take travelers out of their comfort zone, said another.

The speakers included Chris Blackwell, who started the Island Outpost chain some years ago, and Sophy Roberts, the quiet novelist who writes about hotels and travel in the Financial Times (she said when she took her six-year old son to Bhutan, he struck up a conversation with a local boy and instantly felt at home).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the bus to the desert I sat next to a travel agent from Phoenix.  Her Arizona travelers love Asia, especially Cambodia and Vietnam but Laos is still outside their comfort zone.  Looking back on the evening, I should have stuck by that bread lady, it was the best food of the evening (unless one likes lentils followed by rice-and-soft-squash tajine with no sign of protein, followed by sticky-dough sweets).  Who knows, perhaps the eye glasses would not then have gone AWOL, Absent With Out Leave…