Marrakech’s streets are so full of markets and shops you hyperventilate with the desire to buy everything, all at once.

Long strips of brightly coloured woven fabric made from aloe vera plant. Nomad’s carpets. Natty leather slippers, babouches, in a rainbow of colours. Leather bags, cushions, belts. Spices. Kaftans.

What do you want?

Oil from rare argan bushes? Saffron stamens? Fragrant amber? Sandalwood beads? The finest kohl?

Or perhaps wax scented with jasmine, to smear on your warm wrists and scent the air? Antique bracelets, Berber amulets, the protection of Fatima’s hand. A monkey. A chameleon. A snake to dance for your pleasure. What’s your purse, a few dirhams or a prince’s bank balance? Your past or your future. It’s on sale: name your price.

Hotel porn: I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe the new La Mamounia. It is an absolute privilege to be able to test drive a hotel before it opens to the public – there are just 20 or 30 of us staying in this hotel of about 200 rooms.

The staff are there before you can say, “Can I have…” I have been spoilt rotten, test driving the three restaurants – French, Italian and last night, notably, the Moroccan, with its OTT entrée of Moroccan salads. Don’t be fooled, this is a 12-dish extravaganza. Who thought salads could run to so many dishes? Lamb brains, people, are back (tho they never went in Egypt).

The champagne is always on ice, the guest relations people appear to need no sleep, and the pool boys are constantly combing the 28x28m pool outside, seemingly day and night, waiting for me to swim up an appetite.

The signature scents drawn from cinnamon, cloves and dates steal through the hotel, the bar staff are playing with the same ingredients for a series of Marrakechi cocktails and orange blossom water is sprinkled about with gay abandon.

They’re still ironing out the minor details such as the music in the rooms, though the iPod docks are working fine, the spa has yet to open (yes, devastated, but I’m living with it) and Mssrs Gucci, Fendi and Chopard have yet to unpack their bags in the shopping gallery.

The only thing that hasn’t worked is the weather – at this time of year, apparently, it’s rare to see the High Atlas mountains without heavy cloud, and in fact this morning there was a rare glimpse of their outline but now, half an hour later, they’ve disappeared behind white cloud again, so that iconic Marrakech shot of palm trees and snow-capped peaks eludes me. But it’s sunny and a temperate mid-20s, and the best time to visit Marrakech.

This is not a hotel for everyone: to wit the E600 price tag, which peaks at E8000 a night for the self-contained three bedroom riads down the back of the gardens. But with a sensitive and lavish restoration that’s taken three years to get off the ground (do you really want to know how much it cost?), La Mamounia has been restored to iconic status.

PS Egyptians please note: the E600 is euros. Euros.

An update: here’s the piece in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Sunday papers
http://www.smh.com.au/travel/accommodation-reviews/this-lady-loves-her-facelift-20091030-hoko.html

Djamma El Fna is pumping. Smoke from the grill of stand 29 pumps out across the square, putting a mystical haze across the snake charmers, fortune tellers, monkey pimps and men who are dressed like lumpy women, with a scarf across their faces, bellydancing to a crazy band, money in the tambourine, please.

I take a seat at Number 29 and order tehan. For 12 dirhams ($2) I get a thick round of bread on paper, and two aluminum bowls. One is filled with bright red pureed tomato sauce, the other with tehan, chopped and sautéed with onions and fat. It’s the first time I’ve knowingly eaten spleen. Hopefully it doesn’t result later in venting my spleen.

Walking home, I collect my landmarks. The fruit market with its barrows of bright yellow melons. The crazy display of taps and pipes with a badly handwritten sign advertising a ‘plomber’. The mosque with the dicey-looking WC beside it. The neon flashing telephone shop. And finally I take the turn down the chopped up laneway that, every time I do it, makes me feel like a local.

I know where I’m going. I’m going home. To the white cat that sleeps at the door, so still I could assume he was dead if I didn’t see his scarred ears twitch occasionally. To the jasmine-scented courtyard. To the hum of the staff in the warm, friendly kitchen and the slice of tart apple flan they have left out for my late-night snack. It’s good night from me…

The orange Hermes everywhere! The brass chandeliers! The bed that could fit a football team! The incessant petit fours at every turn! The pillows, the linen, the Dedon furniture on the extended balcony, the views over palm trees and the High Atlas mountains – Morocco (and North Africa’s) most famous hotel, La Mamounia, is nearly open.

We’re one of the first to flounce through the hotel in its soft opening, before it all becomes official and splashed about the world’s press on 29 Sept. So here’s a sneak peak, about to do an official tour of the glorious gardens and the beautiful bars and restaurants – will report back. It’s a job…

Doris the pregnant donkey wanders past, going home to her corral, the peacocks, Frank and Stein, sleep on the thatch roof of the bar, the two long little dogs, Woof and Whatsit, are sitting at our feet while we have a glass of wine as the sun sets over the pool. The villas are all open, just curtains drawn against the elements.

Set up by a British couple who moved their family of four young children to Morocco four years ago – in a record five months – Villas Fawakay are three villas 20 minutes from the heart of Marrakesh. Each has its own little plunge pool, as well as a long, luscious main pool. The gardens are a rich green thanks to recent rains, which the pet goats and Doris attack with gay abandon.

It’s no hardship to hang out here. I napped in the afternoon on my fluffy bed, to awake to the peahen, Stein, staring in the window at me. She and her husband, Frank, had been napping in the shade on the rattan loungers outside my window.

The sounds of traffic horns and revving buses are long gone. All I can hear is Doris’ steady munch and the adaan from a nearby mosque. Each meal is prepared in the main kitchens and brought to my villa, and at the end of the day, I join the family for dinner by the pool. But this idyllic time must end, and it’s into the fray of Marrakech today…

It is raining. It is SO raining. Rabat and Rain. Rabat is an hour by train from Casablanca, and I’m sure it’s a nice town. Pretty. Whitewash buildings echoing the Portuguese style. I read about the pirates and prisons, I saw cannon holes and fortresses. The studded blue doors and pretty pots of the rocky outcrop of the Kasbah des Oudiaias. All through a veil of water. My feet were so wet the dye in my leather sandals ran and have stained my feet a dark brown. So very attractive.

The journey home was in sodden clothes on a train with the air-con turned up to 10. Made all the more special by a 45 minute delay in the wilderness. We were there so long, it was time for fitar, or breakfast, the first meal of the day in Ramadan, at 6.45pm. The carriage literally turned into a moveable feast, to steal and bastardise Hemingway.

Middle-aged men all around me suddenly pulled out elaborate picnics packed by their wives – plastic boxes of dates, thermoses of hot water, good-smelling pastries. I had some water and harsha, that deliciously calorie-laden puffy fried bread of semolina that’s sold hot in the markets, and took my seat in the train to eat.

Then the kind man in the next seat poured me a cup of hot, mint tea. Heaven, I started to thaw! He then handed me a small bowl of bright yellow harrira (thick, traditional Moroccan soup) and a sweet crisp fried pastry stuffed with pistachios, then put on his hat and coat, and disappeared into the engine room to drive the train home to Casablanca. Truly the spirit of Ramadan.

This being Casablanca and all, my Casa-based friend Jody and I wandered into Rick’s Café, modeled on the gin palace that appeared in the Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall Hollywood movie, Casablanca. Beautifully decorated and spanning three levels with a terrace (closed because of heavy rain) and a comfortable lounge area that has that movie playing every night of the week, there’s something still missing. I think it’s the layout of the place – too narrow and tall – but beautiful acoustics for the piano, whose 1940s tunes trickle up to the high ceiling.

The cafe, a concept bankrolled by a swag of American expats, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year.

This night, the clientele was a mix of tourists and expats, with a few tables of Moroccans. Perhaps it was so quiet as this is Ramadan. We ordered long vodka & tonics and took a seat at the tall bar, feet dangling from our bar stools. A word: don’t try falling off these devils.

(Interestingly, Misty is the song playing when you open Rick’s website…see earlier post, spooky)

It bodes ill for my bank balance that the first photograph I take in Morocco is of a necklace. Massive rough chunks of amber strung carelessly on a piece of wool. Ibrahim, the trader, was dozing in the sun, but instinct led him to quote A$75 for the necklace. We didn’t strike a deal, but we parted amicably. He knows I’ll be cruising past again.

It’s been a long and interesting day in Casablanca, the administrative heart of Morocco. I always heard it was so boring with little to see, but the street scenes are fascinating, especially now on the 18th day of Ramadan. The city is distinctly liberal with girls walking around in shirts without sleeves and knee high and nobody turning a hair. Even at night, and by themselves. That would never happen in Cairo. They would be wolf-whistled into deafness.

With a population of just four million, compared with Cairo’s 16-20 million (give or take four million), it just seems a little empty, but the Casablancans I met tonight are relishing the unusual silence, that comes thanks to Ramadan. They are surprised to learn that Cairo is the opposite: sure it’s quiet in the day, but the night-time goes into manic overdrive as the country goes on an eight-hour eating binge marked by sunset and sunrise.

Today I wandered through Casa’s old town, stacked with fabulous sandals, pirate sunglasses and leather goods, before taking a turn toward a towering minaret that was so high, its peak was constantly cloaked in clouds.

The Hassan II mosque, set on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, is astounding; as luxe as any palace, it took 13 years to build, finishing in 1993. The minaret is 210 meters, the tallest building in the country, and the third-largest mosque in the world, says my guidebook.

The mosque is set on high walls that drop into the ocean, the perfect place for small boys to dare each other to dive from. They prance along the sea wall, their friends below in the thick water egging them on, swimming and twisting like so many young brown seals till finally, the police clear them off, even pushing them off the wall into the ocean to get rid of them. But within minutes, the boys are back, like a flock of pigeons, disappearing over the wall when the police start to chase them.

It’s a game that will keep both occupied for hours.

You can see the mosque lit at night from Sky 28, an elevated bar in the Kenzai Tower Hotel. While the view is grand, the atmosphere is like any other dreary hotel bar, complete with cigarette smoke, bad aircon and a girl singing ‘Misty’