Totally clean

After nearly 6 months in Africa and only a handful of hot showers it was beginnng to be hard to see where the sun tan ended and the dirt began! So, I had promised myself that as soon as I reached Morocco I´d go for a Hamam and get well and truly scrubbed. I´ve been for a hamam once before in North Africa and the experience was ever so slightly frightening; being told to strip to almost naked then led into a room full of other naked women throwing buckets of water over each other and getting lathered up with soap. This would all have been OK if it wasn´t for the rather large tattooed woman who then came over, grabbed me with some force as she laid me out on a slab of marble and started to "exfoliate" (er...scrub me raw) me until pounds of skin had come off! However, from memory the worst thing about the hamam was that you were totally at a loss as to what was going on, everyone else around you knew exactly what the score was but I was totally in the dark.... so, this time I thought, with all my previous experience everything would be OK! Some of the girls at the rather lavish Equity Point backpackers told me about their previous days visit to the hamam, it cost them 675 Dirams and to me sounded like a day at a health spa, what I was after was the real thing, the local wash house that you can only locate through a tip off and some hand signals... so, with a tip off I set off to find the orange building with arches and who could miss such a sign as the scary looking old lady sat outside? For 70 Dirams I´d ordered the full package and before long I was naked again and being led into a steamy bath house which strangely resembled the entrance hall of Gloucester Road tube station! Of course, each of these places has their own etiquette, their own way of doing things and once again I was the clueless girl not knowing what would happen next. This time the "scrubber" (is that the technical term?) was old and tiny and a couple of times I had to lean down so she could get the bucket of water over my head, but her hand was no less firm and before long pounds of black skin were peeled away and a slight tan is all that remains - but, it felt amazing to have gallons of hot water at my disposal and for the first time in months I feel truly clean!

After a whistle stop tour of the not so romantic town of Casablanca with its almighty mosque, the buzzing tourist town of Marrakesh and the labyrinth which is Fes I was ready to board the ferry at Tangier and make my way back to Europe. Leaving Africa was a moment of real mixed emotion, so much learnt and so much more to learn about that most different of continents. But for now its back to European anonymity and plentiful hot water and need I remind myself, in but a few short weeks, also back to the grind.

The route home - Tarifa, Seville, Malaga, Granada, Madrid, Paris and London town.