Category: Ailsa Travel Theme

This weeks Travel Theme is “Fragrant”. Thanks to Ailsa and her Where’s my Backpack blog for this challenge.

Do you see the problem in the sentence above? See how one little letter makes a huge difference? Mea culpa!

I’m sure lots of post will be filled with pretty flowers and such but mine is a bit (understatement) different because of my misunderstanding. Instead of a flowery post mine gets down to the bad stuff. In this case the bad stuff is the smell coming from a tannery in the Medina in Fez Morocco.

So…I view this as a rebuttal to Ailsa’s post of Fragrant. My post for the Travel Theme of — Flagrant. Totally confused now?

Here goes:

Travel Theme — Fragrant.

The oldest tannery in the world is located in Fez, Morocco, where we visited last year. You can smell the tannery from blocks away. The smell sucks your breath away and makes you want to throw up. A grimace comes over your face, the attempt to breathe shallow, the stepping away from the source, and often the gagging and “almost” vomiting. If a person can escape that smell, they will, if they can’t they just muddle through.

The tannery processes hides of sheep and goats, turning them into high quality products such as coats, bags, and shoes. This is all done manually.

The workers stand in the stone vessels arranged like honeycombs, filled with different dyes, dying the arms and legs of the men. The hides are first soaked in diluted acidic pigeon excrement and then transferred to other vessels containing vegetable dyes such as henna, saffron and mint. When the dying process has been completed the hides are dried on the roofs of the Medina. After a few minutes we were ready to leave.

MOROCCO – THE MEDINA IN FEZ

Thanks kind Ailsa!