One of the few highlights of newly-releasedIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destinyis a frantic chase through 1960s Tangier. It’s breathless, edge-of-the-seat stuff with tuk-tuks, motorcycles, a Jaguar and Mercedes tearing through the narrow streets of the medina, guns blazing and quips flying. I’m told so many tuk-tuks got mangled they needed dozens to shoot the scene.
In the medina, we wandered the crammed, twisting streets full of bustling locals, tired dogs, stray cats and laughing children
What a crushing disappointment, then, to discover that the sequence was filmed not in Tangier at all but in Fez and Oujda. The 1987 Bond film,The Living Daylights, was filmed in Tangier, as was its 2015 successor,Spectre. And there’s that nail-biting chase in theBourne Ultimatum, of course, shot in cinéma vérité style.
I learned all the above and more during a far-too-brief weekend in Tangier with Mrs Ray. I’d never been before. In fact, I’d never been to Morocco, although Mrs R dimly recollected a drunken girls’ trip to Marrakesh (dimly, I suspect, thanks to a touch too muchkifin the Rif). But heck, I’d never even been to North Africa and was immediately smitten.
Flights to Tangier aren’t frequent but they’re well-timed, in the same time zone and short. Indeed, our journey from Gatwick took barely two and a half hours. That’s about the same as Gatwick to Budapest, Helsinki or Rome and considerably shorter than Gatwick to Athens, Istanbul or Valletta. And we weren’t just in a different country: we were in a different continent. In time for dinner.
We stayed at the reassuringly swish Fairmont Tazi Palace, built (but never occupied) in the 1920s by an advisor to the sultan and launched as a hotel in December last year. Set in the hills above the medina in Jebel Kebir (a residential area known as the ‘Beverly Hills of Tangier’), it’s just a short cab ride from the airport.
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We took stock over a co*cktail or so in the hotel’s 1920s-style Origin Bar, complete with wood-panelling, leather armchairs, spectacular green marble bar top, laudably well-stocked back bar and the aroma of expensive cigars. Smoking is encouraged here and, indeed, wasn’t that Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre puffing away on Cuban Cohibas in the corner?
We dined in Crudo, the hotel’s farm-to-table restaurant where 90 per cent of its produce comes from Tangier or nearby. We did ourselves well with sharing plates of tuna tartare, whole roast cauliflower, roast sea bream, marinated octopus, braised lamb, sweet peppers and feta all washed down with a fine, fresh, creamy Moroccan Chardonnay and rich, fruity-yet-savoury Moroccan Syrah.
Few guests bother to venture out of the hotel, I’m told. Certainly, there’s plenty to do with seven restaurants and bars, a vast outdoor swimming pool, fitness centre and spa, but it seems a bit feeble not to go and explore so, the following morning, woken by the call to early prayer, go and explore we did.
We wandered around Perdicaris Park where, with great views of the Spanish coast and of Gibraltar shimmering across the Med, we saw three countries and two continents in one glance. We then cabbed it to the Caves of Hercules, where Hercules supposedly slept before completing the eleventh of his twelve labours: the stealing of golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. The cave is famed for its craggy, strangely-shaped opening which either looks like a map of Africa or the profile of a face in mid-shout. Either way, it’s a striking image.
We took in the lighthouse at Cap Spartel – the most north-western point of Africa, where Atlantic and Mediterranean meet – and had an excellent plate of fresh fish and salad at Restaurant Cap Spartal.
Back in the medina, we wandered the crammed, twisting streets full of bustling locals, tired dogs, stray cats and laughing children, passing tiny booths in which men spun silk and mended frayingjillabas; where barbers cut hair with room for just one customer, and where wizened old souls peddled cigarettes and sweets.
We saw carpet sellers, greengrocers, haberdashers and wood-fired communal ovens where folk brought food to cook and collect later; stalls with great sacks of spices, pulses and dried fruit spilling onto the ground and butcher’s shops with legs of lamb hanging in the windows along with a single testicl* to prove they only sold male meat.
We popped into the tiny, shabby Café Baba, made famous by the Rolling Stones and full of twenty-somethings drinking Turkish coffee, mint tea and enjoying the ‘whole package’, that’s to say locally grownkifor hashish.
We ducked into the Hotel Continental, favoured haunt of Barbara Hutton, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Humphrey Bogart, Winston Churchill & co and then, at sunset, strolled by the harbour watching the lights of the ferry as it slipped out towards Tarifa in Spain.
Then it was back to the Tazi Palace for co*cktails in the quirky, speakeasy-style Innocents Bar hidden behind an anonymous heavy door, followed by supper of lamb tagine, meatballs and beef kebabs and a couple of bottles of fine Moroccan red on the terrace of Parisa.
And so, well, there we were, just two and a half hours from Gatwick, dining under the stars of an African night. How cool is that?
Fairmont Tazi Palace, Tangier – prices start from £229 per room per night.
