Marrakech day 3

 After considerable bartering, we negotiated a 30 min taxi ride down to 50 dirham (about £5) for our ride across town to the tanneries.

These units are for softening camel and cow skins using lime and pigeon droppings. Handfuls of mint were offered to mask the smell, which you can imagine was overwhelming.  We had taken on a 'guide' at the tanneries whose family worked there, we needed him as it is difficult to negotiate your way around and to get a good view you need someone who has a friend with a shop that has a balcony! of course you do :).  Our guide was Berber and explained Berber people process camel and cow whilst the rest of the population only process lesser quality sheep skins. Some sort of hierarchy.

It was sad to see many donkeys overloaded with carts carrying heavy goods such as the bags of lime powder. 

This area is rife with locals all wanting to be your guide, we asked a couple of loitering  police lying on their motorbikes  to help us choose ours and went with the Berber man as they pointed him out, he was happy with a small tip to take us to the flat roof of his relatives shop so we could see the tannery from above.  As you can imagine, there were high hopes that we would buy leather goods but we managed to escape this as we quite simply don't carry much cash! Apparently we are the only tourists who don't carry a debit card, the disgruntled shop keeper told us.  Had we wanted to shop we would have been bargaining today, leaving disinterested and returning with our cards a day later - that's the way we have learned you get the best price.

After the tanneries we found the taxi price was now triple for same journey back as they had worked out that we were stranded - well not quite - not to be beaten we decided  to walk back through the warren of alleyways, above,  it took several hours but was worth the walking as we saw so much.

We got lost many times but my limited French and helpful school children set us back on track each time!