Word: marrakesh
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...Americans, are expected to visit what Moroccans call the "Fortunate Kingdom." Many will come in the summer, when the sun is fiercer. But the big boom is now, in winter. These days, only the lucky find hotel rooms ("We just had to turn Charlie Chaplin away," a clerk at Marrakesh's Mamounia Hotel boasted last month, probably falsely). The rest have to make do with tents, trailers or sleeping bags slung somewhere along Morocco's 1,000 miles of beach. The squeeze in accommodations will be eased by new hotels currently under construction: two motel corporations, Ramada Inns...
...Marrakesh, the 900-year-old "Red City," Winston Churchill spent long hours painting the vast expanse of date palms against the haunting backdrop of the Atlas Mountains. Now pleasant French nouvelles riches wear mink or sable coats as they trip down to the Mamounia Hotel's heated pool.* A few blocks away, in the teeming public square known as Djemaa el Fna, or Assembly of the Dead, robed Berber men and veiled women chew on fried locusts while they watch snake charmers toy with defanged black cobras, or listen to interminable tales of storytellers perpetuating the tradition...
...vistas, the warm climate (daytime temperatures rarely dip below 80° except in the mountains and on the coast) and the languid, inshallah ("as God wills") pace of life. "It's all very exotic," says Paris Couturier Yves St. Laurent, who has purchased a tiny villa in Marrakesh. "Here I don't work at all, or even think. This is my refuge from the world...
Eugene Paul Getty, son of Oil Billionaire J. Paul Getty, also lives in Marrakesh. Regular Moroccan visitors include Queen Fabiola of Belgium, Baron Guy de Rothschild, Barbara Hutton, Yul Brynner, David! Rockefeller, Lee Radziwill, Fiat Boss Gianni Agnelli and Author Truman Capote, who advises anyone contemplating a Moroccan trip to "have yourself vaccinated against typhoid, liquidate your bank account, and say goodbye to your friends. God knows when you will see them again...
...there are also the not-so-rich. Lydia Bach, a blonde, 27-year-old language teacher from Decatur, Ill., and Mary Jo Ostrom, 29, a fashion illustrator from nearby Galesburg, have vacationed together in southern Morocco for six years; they deliberately travel around Marrakesh in filthy old market buses rather than tourist coaches, "to be with the people" as well as to save money. At the bottom of this season's tourist barrel is a colony of about 270 U.S. and Canadian hippies who are living in sleazy abandon in Marrakesh's medina, or "old city...