On being pampered

My birthday was last week, and T gave me the extravagant and excessive gift of a visit to the spa at the Michlifen Hotel (you can get some sense of the extravagance of the hotel and spa by visiting the Web site).

This hotel has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Like some medieval European castle, the Michlifen Hotel is situated on top of a hill so it can easily condescend to the village of Ifrane – and its inhabitants – below. The rooms are unbelievably expensive. Just out of curiosity, I looked at Booking.com to see the costs of the rooms that are available right now. They range in price from the equivalent of US $315 to $1207 per night. For perspective, I'm pretty sure the cost of one night in a standard room is close to the cost of our rent per month. I have friends who looked at some of the rooms there, and they said that, while the beds looked comfortable, the rooms were quite small and not particularly remarkable in any way.

The view and unusual plushness of the hotel sometimes cause bored University employees to go there for a tea or hot chocolate. In exchange for a heated room in which to have drinks, a nice view, and clean bathrooms with soft toilet paper, soap, and working hand dryers, we pay almost four times for a hot beverage what we would pay at a typical café. Alcoholic beverages are even more expensive, with the average cost of a cocktail being the equivalent of almost US $22. One can also splurge on a nice French meal at the restaurant there if one wishes.

There is no other place in Ifrane remotely like the Michlifen Hotel. When you walk into this hotel, you are no longer in Morocco. I suppose that is part of its appeal. But the greatest mystery about the Michlifen is…how many people is it really appealing to? The spa seems to be representative of the hotel at large. I have gone there twice (once for a pedicure with my friend LW, and then last week for my special birthday treatment), and both times I had the sense that I had the place – and its many employees – all to myself. I am not the only one puzzled by the existence of this excessively plush hotel in a small Moroccan town.

At the same time, though, the Michlifen Hotel represents a puzzling Moroccan business model that strikes me (in my admitted ignorance of business) as being entirely based on optimism. While this hotel sat virtually empty, on the other end of town, someone built an enormous Best Western complex. The University is housing students there (because of a lack of ability to plan, which I will not get into here), but otherwise, I imagine that the hundreds of rooms and chalets sit empty, as do the dozens of spaces built for hanuts, or small shops (something I can't imagine any Moroccan town needing more of).

The Michlifen Hotel also highlights the difficult-to-characterize nature of being an expat in Morocco. T and I are living quite comfortably on a salary that would probably qualify us for welfare in the United States (if anyone is getting welfare there these days). We can't go on European vacations or drink 40 dirham tea or go to the spa on a regular basis, but if we want to do these things once in a while as a treat, we can. We can hire a maid. We can stay in nice riads when we travel in Morocco.

Am I entirely comfortable with that? Absolutely not. The fact that I can spoil myself once in a while just serves as a reminder that most Moroccans are living on far, far less than I am. And living in a developing country means there are some things nobody has access to, regardless of how much money they have. Adequate medical care (especially access to alternative and complementary medicine) is one example (although to be fair, I should add the disclaimer that not everyone here would agree with me that the medical care is inadequate).

Did I enjoy my two hours at the Michlifen Hotel spa? Indeed, ultimately, I did. I knew it would be a once in a lifetime experience, like many of my experiences here in Morocco, and I tried to make the most of it.