Postcards from Morocco

I'm not a blogger.

I'm not a writer.

I don't know what qualifies one to classify themselves as a blogger.

As this short excerpt about my travels types itself, in effect by definition I guess I am becoming a blogger, just not a proper one. This isn't a good or a bad thing, it's just surprising to me that it's something I today found myself doing.

Maybe it's the down-time I am currently enjoying, or the whimsy of actually expressing myself in a form that isn't a social media snapshot or video. Reason being that I've almost exclusively creatively defined myself by those methods since moving to London (semi-drunken interpretive Friday night dancing aside). 

A word of warning to all you grammar Nazis, there will probably be all manner of incorrect grammar and controversially scattered semi-colons, if you're ok with that as well then hopefully the rest my musings on a most wonderful trip I had recently won't grate too much. 

There is a certain romanticism in the written word I have always admired. As a kid, even as the digital age shifted towards shorter interactions, I was still into writing to my grandmother in France. There was something about physically sitting down and writing a letter that made it that much more heartfelt and genuine right?

I still feel that way, and chances are you do too, secretly. If you would today receive a written letter in a day and age when time is the most expensive commodity we have, then chances are you will be all the more open and receptive to whatever the letter contains. Not quite sure where I'm going with this particular tangent other than the fact that there is something quite exciting to me about penning some thoughts on a little trip to Africa. Hopefully to you too, genuinely I hope that sitting down with a cup of tea and reading my experiences of going away will be as enjoyable for you reading, as they are for me, writing.

If not I'll write you a copy and post it to you, that might change your mind.

Morocco

"How about Morocco?"

It was different, for sure. Not even in the first 50 places I would have thought to visit, but fuck it, Scott had a week's holiday to use before April and we said we'd try something different to the usual 'lads on tour' week abroad. Marrakech it was.

Scott was all over it, the magic of the Easyjet package deal had thrown up the enchanting prospect of 4 nights in a 5-star plus flights for £300 pounds each. Even now that still looks wrong, it was such an amazing deal that it has changed my perception on the regularity with which to take holidays. More on that later.

A couple weeks later we were in the skies for the enjoyably short 3-hour flight to Marrakech, landing at 7pm local time on a warm evening breeze. The airport reception was a brief 15 second walk across the runway, as it tends to be in a lot of foreign airports.

Inside we found a comical scene of fellow passengers from our flight frantically scrambling around the lobby attempting to fill out immigration forms before they could pass through security. My amusement with this though came from the more seemingly trivial matter of the acquisition of a pen with which to fill in the forms with. There were no pens in the lobby, and hence suddenly the humble Bic that layers the drawers of my desk at home was suddenly worth more than a gram of coke in this lobby. You see not many people travel with pens nowadays, and the airport staff were charmingly useless at providing anything in the way of writing implements, so it soon became a case of begging fellow passengers if you could borrow their pen when they'd finished; it was like being back at school.

As we came through customs we were offered free Moroccan sim-cards with 10 free minutes by a local mobile company. Morocco is in zone 5 and for anyone who has travelled this far away, you will know leaving your data on this far from home can be a faster way to bankruptcy then a severe drug habit. We gladly swapped to Moroccan numbers, there was something nice about not being reachable for a week anyway, we were on holiday after all.

Outside we were greeted by the usual row of enthusiastic Taxi drivers looking to take gullible tourists 'for a ride' (in every sense of the expression). Luckily the gift of being able to speak French gave me the ability to negotiate a fare that we felt was fair for our short trip to the hotel.

Our driver was welcoming and chatty, and gave us the 10-minute crash guide to Marrakech as he steered us to our base for the week. As we navigated the crowded intersections down the main roads we came to realise one of the first things that stuck with us from our trip. There were seemingly no rules for driving on the streets of Marrakech.

Scooters piled high with pots and pans darted between cars recklessly changing lanes and generally disregarding driving etiquette. It was funny and terrifying to be a piece in this giant game of GTA. Our driver laughed and told us he had only 'had one accident in 15 years' - Fortunately this was still the case as he pulled into the nice part of town which was home to our hotel.

The lobby was magnificent, having stayed at the Encore Hotel in Vegas a couple years back, it had a very similar vibe. Marble was everywhere with red and gold the accent colours to just add that extra touch of opulence. The lobby had a 24-hour bar and very helpful staff. Soon we were in our room and then out again as we sought to explore the resort. We had safely made it to Africa.

We ate at a variety of establishments around the immediate area of our hotel, all very nice places, all very different. We usually left at 7pm for a night out, but whilst arriving early looked like a rookie mistake to the casual observer, it was actually a good ploy to get a good seat for the shows which most restaurants offered as the evenings drew on. The performances whilst varied usually involved the rhythmic, almost hypnotic waists of the local dancers. There was also usually a man banging a drum whilst another man was doing some gravity defying mid-air splits. It was often strange, but always entertaining.

We also found out that Marrakech is no stranger to imports. We watched a London 5-piece of Moulin-Rouge style girls (aptly named the 'oo-la-la girls) deliver a thoroughly choreographed set of dances throughout our final evening. It was probably the best night of the time we had there, the girls were great and we even suited magicians blowing the minds of fellow house-guests between performances. The Lotus Lounge comes highly recommended.

A couple places we ate

We decided early on trying the local delicacies as long as it wasn't street food. Although I'd had my jabs I was still adamant I'd be extra cautious with any food consumed whilst we were there. We were there for 3 days and I didn't want to spend one of those on the toilet. 

We tried every flavour of Tagine available, this turned out to be African dishes served in peculiar tent-shaped earthenware pots. It was a lot better than expected, especially the chicken. One thing I wasn't so keen on though was that the Moroccans seemed borderline obsessed with putting sugar on EVERYTHING.

The most bizarre thing that I sampled was a pigeon pastry on our second night. It's not something I'd usually try but what the hell, whilst in Rome right? Bearing in mind this was my starter, the pastry looked like some kind of pigeon-stuffed fried doughnut with a generous latticed layer of icing sugar and cinnamon.

Just to recap there in case you didn't quite get that - pigeon-iced cinnamon doughnut.

Using every trick in the book ('Hey Scott do you wanna try a (large) piece of this?') I chipped away until what was left was an acceptably small amount of food left for the owner not to think I was a dick, a noble thing to aim for when visiting foreign restaurants. This was to be my last foray into the exotic Moroccan cuisine whilst we were there. From then-on out, it was the 'World' section of the menus from which my food would come from.

The limited mobility of my travel partner Scott (who was on crutches) meant we largely lazed around the pool for most of our time there, necking endless bottles of the heavenly local beer 'Casablanca' and casually chain-smoking away the time. This wasn't a bad thing, sometimes it's nice to just do nothing but cut off and lie in the sun, however we knew we would be kicking ourselves if we didn't at least once go out exploring before we left so on the last day we made the decision to head into the heart of Marrakech to check out the markets.

The Good Life?

Donning our cameras and google maps screenshots we headed out in the late afternoon sun. There was a huge wall which seemed to separate the richer and poorer parts of town, never had the rich/poor divide in a city been more apparent to me. To the east in the distance we could see the snow-capped Atlas mountains as we walked along the wall looking for a way into central Marrakech.

As we got closer to the centre of Marrakech the intensity level seriously rose on every level. Suddenly people would be coming up to you looking for a few Dirham coins, whether they had a legitimate begging strategy or not. Some where brazen enough to just ask for your coins, whilst others had more inventive ways to make tourists part with their precious spending money. 

My personal favourite was when I went down to a courtyard to take a shot of some nice repeating stone piles, I returned to find Scott bonding with an ancient-looking one-legged man over their mutual ownership/appreciation of crutches. He seemed to be blessing Scott and trying to rub his leg, whether this was an act of God or an attempt to get Scott's Moroccan digits was unclear; what was clear however, was he then asked to be paid. We played dumb, but he gave as good as he got and soon we left a few Dirham lighter, and a little wiser.

We were almost at the central square and had begun to make our way through the smaller backstreets, ripe with fascinating characters selling all manner of rotten fruit and replica football shirts. For someone who usually visited the more 'cultural' parts of Europe it was such a different travel experience but equally fascinating, and more than anything this was real. Real people hustling for a few coins to feed their families, and it really felt that way with most of them - whether they would get to eat that night, or not depended on how well they could 'loot' the tourists. The stakes felt high.

We then reached the famous square, and what little organisation the country had going for it went straight out of the window. The square was in fact just a massive open area where people just brought whatever method they had for making money for the day, and went for it. It was genuinely one of the most surreal parts of the holiday as there was so much going on at once that it was impossible to take it all in.

Scooters zipped around, people were dancing, people were selling, there were snake-charmers sat on the floor like a scene out of the Arabian nights. Amongst all this, fellow awe-struck tourists were trying to pick their way through the structureless rows of stalls and cacophony of merchants. It felt like Leicester Square on speed. 

As we meandered through the sea of people trying not to get ran into, a man emerged from behind a stall and came at us holding up a snake. As a side note to this, whilst admittedly not the biggest fan of the snake this pales into comparison with Scott's downright phobia of the slippery devils. We smoothly managed this situation by spinning on our heels and literally running away from him whilst just shouting 'NO NO NO NO' - Whilst this might seem the move of a couple of bitches, I challenge you to not react the same way when a guy is trying to force a snake onto you. There is something internationally recognisable about 2 grown-ass men running away shouting NO repeatedly. 

We safely made our way to the other side of the market, picking up some cute wooden camels and a selfie with a monkey in a diaper and then proceeded to dive further into the back-streets. 

The sun was setting as we made our way towards the promise of the tanneries where people were supposedly making goods for all to see. We got led down the backstreets by a lively man who's enthusiasm to show us his workplace could only be matched by his lack of teeth. This was the side of Marrakech we wanted to see, you read stories about people getting lost in the maze of roads and befriending locals, only to be invited in for tea and cake. This felt like it could happen at any point, we were going with it.

Sunset in the backstreets

Our guide handed us off to a local man who worked in one of the bigger tanneries in the backstreets of Marrakech, he was equally lacking in teeth but also had one of the biggest smiles we had seen since we arrived. He gave us some herbs to put under our noses as he showed us around.

'Gas mask' he joked as he showed us around the pits where dead animals were fermenting in pigeon dung. - This was a process for making a sort of ammoniac, he told us. As we got a tour of all the stages of the leather making process he explained that the next day he would return up to the Atlas mountains as it was a rest day, we had timed it perfectly as luck would have it.

Our whistle-stop tour ended in a local shop across from the tannery we had just visited. An eager merchant was keen to show us the final stages of the leather-making process as he fanned out a variety of embossed leather foot-rests in the middle of the small room for use to peruse. Whilst it all felt very oriental and ancient, this illusion was broken when I proceeded to purchase a footrest with my mastercard from a wireless terminal. Didn't have those in Aladin.

As we left we were shown to what is the loosest description of a taxi I had ever seen. We had literally 200 Dirham left (Approx £15) and needed to get home, our driver agreed as long as he could drop off his backseat customer first. We squeezed in and proceeded to drive through the narrowest streets Marrakech had to offer. People were constantly shooting out in front of the car and walking across as we made our way back towards civilization. Once again the sheer chaos and lack of organization on the streets amazed us as much as the lack of accidents we had on our way home.

The next day we were driven back to the airport for our 1pm flight, it was over as quick as it had began. As we touched down in London I gloomily looked over to Scott as we both depressingly gazed out the window. It was 5 degrees and overcast in London. Not 3 hours earlier we had been in the warm 25 degree climate Africa. We had a rather long conversation about the lack of sun in London and already started planning our next foray abroad.

It had been so much fun, definitely something I will be doing again and would recommend to anyone looking for a different holiday.It also helps if you have the irresistible  travel combo of a man on crutches and a French-Speaker but I'm sure it would have been fine without as well as the local people are so welcoming.