Blanca & Ian's Travels

Morocco

Trip Report - 2013
 

Morocco . . . Rough around the edges

Marrakech, Skoura, the Draa Valley, Chegaga, Taroudant & Essaouira

April 26 - May 12

Marrakech

We began our escapade with an Air Canada flight from Toronto (YYZ) to Paris (CDG) & then a long wait of 5 hours pacing the various sections of Terminal 2 before we could check in for our EasyJet flight to Marrakech (RAK).  All went smoothly.  If you have ever flown EasyJet, you know that they have a baggage limit of 20kg per bag.  My wife’s bag clocked in at 19.8kg.  The over charge would have been €14 per kg so we were relieved.  We had premium bulkhead seats that allowed advanced boarding but that disappeared with a bus to gate system which turned it into animal boarding . . . oh well . . .

We arrived at RAK airport at the same time as flights from Manchester & Birmingham so the terminal was abuzz but we cleared customs easily & retrieved our baggage.  It was 28C outside which was a welcome change from home where I had seen snow flurries on the day before we left.  Spring had skipped Toronto this year.  RAK is just one small newish terminal which made it very easy to navigate & we met the sign-carrying driver that our hotel had arranged for us.

We had arrived.

Our first impression of Marrakech was very favorable as we exited the airport & headed into the city passing the posh Mamounia Hotel on the way.  Everything looked clean & orderly with wide boulevards until we turned south from the circle just at the edge of the medina - medina means old city - into the real chaos of the streets of Marrakech.  I was very happy that I wasn’t driving.  That first assault to your senses is always the most vivid.  Cars, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, scooters, bicycles, pedestrians – all weaving & dancing like a choreographer’s nightmare.  Now THIS was the real Marrakech.

Our riad was in a no-drive zone on the edge of the old Jewish quarter just south of the Bahia Palace.  The hotel had staff collect us & our things for the short walk to our hotel.  It was up a small stretch of a one way vendor-lined road that buzzed with constant traffic & we turned into a short series of three narrowing alleyways that would be a great film set for a horror movie.  But then we stepped into the peaceful tranquility of our home for the next three nights – the Riad Dar One.

The riad owner, Jean Peres, an expat Frenchman from the south of France, greeted us warmly & had us sitting down & drinking our first mint tea in a flash.  A true gentleman, he explained the riad & the breakfast details & showed us to our suite.  His riad is your typical small tastefully decorated open courtyard house with a small rose-littered pool with a gentle tinkling cascade of water in the atrium.  So serene you wanted to whisper.  The rooms are on the 2nd floor with our suite, the Sirocco, sharing the 3rd floor with a comfy terrace for the guests.  We had a private terrace on top accessed via a circular metal staircase that had a panoramic view of . . . well . . . rooftops & satellite dishes with the odd stork’s nest thrown in for balance.  Oh & not to forget the several minarets . . . but this terrace perch is one of the higher points in all of Marrakech.

We had a coffee on the terrace & talked briefly to some other guests – a friendly pair of NY girls relocated in London who we saw every day & an unfriendly quartet from Canada.  Shame on them!

With some suggestions from Jean, we headed out to find an ATM & to have our first Moroccan dinner.  Thankfully, both were very close to the riad.  The ATM required some busy street crossing & a first whiff of some of the more unpleasant smells of Marrakech in the small & very decrepit Jardin Sidi Hmed El Kamel square but we got a mittful of dirhams (2000 is the maximum at the ATMs now) & made our way to the restaurant that Jean had made a reservation with.  It turned out to be Le Tanjia, which is a tourist restaurant in a riad decorated with dark woods & Moorish plaster dimly lit with big brass Moroccan lights.  They sat us on the second floor.  The menu – which was to become all too familiar – was brochettes & tagines.  We enjoyed fairly nondescript lamb brochettes but with our jetlag we probably would have been happy eating cardboard by this point & a half bottle of wine helped immensely.  Just as we were finishing, the house DJ (really?) cued up some tunes & three belly dancers made the rounds of the various tables.  Hmmm.

Then it was back to the riad for a nightcap of duty-free booze & bed.  Thud.
 

Day 2

I vaguely remember hearing a distant call to prayer in the dark.  Undoubtedly the pre 5am call.  Always exotic & haunting in a very good way.  Well . . . as long as it is far enough away.  We had a really horrid scratchy recorded call in Istanbul that emulated from a mosque next door.  The Blue Mosque would start it beautifully & then this horrid thing would kick in & drown it out.  And in Cirali, Turkey, it musically echoed off the backdrop mountains . . . but it also woke the roosters & the dogs up.

Anyway, I finally gave in & got up at 6:30 leaving my spouse sleeping.  It was warm outside & it was really, really quiet for a city.  I could only hear street noise when I climbed up to the aerie. A very light drizzle started & immediately stopped but it drove me inside so I wandered downstairs to rev up the iPad’s WiFi, managing to almost seriously stumble on the stairs in the dark.  I still have the bruises.  The whole riad was dead quiet with the night man asleep on the couch in the back room until the house started buzzing around 7:30.

We had breakfast & hit the streets around 11am armed for action.  We have dual cameras:  her’s a Canon dslr, mine a Sony RX100 – an amazing little camera btw.  We both had money – Euros & dirhams.  And we pointedly both had our riad’s address & phone number in our wallets.  A little incident in the Sistine in Rome had proven the wisdom of this.

We headed up the beeline route:  Rue Riad Zitoune el Kmid to Jemaa el Fna square, gawking at the sights, sounds & smells all around us AND dodging motor scooters, handcarts, bicycles in the narrow cobbled streets.  This is not a pretty & quaint city.  This is raw, vibrating place that assaults you & excites you in equal measures.  After a cursory walk around the Jemma vendors & requisite snake & monkey dudes in the open square, we hit the souks - a souk is an open air marketplace often partially covered overhead.  At this point, we were sight-seeing & price-checking but that didn’t last long.  After a few minor purchases, we got sucked into a carpet store, complete with the mint tea ritual & yes, we bought a few small throw carpets.  Not crazy money since we also knew our prices in NA as well as at source from our previous Turkish carpet experience.  The Turkish Soumak carpets we picked up in Göreme, Turkey for our newly renovated bathroom really MAKE the room imho.  My wife also conveniently had brought our sizes & her own tape measure, so we were prepared.  After the usual what’s your price/what’s your offer exchange, we bartered him down to his exasperation level, which is always a good thing when you are negotiating.  When he is ready to write you off, make him a do or die offer & you will usually get what you want for a decent price.  It worked.  I was happy that it was done & out of the way for the rest of the trip!  We bought some washable veggie carpets that are made in Western Sahara (aloe vera supposedly) since they are for the kitchen.

At his suggestion, we went for lunch in the Riad Timtam which was nearby.  Another average brochettes & tagine set menu restaurant (250dh) but we ordered a la carte for less.  The sunny courtyard where we were seated was stunning & almost worth the price of the meal on its own.  The tile, plasterwork, greenery & roses were all pretty dazzling & a nice respite from the mania of the street.  Ditto the other carpet store that you walk through to get to the courtyard.  Service was lackadaisical but we were starting to find that this seemed to be the norm in most places, so we went with it.  As antsy North Americans, we always have to remember to slow down, take a deep breath & enjoy the slower pace.
 

After lunch, we did some more souking as we started back in the direction of our riad.  Now - of course - streets signs in the Medina are awfully shy & the hotel-supplied maps are not the most accurate things.  So, after some wrong turns & some map confusion we asked someone for directions & made our way back.  Hint:  it is very helpful to get a fix on a major site/building that is near your hotel so you can ask directions to IT rather than your hotel which nobody you meet will have ever heard of.  In our case, it was the Bahia Palace.   You have been warned.

At this point in the narrative, I should tell you about our ongoing iPhone issue.  My wife needs to keep in touch with home.  With a new iPhone 5, she had planned ahead.  She phoned our provider before leaving home & bought a $100 package that included X number of minutes & X number of text messages.  She had downloaded directions for international calls.  That way she could call her elderly parents & text her son.  It all sounds good until you get there & the phone only returns a message nattering in a foreign language.  The night before, we had asked the unfriendly Canadians for advice.  Their suggestions returned the same result.  Before we hit the street that morning, my wife had asked the riad staff.  One of them went out & bought a cheap phone card so we could use his phone to phone our provider.  Of course, the card expired while she was on hold.  Frustration was growing in leaps & bounds throughout the day so we made this a priority.  We hit the street again & found a payphone & bought another phone card with more minutes.  This time we got through & we were informed that Bell Mobility won’t allow international roaming calls from a new iPhone account holder for 6 months.  REALLY?  AND YOU COULDN”T HAVE TOLD US THIS WHEN WE BOUGHT THE PHONE PACKAGE BEFORE WE LEFT HOME?  Yes, there was yelling involved.  “I’m sorry ma’am but if you keep using language like that I will have to disconnect”.  After a while, they finally relented & opened the phone with a $300 limit & it worked.  Ah . . . the joys of modern technology . . .

With this task completed, we set out on another mission.  To buy wine.  On the forums etc, I had discovered that at least one of the riads that I had booked was dry.  Oh the horror!  It was OK to bring your own but they didn’t sell liquor in the restaurant.  And I had read that liquor stores beyond the High Atlas Mtns were few & far between. This is very true by the way but most riads did have a very basic selection.  Using my rudimentary French (a MAJOR asset for our future adventures btw) I negotiated a fare with a taxi driver for a round trip & we sped out of the medina & into the newer parts of the city to the north.  It is a whole ‘nother world out there.  Wide streets & boulevards with a seemingly calmer version of the traffic mania.  He took us to a well-stocked Carrefour somewhere near the Jardins Majorelle & I bought 6 bottles of cheaper Moroccan red wine to help us survive the trek south.  This proved to be a very wise thing.
 

We had had a busy day so we chilled on the riad’s terrace with a cocktail, resting up for one of Marrakech’s main events:  the evening food stalls in Jemaa el Fna.  The snake charmers & the monkey guys etc all pack up & numerous food stalls are set up in the square.  Some of them will seat 50+ people.  Lots of fried foods & there are even a bank of stalls devoted to snails.

It was Friday night & the streets of the medina burst into activity as shopkeepers shuttered their stores & everybody – young & old, tourists & locals – all made the pilgrimage for this spectacle.  And it was.  The narrow alleys had scooter jams as they weaved through the crowds making their way to the square which was jammed with people by dark.  Smoke & steam hovered over the stall cooking grills churning out goodies for the crowd & the smells were tremendous.  Musical performers did their magic to the delight of circles of spectators – all clapping & dancing with the rhythms - but no pictures please!  Even a few Henna ladies still sat on their stools in the dark.  On one side, a free art exposition displayed the considerable talents of Moroccan artists.  The Jemaa was hummimg & it was a major party for all.

After a walk around to peruse the various offerings, we settled on Stall # 1, Chez Aicha, which is run by a local woman according to what Jean, our friendly riad owner had told us.  We grabbed some seats with a young Portuguese couple on one side & some Brits on the other.  The Portuguese guy worked for the French TGV in Rabat & came down for the weekend to show his girlfriend that life in Marrakech was very, very different from the ‘sterile’ cities in the north.  We ate some brochettes & a salad & had a blast.  Do not miss this if you get to Marrakech!
 

Bellies filled, exhilarated & exhausted, we made our way back through the spooky alleys to our riad & collapsed.
 

Alley with motorbike

Day 3

This was site visit day.  Marrakech isn’t just a big shopping bazaar although it fills this role admirably.  After breakfast we aimed once again toward the souks for the trek to the Ben Youssef Madrasa.  Another warm day in the high 20Cs albeit overcast.  Our legs were a bit sore from our trekking the day before so we took our time browsing the stores on the way & chatting with the friendly vendors.  They typically asked where we were from or tried to guess.  No one ever guessed Canada but as soon as we told them, they immediately said:  “Montreal?” “No, English Canada – Canada Anglais”.  That would stump them because they thought we all speak French & live in Quebec.   I guess my mediocre French fooled them.  My grasp of the language is actually coming back slowly & the trip helped.  I dredged up words that I haven’t used since high school French.  I am exposed to both French Canadians & French associates through work which helps even though they always use English for me.  I do have pronunciation down pretty well so I can fool a Parisian if I keep it really, really, really simple.  I do a great ça va.  And btw French is the immediate language that everybody defaults to if you are not Arabic.  So freshening up on it before traveling to Southern Morocco is not a bad thing.  My wife was often at a loss to communicate in the hinterlands where English petered out to a large degree.

It was easy to find the Madrasa/Medrasa/Médersa after a mid-trip direction check with a vendor.  It shares a square with the museum & the mosque.  As noted by many, paid admission also gets you into the Marrakech Museum.  Both buildings are great examples of Moorish/Arabic craftsmanship with intricate wood carvings & delicately plastered entrance ways.  Oh & not to forget the tile work.  As we both love this architecture we wandered around both venues snapping pictures.  The museum displays were pretty much useless but the building was worth a look.  We encountered our first tour groups here but I won’t rant on about them as I have in previous trip reports.
 

After these great photo opps, we saw a tannery sign & thought it might be worth a look.  So we promptly headed north – in the wrong direction.  It wasn’t on the hotel supplied map . . . It didn’t take long & we were the only tourists on the busy streets.  Eventually, I admitted confusion & I asked a 20s something man for directions.  He said:  “I will take you there & I want you to know that when we get there I don’t want anything but a shukran.”   Well, that was a surprise!

And he was true to his word.  But we didn’t know that as we set out through the crowds.  His English was quite good.  I am at a loss to recall his story but I believe he was a native of Marrakech.  He led us through streets & alleys (big ones thankfully) & he & I chattered the whole way – about 15 minutes.  The surroundings were getting bleaker & smellier & more rugged with fewer people & our radar was on alert.  I am sure that most travelers have had these experiences.  You get in a situation & you have to trust someone you have never met - not necessarily blindly, but you are there & your options are limited. 

Anyway . . . he delivered us right to the waiting arms of a tannery guide.  We were immediately given a handful of mint – they jokingly called it Berber perfume – to help ward off the smell.  We snapped a few pictures of two tank areas as he was telling us that it was Berber day & they were tanning camel hides today.  This is not a fun place.  As the smell really hit us, my wife called a halt & informed us that she had to leave.  Right now.  I gave the guy 20–30 dhs & we left.  Back into the not too pretty street in the not too pretty section of Marrakech.  Looking at a good map later, I would say that we were on Bab Debbagh St near the gate.
 

The tannery

It didn’t take long before another ‘guide’ had latched on to us with the promise of salvation & a way to Jemaa el Fna square.  He kept with us for 5 minutes or so & insisted that we take a picture of his kids along the way.  When I offered him 20-30dhs, he asked for more & when I said “Non, merci” he got insulted & dropped us like a hot potato, but the streets were busier & we were feeling more comfortable by then.  But we were still quasi-lost.  We trudged through some streets & a Berber market & I spied a Jemaa sign with an arrow which led to more streets & alleys & we eventually found our way back to the Bahia Palace & our riad’s area.  We had a late lunch at the corner restaurant La Table de Marrakech eating brochettes in their second floor open room watching the very active street below.  It was cheap & OK & the street parade below was entertaining.
 

Refreshed, we set on sights on the nearby Saadian Tombs.  Easy to find, just around the corner from a spice vendor-lined street.  It is also on the tour group’s maps & the major tomb had a 10 minute lineup to snap pictures.  And 15-20 minutes was all the site needed but we had some kittens to take pictures of while we queued.  Speaking of cats, a vendor outside the entrance had dyed a cat pink & he tried to collect money if you tried to snap a picture. Sorry, but my picture of it was free & I don’t approve of the dye job.  Street cats in general looked pretty rough in Marrakech & numerous kittens had eye infections.  I felt very proud of myself as we sauntered back to the Bahia: two French ladies asked me – in French – for directions to the Tombs & I was able to answer convincingly in their native tongue.  Of course, the Bahia Palace had just closed prior to our arrival, so we called it quits & went back to our riad for a pre-dinner rest & cocktail.  Our bodies were rebelling & we were showing our 60ish age . . .
 

Marrakech streets
 

Saadian Tombs
 

Saadian pink cat
 

I had booked the schizophrenic Italian/Moroccan Pepe Nero for a taste of something different.  It is housed in an out of the way – but well signed – area between the Bahia & Jemaa & we found it without a problem.  Housed in a riad, it has a very elaborate & photogenic pool in the atrium, resplendent with nice foliage.  The restaurant itself has wonderful tile with a fountain in the middle of the dining room.  As we dined on beef filet & sucked in a bottle of wine, we watched a waiter step into the inoperative fountain’s pool as he rushed by.  He didn’t drop his dish & he recovered with aplomb albeit with a wet shoe.  Well done!  The meal was very good & a nice break from Moroccan fare.  The clientele was mostly tourists, but a large table was Moroccan, who obviously knew the chef.

We strolled back to our room for a nightcap & to toast our time in Marrakech.  Another day could easily have been used here but we were ready to leave the hubbub all the same.  The constant parade of scooters in the alleys in the popular areas was wearing awfully thin.
 

A Note about the pictures . . . For High Res Versions of the photos on this page go to:

Marrakech

And keep clicking the magnifying glass in the lower right corner