It’s been a few months since I updated, but I’m going to try to catch up on a bit of the backlog over the course of this month. We’ll see how it goes.
My last post was about our excellent layover in Lisbon, but that was sort of a bonus on the way to our real destination for late April: Morocco. First up, a flight to Marrakech.
Actually, this was not part of our original plan. We were planning to fly from Lisbon to Casablanca, and catch a train from there to Marrakech. However, we had a bit of an… interesting time catching our original flight. Basically, we were running a bit behind as we arrived at the airport and the automated check-in kiosk told us we needed to talk to a gate agent. We then proceeded to wait in line, talk to the person at the front, and have them tell us that we were in the wrong line and needed to go somewhere else. Three times in a row. Given our lack of lead time, this was enough to guarantee that we missed our flight to Casablanca. Fortunately, we were able to book a flight on a different airline to Marrakech directly, which was more convenient for us, anyway, so not all downside?
(We were also told by the customer service person for our original airline that, since we had missed our original flight to Casablanca, the airline would cancel our return ticket to Boston on the other end of our trip. This was… pretty upsetting, but we just decided we’d deal with the issue later on and focus on getting to Marrakech.)
The new flight was uneventful, and we arrived in Marrakech pretty late in the evening (around 10pm). I was grateful that my phone service provider offers extremely easy international roaming (free 3G data and text in most countries, and cheap per-minute voice calls). This allowed us to call the riad that we were staying at, and they arranged for a cab to come pick us up from the airport.
I alluded to “unlikely nostalgia” in the title of this post, and the ride from the airport is where I really started to feel it. It’s been over 25 years since I was in Indonesia, but Marrakech felt familiar to me. It didn’t feel exactly like my memories of Indonesia, but there were definitely things that triggered my sense of “oh, yes, this is how things are supposed to be” in ways that I hadn’t felt in decades. The driving style, the abundance of motorcycles, and once we got into the old city of Marrakech, the narrow roads that weren’t built for traffic.
It was a pleasant sensation, and was the first of many things that led to my enjoyment of the city.
The medina of Marrakech, the old city, is about a thousand years old, and while plenty of concessions to modernity have been made over the years, it’s maintained a level of density that doesn’t really support cars very well. One consequence of the density is a lack of traditional hotels within the old city. Instead, most people who want to stay in the medina find a riad: a small traditional guest house. Our was amazing.
They also served breakfast to us every morning, and it was delicious.
I highly recommend that, if you ever decide to visit Marrakech yourself, that you find a riad to stay in. It was truly lovely.
While there were things about the old city that felt nostalgic, there was so much that was new. A bunch of the museums are in old buildings where the architecture is just as (if not more) interesting as the contents of the museum itself. My favorite of them was the Museum of Marrakech, built inside a historic palace in the center of the city, and full of incredible architectural details. A bunch of them weren’t really part of any exhibits, just how the building had been built and restored.
While we hit up a lot of museums, and went to a few classic tourist locations in the city, the only really “touristy” thing we did in Marrakech was a sunrise hot air balloon ride.
Basically, you get up at 4am, walk from your riad to the nearest place a car can easily get to (in our case, a 5~10 minute walk to a small parking lot), and ride an hour out into the desert to the launch site. Then you pile into the balloon, and if the timing is right, you find yourself at about 8,000 feet just as the sun rises over the mountains to the east.
I don’t care how tourist-y it was, it was awesome.
There are dozens of balloons all carrying tourists, so this flock of balloons all drifts back toward the city. As you began to descend you look down and see the van you came in chasing after your balloon so pick you up from wherever you land. Then you get breakfast, and finally driven back to where you started. At which point it’s, like, 10am.
One thing that I’ve sort of intentionally breezed past so far is food. Which is sort of a disservice because the food was incredible. Not every meal blew me away, but quite a few of them did. We kept just wandering into random restaurants around the medina, and most of the time got something quite tasty.
Interestingly enough, I think our best meals in Marrakech were at the riad itself. While we got breakfast every morning as part of our stay, they also offered the option to order lunch or dinner off a menu and telling them what time you wanted to eat. We did this a couple of times, and it was great every time.
Finally, the most important thing about our time at the riad: the resident kitty Khaima. She was so cute and sweet and excited to see you.
After a lovely week of wandering around the markets, plazas, and museums of the medina, we walked out of the old city to the train station and hopped on a train bound for Casablanca.
Which, hopefully, you’ll hear about soon.
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