“This is Marrakech”

Pictures will be added once people upload them to Facebook so I can copy them here :p

Onward to Marrakech, Morocco!  A bunch of people in my study abroad program have been going on this massive (five week long) trip during the break between terms.  Various people have been joining and leaving the trip depending on their individual travel plans.  I believe the eight people traveling intersecting in Marseille for a day will be the largest the trip gets.  I joined up with the Oxford travel group in Marrakesh, Morocco.  There were seven of us there.

Marrakech is a wild city.  I am really glad I went on this trip at this age, because Marrakech is definitely a young person’s city.  One can only really visit between the ages of twenty and thirty.  Palermo was a pretty crazy city, but that was due to the pervasive feeling of incompetence and decay.  Marrakech is a really crazy city because it is so exotic. 

The hostel we were staying at was extremely close to Jemaa El Fna square, which is the heart of Marrakech.  The directions to the hostel give some idea of how bustling and confusing this square is:

“From the no. 19 bus stop at the bottom of Jemaa El Fna walk down the street past the horses and carriages. After a minutes walk you will see the square's juice sellers. Keep the juice sellers on your left as you walk up and on the right you will see a large cafe called Cafe De France. Take the right hand turning immediately after Cafe De France with the newspaper stand on the corner.

Once on the street next to Cafe De France continue straight ahead for 100m and then take the first left hand turning with a perfume shop on the corner.

We are located down the first small left hand turning (derb laadam) off this street at number 13.

If you have any problems finding us feel free to call us or we are more than happy to meet you outside of Cafe De France to show you the way.”

The hostel was in a tiny back alleyway, and really difficult to find.  Jemaa El Fna is filled with pushcart vendors, random tiny stalls, insane motorcyclists, carriages, donkeys, monkeys, snake charmers, etc (You don’t know what panicked running through traffic is like until you are trying to dodge motorcycles while being chased by a guy holding a snake).  At night, the square is filled with the fires of about a hundred tiny food vendors (best one is number 22.  Don’t go to 118).

Near the square is a mess of souks.  In Marrakech, one haggles for everything.  At first, I was somewhat hesitant about arguing with every single merchant, but by the end all of the members of OxfordQuest2012 were haggling over almost every product – even a 4 Dirham (about 50 cent) glass of orange juice.  In the square, since there are so many food stalls one can try to find the best deal possible by constantly threatening to move to the neighboring stall unless you are served free tea/bread/whatever.  Stuff in Marrakech is extremely cheap, although a lot of it is clearly counterfeit.  Arguing over 30 Dirham makes sense when 5 Dirham is enough for a meal if you can swing it (which one girl did, super impressive), but seems ridiculous when you exchange your 30 Dirham for 3 Euros.

The hostel was fantastic.  It was not particularly clean, or quiet, or spacious, but the staff was absolutely fantastic.  They hang out with all of the people staying at the hostel, and are incredibly chill guys.  Rajeev, the staff member who waved us off, is a Moroccan dude with dreadlocks.  He gave me this ridiculous goodbye and called me his “brother from another mother.”  Plus, they hand out free infinite mint tea, which meant some people drank double-digit cups of tea per day.

I guess I’ll run through some entertaining stories from Marrakech –

On the first day there, I joined four of the people I was with for a tour of the city by carriage.  I thought the tour would be a pretty lame super-touristy thing, but our guide was terrific and took us to his favorite spots.  We also got to see the “new city” which is a modern city with apartments and chain stores and stuff (and roads that are not jammed with pack animals).  He also took us to an apothecary’s shop.  The person running the store was wearing this argyle vest with no shirt underneath (really deep V neck) with a lab coat on top.  Midway through his spiel, his wife brings out some mint tea, which we start drinking.  Then…

Him: *starts sprinkling some unmarked white powder in our tea*

Us: Um… what?

Him: Drink drink!  It’s not cocaine hahahahaha (wtf?  Nobody drinks cocaine)

Us: Um… ok I guess…

It was some really intense sinus-clearing drug

Him: *Grinds a bunch of black powder* Ok, now inhale this!

Us: Uh… ok…

So we tried a variety of weird herbal remedy things.  I forget what most of them were supposed to do, but snorting random stuff is a pretty interesting experience.

Later that day, we were talking to this Bedouin guy somewhere in the maze of souks who volunteered to show us the tannery he worked for.  We followed him to some sketchy place far away from any tourists.

Tannerys are actually pretty intense.  They’re messes of animal corpses, animal skins, and weird unhealthy looking chemicals.  Someone locks us in, so we’re awkwardly following the owner as he explains how vats of pigeon shit are used to treat the skins (it’s a natural acid) while we’re uneasily looking for some way to exit this weird place.  At the end of the tour, the owner starts demanding that we pay him.  We don’t really have much choice since we were surrounded by pissed off looking Moroccan leatherworkers, and end up chucking 40 Dirham at him (he wanted a lot more but we talked him out of it) before leaving as quickly as possible.  In retrospect, following random locals was probably a pretty dumb idea, but at least it worked out fine.

For Day 2 in Marrakech, we took a day trip to Essaouira.  It was actually pretty lame, but some stories typify how surreal Morocco can get.  Essaouira is mainly a beach town, but it was way too cold to go swimming, so the group basically sat around on the beach.  A guy with a tray of cookies came by and started trying to sell them.  He listed off the flavors:  Chocolate, coconut, apricot, blah blah.  The last flavor was “happy cookie”.

We ask what flavor happy cookie is, and he explains that they’re called that because they make you happy and make you want to eat more cookies.  We figure out that this guy is selling pot-cookies on the beach.  In fact, there are a bunch of these guys, selling happy cookies (one guy was selling “space cookies”).  One of the cookie guys offered us cocaine, although “cocaine” seems to be just the generic term for a drug in Morocco.  For lunch, we ate at this random restaurant.  Nearby some crazy party started (apparently the restaurant was near the finish line of a race) which had music BLASTING base.  This was some insane, plate rattling base.  The hysterical part was that half the music was 90s soft rock, so we spent lunch listening to middle-school slow dance music with massive thumping 100 BPM base.  Utterly ridiculous.

On the way back, our bus broke down on the side of the road, leading to this hysterical conversation:

Us for the past 15 minutes or so: Oh my god, it sounds like the bus is falling apart.

*Bus lurches to a stop*

Bus driver: Ok, everyone leave.

Us: Um… what?

Driver: Go, get your bags.

Brian: Wait, what?  You didn’t take us to our destination! Can we have a refund?

Driver: Huh?

Brian: A refund? Our money back?

Driver: *incredulous look* This is Marrakech.

Emma: I sense a Facebook album title.

Third day, 5 of us took a day trip to this waterfall park.  The brochure in the hostel described this (in incredibly mangled English, so we may have misinterpreted it) as a four-hour walk with a donkey ride back.

First, there were no donkeys.  Second, there was no walk.  This was a serious climb, with ladders and grabbing handholds and helping pull people over rocks and stuff.  I’m scared of heights, and basically started freaking out halfway up this thing, since a decent amount of time was spent clambering along a very narrow path adjacent to the edge of a cliff.  I made it through the whole thing though (even though I went at about half a mile per hour on the way down), which is good I guess.  The other two went into the desert, which they said was a fantastic experience in its own right.

This post might make me sound like some globe-trotting badass exploring wild African cities.  No.  Wrong.

On the first night, our incredibly awesome hostel people arranged this big dinner for the people staying in nearby hostels.  There were maybe 100 people packed into the most spacious hostel in the area.  Most of them were British college kids, participating in “The Hitch”.

The hitch is an annual 2 week (I think) trip where British students travel to an international city to raise money for something or other.  This year, that city was Marrakech.  The catch is, they have to hitchhike all the way there.  If traveling through Europe with no clue what city you will end up in each night sounds nuts, that’s because it basically is.  They had crazy stories about sleeping in fields, or in friendly strangers’ homes or whatever.  Some got stuck for days in southern Spain, trying to find a way onto a boat bound for Africa.  One pair of girls said that their night in Fez was the most terrifying experience of their lives.  All participants in The Hitch travel with one to two partners, and at least one member of each group must be male.  However, their male companion got seriously ill somewhere in France, and had to go back.  They pressed on, and ended up in Fez at around midnight.  So these two girls are wandering around the maze of Fez, trying to find some hostel to sleep in.  They run into these two mysterious cloaked guys, who offer to direct them to a hostel.  During the walk, the girls are getting more and more lost, and farther and farther away from the main streets of Fez.  Fortunately, the cloaked people actually were directing them to some remote hostel, but the girls said that during the walk they were completely petrified.  One of them told me the trip was easily the craziest thing she’s done in her life.

Basically, Morocco was an absolute blast, and a really stark contrast to Venice.  As one girl commented, Marrakech was the only city she’s been to on OxfordQuest2012 where she did not feel safe.  But as opposed to a city like Venice, which seemed really tame and touristy, Marrakech was exotic and wild enough to be constantly entertaining and fun.  If you’re a college student and want to go somewhere different with a group of friends, Marrakech is a really amazing place.