by Tigerlili

Created on: December 28, 2009

The Marrakech Express

We planned a holiday to Marrakech - a new experience for Richard, a revisiting of the past for me. I had once, long ago,  hitchhiked through the north of Morocco with two girlfriends. I remembered it as colourful, exotic, dirty and poor and the cities were quite smelly in the summer heat, especially those with tanneries. But that was almost forty years ago. Things must have improved, I reckoned; tourism in Morocco was hot these days, especially in Marrakech. It had become quite a trendy destination.

We were exhausted when we arrived at Marrakech airport at 8.30 in the morning, Morocco stays on Greenwich Mean Time permanently, and the flight had taken 3 hours. Departing at 6 am from Luton Airport had been a nightmare. No point in getting an overnight hotel when we had to check in at 4.30 am. After depositing the car at the car park at midnight we'd spent a hellish five hours trying to snooze in a hard plastic chair surrounded by noisy travellers.

There was a long queue to get through Passport control at Marrakech Airport. Our passports were eventually stamped – can I ever go to the USA again I wondered?  Outside the building the city bus had just departed. Tired and dishevelled we were ripped off by a petit taxi driver who charged us 10 euros for a suicide drive into town. He passed every thing, hand on horn, even as lorries careered towards us. Richard told him to slow down in French but he was ignored. My guidebook said don't pay more than 6 euros. Everything looked dry and dusty and the only relief from the brown earth and the pink painted walls of the city was the occasional palm tree.

The car passed through a Bab, one of the arched gates leading in to the medina, the walled city. Now the car was in the midst of a mass of people, motorcycles, bicycles, carts and donkeys. About 300 yards further in we were deposited in the dusty street. It was  too narrow for a car to go any further.  The riad  I’d booked on the internet was through the covered souk, my directions said, then right, left, right and at the end of a blind alley.  The driver pointed us in the right direction then hurtled off in a cloud of dust. If 30p an hour is the average wage in Morocco, he’d done well out of us.  We dragged our cases along the rutted street, dodging the crowds. Scruffy men with hand carts offered to take us to the a hotel but I refused. It’s only a couple of hundred yards, I reassured Richard. 

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