Utopian Quest

Eager to see more, we followed advice for cheap rental cars to ‘AVIZ’ an avis knock-0ff. They rented us a beat-up old Fiat Sienna with a contract all in French. Driving in Marrakech tops the ‘rainiest day’ on the Autobahn for most stressful driving experiences so we were glad to get into the mountains. We stopped at a mountain village for a lunch of…guess what: TAJINE. Back on the road, ‘two grand taxis’ flew by us up blind mountain curves. Five minutes later one had collided, head on with a French tourist. A diesel tanker pulled up and couldn’t get through. Meanwhile the taxi sat leaking gas right to where the tanker sat running (nervous). Finally we moved the taxi and made it through. As we grew closer to Erfoud, the highway and villages became more muddy, and the hassle was laid on thick.  One scam was a van roadblock with a guy standing in the road. It was becoming quite imposing so we decided we’d do a day hike in the dunes on our own. Even there we couldn’t escape it, several people appeared out of nowhere, trying to sell us tours and fossils. Here you can see the vast fun we had.

The train from Casa Voyagems to Marrakech was already full when we got on. We had to hug our packs and the wall of the hall of the train. Every stop, herds of people were denied aboard. A dusty roughness greeted us in Marrakech. A nice contrast though were the orange trees that line all the major streets. It is quite different spending Christmas in a place where you wake up to the call to prayer rather than a tannenbaum, none the less a bright 80F day made us joyously eager to see how Marrakech could take our money. It didn’t take long at Djemaa El Fna (the historic square) for a snake charmer to see this was true… He took our $15 for a lousy photo, not even of the sweet cobra dancing to da musicman. Naive hardly describes our first journey into the enormous labyrinth that are the souqs (markets, above left) of Marrakech. It is quite smart to take a first passage without a camera, wallet, or anything of value, all of which we had our strong clutches on. The horse carriage ride back to Djemaa El Fna was the highlight of Christmas. The hassle free journey through innavigable alleys brought us direct to a dinner above the roaring square. It had a great view of the sunset behind the minaret(above right).

Our flight to Casablanca was like riding the chicken bus only in the air…the airport is nicer than Lisboa though. A train took us an hour to the city where we checked into our 4 star chicken coup. We tried to find a place to eat and it was the holliday of “The Killing of the Lamb” so everything was closed. Some guy named Mufasa agreed to take us to dinner if we bought him a coffee. He took us to an expensive place which we were sure he got a cut. Afterward we told him we were going to the Medina and he agreed to take us. On the way to the souq we went by the public hammam (bathhouse) where a guy in the boiler-room was sawing a sheeps head with a rusty old saw. In the souq, we were the main event (I stood out everywhere in Morocco because I am white (rich).

After we survived the 500 pickpocket attempts in the souq, Mufasa took us back to the hotel where he asked us for 200dh for wine and couscous (he wanted to have us over for dinner).  Luckily I got out of the “tour guide” scam with only 30dh bill and being called a liar.

The next day we were a little more street wise, though we knew that we wanted to be somewhere other than Casablanca.  We went to the Hassan II mosque, the largest outside of Mecca, got a mint tea and jumped on the train to Marrakech.