Morocco Holiday

We had an adventurous trip to Morocco that started with a combination outstanding bad luck and slight stupidity.  I arrived in Morocco with nae cash after my card got swallowed by the machine in Marrakech airport.  Jonny’s flight got delayed so a friendly English chappy had to sub me for my dinner and a taxi ride until JY arrived the next day.

Marrakech is an amazing city, everything worth seeing seems centred round the huge square (Photos start here) Djemma El-Fna in the old Medina.  It was packed with soothsayers, musicians, snake charmers, and even boxers all performing for crowds of Moroccans.  At night stalls opened up all over selling kebabs and fruit juice.  Unfortunately as we arrived in the middle of Ramadan getting a real drink meant a trip to the new town supermarket where they took note of your passport number how many bottles you got and what it was. The hotel was great though, a nice Riad right in the middle of the Medina, with a perfect terrace for reading and drinking said alcohol.  It was completely insulated from the noise from the labyrinth alleyways of the Medina and the square, though not the call to prayer from the loudspeakers at 6.30am, 11am,  3pm, 6.30pm, and 3.30am!

We then made an effort to leave the hustle bustle and get to the countryside, via the climb of Jebel Toubkal the tallest in the Atlas Mountains at 4167m.  We made our way from the town of Imlil until my boots completely disintegrated at 2200m. The soles just fell to pieces.  Luckily we were only a couple hundred metres passed the one and only tiny stall village of Sidi Chamharouch where I rented the boots off this guys feet.  We were then able to continue the rest of the first days trek to the glorious mountain hut which kept us well fed and warm for the night before making the final 900m summit trip.

We then made our way out to the desert, a lucky Swiss couple, were to be our travelling companions on a three day 4WD trek through the Draa valley and the Sahara.  The first day we travelled through the valley full of Kasbahs and palm trees and then a few hours camel trekking made me doubt I would ever walk again.  We spent a beautiful night outside in the desert before meeting up with the jeep again and making our way towards the huge Erg Chigaga dunes.  Jonny managed to get stung by a scorpion that night, and got rushed 70km out of the desert to town so the doctor could suck out the poison.  He was fine the next day though and the ravenous scarabs soon started to make short work of the flattened scorpion.  We returned from the desert to Ouarzazate the centre of the Moroccan movie industry, Gladiator, Laurence of Arabia, Kingdom of Heaven, and Alexander were all filmed here.  We even stayed in the same hotel as Timothy Dalton while filming the Living Daylights (hotels must’ve been slim pickings in 1986).  We didn’t hang about though and made our way across the country to the coast.

Apart from a blowout on the bus this was to be the end of our unlucky streak.  It was the easy life for a few days in Essaouria where we got to do not much but surf, read on the guesthouse terrace, visit the village where Hendrix wrote Castles Made of Sand, and eat great food.

We had just enough time on our return to Marrakech to visit the Souqs, a huge market selling everything under the sun and ensuring we returned to Britain without a Dirham in our pockets, the same way I arrived.