With Algeria in the bag, our final stop on the North African adventure was a quick four days in Morocco. Algeria had been amazing, but after the bureaucracy, lack of tourist infrastructure, and limited food & drink options, we were looking forward to Morocco. We landed in Casablanca and decided to take the independent-traveler bull by the horns by renting a car. In no time at all we were off and hitting the open road bound for Marrakech!
Once we got to Marrakech things started to go south. We sorta didn’t do much research on where we were staying, and were (stupidly, in hindsight) surprised to find it was in the center of the maddening labyrinthine old medina. We hit the first of what would be endless aggressive hard sells when we were led to our hotel by a man on a motorbike. Alecia managed to drive the car through the impossibly narrow streets and park it at the “lot” to which we were led. After getting to the hotel, we had another stressful haggling sesh with the man to pay him for leading us. This would become a common theme in Morocco.
We spent the next two nights in Marrakech, alternating between getting lost / getting screamed at in the medina by pushy “guides” and hiding out from the shrieking corn maze in either restaurants or the hotel. Despite our optimism due to being in a place crawling with tourists, good food and alcohol options were very limited. By the end of day two, we were beyond over it and ready to flee to solitude in the Atlas Mountains.
I have a future in spice photography.
At least our hotel was cute.
The next morning, we navigated the car ourselves out of the medina (after overpaying someone to let us leave the spot, of course) and got the hell out of the city. The drive up to our hotel in Ouirgane was nice enough and we planned on doing some actual hiking once we got settled into our room. However, all the travel up to this point plus the two days of stress in pushy Marrakech had really caught up to us. We “hiked” from the pool area to the bar repeatedly and passed a rather nice Thanksgiving day and night in beautifully drunken peace and quiet (with a new friend).
The next day was our last full day in Morocco. We left the nice hotel and made our way back to Casablanca, passing through Marrakech again long enough only to give it the finger.
Fat cop on a little bike.
Returning the car and securing a cab into Casablanca for our final night were, predictably, horribly stressful affairs that involved a lot of haggling and getting ripped off. We had gone from being excited about Morocco to being cautiously optimistic about Morocco to being annoyed with Morocco to more or less hating Morocco. Casablanca put on its best face for us, however, and we managed to find drinks and a nice meal before retiring and catching a white-knuckle cab ride back to the airport the next morning and AWAY FROM MOROCCO. It wasn’t our favorite place, but there were a few nice moments of peace. We wish Morocco well but the almost universal acclaim was really lost on us. They’ll just have to make do without our company!
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