I’ll be honest – I feel like I have a love/hate relationship with Marrakesh. Like an abusive boyfriend, this city forces you into a turbid relationship that you can’t help but remain in even though you know it’s not doing you any good. You love it, even though it kicks you, all the while smiling and whispering sweet nothings.
I’ve always wanted to visit Marrakesh. To me it was akin to Timbuktu and Zanzabar – far away places I daydreamed about and wished I’d one day see – so naturally when our plane landed in Morocco I could barely contain my excitement – my smile mixed with gasps as I inhaled and choked on the second hand smoke from inside the terminal. Gasps and smiles – how fortelling (I’m spoiled in Vancouver with our non-smoking and clean air, I know, but I still can’t stand that someone else gets to decide what quality of air I get to breathe).
We got off to a rough start. Landing in Casablanca, we went to the train station to go directly to Marrakesh. We had to change trains and sadly despite our best efforts the trains weren’t timed well, meaning we ended up sitting at a train station for 2 hours with no way of buying anything (no bank machines near by, and no one accepting credit cards).
Once we were finally in Marrakesh we walked out of the train station and into the waiting throngs of taxi touts. We know not to listen to these guys. We know this. But we asked how much to get to the Medina and the driver confirmed he had a taximeter. I was dubious, but we went along with him. Our bags in the car and 20 minutes (no joke) of back and forth trying to communicate in French with someone who barely spoke it, we got him to agree to drop us off in the main square since cars can’t drive in the Medina. Great – so lets turn on that taximeter and away we go. Except he didn’t. He turned around and said: “200 dirhams”.
No thanks. We were out of the car like lightening, and it was now 8 pm and we had to start this dance all over again. I was furious. I asked if he had a taximeter and if he would use it. He said yes. Why was he doing this to us? I know we’re tourists and I know that tourists pay more for things – but this seemed so unfair.
Finally we hailed another cab who also ripped us off, to the tune of 50 dirhams (I knew from the guidebooks that it should have cost at most 20 dirhams), but at this point Jordan was getting antsy about finding our accommodation since we knew we’d have to wander in the Medina and it was already dark.
Finally in the medina, Jordan armed with his googlemaps, we start walking. Everyone and their brother offers to tell us how to get where we’re going, even though we haven’t made mention of the place we’re looking for. We knew that this would happen. We knew to say “no, merci!” and keep on our way. We knew to be firm. But it’s hard. When you’re disoriented and tired and you’ve been traveling a long way and you have to dodge donkeys and motorbikes and it’s nighttime with not much lighting and street signs written in Arabic, it’s hard to keep your cool. None the less – we remained firm, even with our frayed nerves, and we were about a street away from our riad when a kid came up to Jordan and said the name of the riad. Jordan reacted by confirming that was in fact the place we were searching for, so the kid led us halfway down the alley that we were already standing in – and then immediately demanded payment. His English was perfect for his purposes, and Jordan handed him 5 dirhams, much to my protest.
Finally, we were in a safe zone. Except we weren’t. Another scam I had read about and was aware of was that some riad owners have more than 1 riad. You book in the nice one and when that one is all full they walk you over to another one that is definitely not of the same caliber. So I was particularly angry when the man who greeted us proceeded to do exactly that. He said that the riad we booked was being painted – and it was (Jordan asked to verify this by checking the rooms), but the place shouldn’t have been available to book if it wasn’t, in fact, available. The place we were taken to was obviously of a lower standard. I asked about getting money back – and the guy told me to talk to someone in the morning – except that there wasn’t anyone but him there for the entire time.
Another thing I had read about was that riads can be quite noisy and the walls are quite thin – so it’s always a smart idea to ask to be on the second floor rather than the ground floor. So when the man led us to a ground floor room I immediately asked to be on the second floor. But that wasn’t possible, since the second floor was full (no doubt with all the other people who had probably booked the same nice place we had done, and also received a bait’n’switch). Alright – it’s one night, let’s just get to sleep. But the people online weren’t kidding about the noise since people were loud and I could hear every word of their conversation, despite not being able to understand it. As an extra bonus, the smell of smoke started to waft into our room – someone was smoking in the riad, great.
I was woken at 7 in the morning to a couple arguing loudly in french right by our door. The guy said we could switch to the other riad for our second night since now it was all painted, so we packed everything up after breakfast (which consisted of 4 different types of bread: baguettes with butter, a croissant, a moroccan pancake and a crepe) and moved.
Much like its signature dish, the tagine, Marrakesh is a mix of things all thrown together and left to stew. It’s incredible.
You wander through the maze of the medina jumping out of the way of motorcyclists, donkeys, wheel barrows and throngs of people. It’s chaos – and yet it seems somehow to just work. We didn’t witness any accidents or crashes, which was shocking since every moment it seemed like there was a near-miss to a collision.
Our first day we spent exploring the Badi and Bahia palaces – beautiful works of Arabic architecture: one in complete ruin and the other perfectly preserved. We wandered through the famous J?? Square and saw monkeys forced to do tricks, ladies offering henna tattoos or offering to read your fortune, stalls of fresh herbs with the delicious smell of fresh mint leaves, row upon row of fruit juice vendors each vying to sell you a freshly squeezed OJ for 4 dirhams (50 cents), snake charmers (who, when they saw me taking a photo demanded payment so I deleted the photo), and all kinds of other things being sold. It was all so fascinating and a complete sensory overload. We took refuge in a cafe that overlooked the square and ate a tagine and a couscous.
Over the next several days we immersed ourselves in the Medina – only wandering out of it into the “New City” for a visit to a place I had read about on Tripadvisor, “Cafe du Livre”, where I knew we’d be able to get yoghurt and fruit for breakfast (Moroccan breakfasts are very bread-focused and that’s not something we’re particularly fond of) – plus it had the added bonus of having lots of books there, and I was sure we’d find a guidebook or two to help us plan how to make the most of our stay.
We visited the Saadian tombs, the ??? and ???, as well as trying out a few restaurants I had read recommended on tripadvisor, and I was sad that we didn’t make it to the gardens of ? and ?, but even with 5 days there wasn’t enough time for everything. Not when we were moving so slowly – and we were, because in 39 degree heat it’s hard to do anything other than move slowly. Most days we’d take shelter in our riad from 11am-3pm simply because it was too hot to be walking around. Between the heat and me having to keep covered, I was grateful for the cool haven of our riad. When we weren’t hiding from the heat we were wandering – often aimlessly though sometimes with purpose through the labyrinth of the medina.
I wished I could have taken some portraits of all the people going about their day-to-day lives – the barber in his shoebox shop with only one chair cutting hair; all the artisans working at their craft, the emotive faces of the people – but most demand money if they even see you pointing a camera in their direction (and usually I wasn’t even taking a picture of them) so the only portraits I took were stolen, which may be more authentic in an editorial sense, but I didn’t feel awesome about it and they aren’t well composed since they’re stolen glimpses.
In all it’s chaos it’s still incredibly beautiful and fascinating. It’s a feast for the senses with exotic spice smells and glimpses of sheep’s heads, with children running around and stray cats everywhere. There’s nothing you can’t find in the medina of Marrakesh, I’m sure of it. It was like I imagined – but better. I loved it. I loved it even when I was exhausted from saying ‘No, Merci’ for the hundredth time in an hour. I loved it even when it was hot and crowded and people kept trying to sell us everything under the sun. I loved it. It’s true – it’s not for everyone, and if you aren’t able to give in to the chaos that surrounds you you’ll likely hate the place. But if you can – you could easily close your eyes and travel back in time. Were it not for the motorcycles and scooters that zip through the narrow alleys with entire households worth of possessions loaded on top, you’d think you were in a different century.
It was a treasure trove, and even though it drove me to near insanity and tried my patience, I’d still go back in a heartbeat.
