Morocco - Part three: Shopping, Drowning and Eating

Riad Eden

There are cats everywhere. Even in the middle of the desert the campsite had cats. They are not the cute and cuddly type, but a Moroccan type, that make the weirdest meow noise ever. It is like a scream cry (like cats do), but they seem to not have the ability to make normal meowing noises as well. Just the horrible cat scream.

There are a lot of sounds actually. Like the call to prayer. You don’t notice it so much during daylight, but at 5:30am you can clearly hear the ‘singing’? I think I didn’t sleep through the night once while staying there (though I am sure the rock hard beds added to that).

During the day time the sounds change. Just like Asia you are constantly hounded to buy things. Common sayings in Marrakech included: “what’s this?” (for those selling soaps and spices and anything that smells) “you’re too skinny, come eat” (food stall holders in the evenings) and the age old “you promised me yesterday”, were a few I can remember.

The selling strategy at the food stalls in the evenings literally made me walk down the aisles cracking up laughing the first night we arrived. Everyone charges at you with menus and promises from every direction and takes no shame in grabbing your arm, trying to drag you, and standing right in front of you so you can’t move. The novelty wore off fast though and by the last night I had given up even speaking to them and just walked past ignoring all comments, eye contact and charging through anyone in my way.

We had arranged a lovely Riad to stay in after our trip into the desert. Riad Eden is owned by a French couple and their staff are very friendly, the breakfasts extremely generous and the guesthouse just plain lovely. Breakfast in Morroco is normally quite tasty, they have these deslious pancake things generally eaten with honey, fig or apricot jam. Tasty. And of course there is the fresh orange juice, not unlike South America. Emmanuel, the owner seems to have an endless supply of conversational topics and a lot of really helpful advice as well.  A highly recommended place to stay if you ever go to Marrakesh.

Sweet treats

All the sweets in Morocco are almond flavoured. By sweets I mean cakes, cookies, slices all the little baked and non-baking goodies they eat. It gets a bit old after a while. Although they are pretty tasty, just probably not as good as they look.

The median in Marrakesh gets pretty mental. There are people pushing everywhere and bikes and motos try to squeeze through streets which can barely fit two people wide. I even got hit by a pushbike and damn it hurt. I spent most of my time wishing they would just ban bikes from the median They even managed to fit small trollies down some streets and small cars down the slightly larger ones… what a nightmare!

We did our fair share of shopping and bargaining. There is a lot of neat stuff to buy, Tarjines, tea pots, bowls, luggage, shoes, lampshades and so on… The best value buy probably was Spikes fake Rolex, which started off at 650Dh (65 euros) and we ended up paying 140Dh (14 euros). Not bad. Though it is not always keeping time… The bargaining was good though!

We couldn’t visit Morocco without going to a Hamamm. The massage was below average but the Hamamm itself was a surprise. Sitting naked on a little stool getting hot water thrown at me by a lady and then scrubbed down with black soap and drowned again. Intense.

On a side note I was determined to complain to the guy that sold us the tour. With his encouragement to “please come back and tell him how it was” after the tour. My goal however was to gain back some of the money we were ripped of through being sold to another company. There was people in our van who only paid 700Dh each, where we paid 175D more each (for the ‘better experience’ we were ripped off). I must admit with the numerous tours we had done and been ripped off I expected nothing. After waiting patiently while others handed their money away we finally got our turn to speak up. After a good half an hour we walked away with 200Dh and an offer of a free  day trip. We didn’t want the day trip. But it was better than a kick in the face and a lot more than I expect from Best Travel. Although, still not a fair deal.

After a little over a week in Morocco we were ready to leave and on our way for one night in London before embarking on the long journey that is getting to Melbourne. 

Morocco - Part two: The Sahara Desert

Sunrise in the Sahara (we are the last two people)

Things started getting a bit more interesting from there. We had a week in Marrakech and this meant we had plenty of time to look into a desert tour. We spoke to a couple of different agents to get an idea of price. There seemed to be a decent difference between what you could get price wise. Having done a lot of tours over our travels and having been ripped of our fair share we had learnt one thing (or so we thought). Always pay a bit more and get a bit more. Don’t take the cheap option.

Sugar coated peanuts... delish

Using this theory we decided on a company, Best Travel, who promised us a number of things including longer camel ridding than many of the others, showed us photos of a nice enough hotel and decent sized, comfortable looking vans and above all they were very sure in promising that they would “not do what other companies do and sell you to another company, you will defiantly be with Best Travel”. What an outright lie that was.

We waited for our van at 7am as instructed and it all started out well. That was until we got changed over to a different van just around the road. It took us a minute to realise this was a piece of crap van, a lot smaller than promised (so way less comfortable) with a mini seat – which I was left with on this first leg. Not long after we hit the road it was obvious that the company was “Sahara Travel” and not Best Travel after all. We had been sold. I knew from there this was going to bring back memories of Solar de Ulyuni and others tours from the past. I tried to brace myself for the angry I was likely to feel over the next four days.

In order to see the ‘real desert’ and not just a rocky desert you need to take a four day, three night trip from Marrakech to Erg Chebbi, almost in Algeria. So much so that we saw the border (well a few sticks in the sand).

Us at a Kasbah

The tour started off ok, as many tours do. We stopped a decent amount of times and saw a lot of things as we crossed the Atlas Mountains and descended through the valleys on the other side. Visiting a Kasbah where Gladiator and heap of other movies have been filmed that is protected by UNESCO and a few other more boring things. Things really started looking shady from the first night. The hotel was extremely cold and there was no heating in the rooms. By this stage I had all my clothes on, singlet, thermal, long sleeve top, cardie and jacket from the UK. The rooms were dirty and everything was damp and falling apart. Far from the decent (though nothing amazing) pictures we were shown when booking.

The next morning the cold was confirmed when we opened the window to get handfuls of snow. “It won’t be cold, you won’t need any more clothes than what you are wearing now – the tour salesman told us”. But it was truly snowing and freezing. The upside to the snow was it was really pretty and it was also our first semi European snowfall. It wasn’t a bad start to the day, but put some serious concerns about our trip into the Sahara for that night.

The wind was crazy as well pulled into a small hotel in the middle of nowhere. Literally it was just flat hard and dusty. It was from here that we would enter the Sahara. A mere 5 minute camel ride away and we were deep in the heart of the Sahara. Rolling hills of sand in every direction. It was amazing.

It was also freezing. The winter wind hadn’t stopped and sent sand in every direction. After about 15 minutes I was holding out to get somewhere warm, all feeling had gone from my fingers and toes and I was about as cold as I think I have even been in my life. It was mental. Even once we arrived at camp I could not warm up and didn’t warm up until I was on the road again towards Marrakech.

Our time camel riding was yet another disappointment as the cheap tour we found had an hour at night and an hour in the morning and our one was meant to have two hours – but with getting sold this was another pitfall (among many smaller things along the way).

The people are weird in Morocco. They have had European tourists for so long that it feels like we only ever see a small part of what they are really like underneath. They are cheeky, they try to rip you off more than I ever would have guessed (at least as much, probably a lot more than Asian country’s! and the costs are a LOT higher in Morocco too, so you end up a lot worse off – for example the price difference between the tour we paid for and the cheap one we were offered was about $60). An example of this ‘milk the tourist’ attitude was when we went to visit a gorge on our desert trip. There was no need for people to be washing their clothes there; there were lots of streams closer to where the towns were and better water etc but they took their donkeys miles away to this part where the tourists come and feed them some hay. Obviously people were stopping to take photos or pat the donkeys and they evidently were asking for money…. Public space anyone? When they weren’t paid the lady would spit towards the tourists. They didn’t need to wash their clothes there and if they wanted money they should have been selling things or singing or doing SOMETHING, not trying to get money because people took photos or patted their donkeys, which they clearly had only put there to try and get money out of tourists. 

Morocco - Part one: Not what we expected.

As we flew over the gap between Spain and Morocco the land became so much greener than I expected. There were clearly marked paddocks, crops and cattle. Not exactly what one imagines when you think of Morocco. It was very beautiful and not at all sparse as my imagination and small amounts of education on Morocco had told me.

Hassan II 

Casablanca airport welcomed us not with the warmth I was expecting or hoping. It was somewhat warmer than Spain, but not enough to become a non-coat wearing human again. Damn it. A reasonably comfortable train ride into the city and a short taxi later we found ourselves a hotel. Another shock had hit us upon arriving – that French appeared to be not only a widely spoken language, but the dominate language. Being a European language they all expected us to speak French. Doh. I later read that French is only really around in the cities, and Moroccan Arabic is much more prevalent throughout the country as a whole. Although it brought back strong memories of backpacking through South America, old and grimy. This was not the Morocco I had imagined. It felt like it lacked anything, sort of like Yangon in Myanmar did. Reflecting on that experience I knew for certain that things would change, if not in other parts of the city then when we headed down to Marrakech the following afternoon. The first meal in Morocco added to my South American fears. Meat and dirt and chips...... I snacked on a few fries and hoped the next day would bring better things.

The next morning after a below average Moroccan breakfast (more concerns were upon me by this time) we headed out to see Hassan II mosque on the waters edge. I had seen a number of pictures and was looking forward to seeing this amazing building. The fog lingered (it is around in the mornings, we were informed by the taxi driver to the hotel the night before and re-confirmed by the one this morning) and our photos were very largely impacted by this weather, but the sheer size of this building was not lost in the physical presence. It is an amazing building. Only built in 1993 and designed by a French architect, it is over 200 metres tall (worlds tallest minaret) and can hold 25,000 people and a further 80,000 if you include the courtyard area. It is the 7th largest mosque in the world.

After this, we jumped back in the taxi and discovered that, yes, we were staying in a terrible part of town. The waterfront area in Casablanca screams wealth in a very obvious way. There were even surfers in the cold water. Morocco was proving to be full of surprises already.

Mint being sold in the Medina

Next it was time to take a three and a half hour train journey to Marrakech. Our fingers were crossed for a feeling of more life and culture. What I would describe as soul to the Marrakech than we had found in Casablanca. Within arriving and making our way to the central medina it was evident there was a lot more going on here, with the hustle and bustle of Asia (although Asia still remains my favourite travel destination to date by a long shot). Next was the mission of finding our Riad (guesthouse) in what is well known as an area to get thoroughly lost in Marrakesh.  I was pleased to have had a bit of a read of my Lonely Planet Morocco at that stage when I remembered that 20Dh (about 2 euros) would get us a guide of sorts to escort us to where we needed to be. As those thoughts hit home a guy tapped on Spikes shoulder.

Riad Bahia

The next hour was spent looking for our accommodation. We had pre-booked on Agoda with the hopes of avoiding a nightmare upon arriving to Marrakesh. This was all in vain as we followed our guide around the medina making phone calls and looking for this mysterious Riad. Eventually the address was certainly located. No sign, nothing to indicate this was any type of accommodation. An elderly Moroccan man finally greeted our guide after a few minutes of knocking. In French. After about 10 minutes of discussion and a phone call or teo it had been established that this was the correct Riad, and that we were the first guests it has had. At about that time I knew that it could go any way from here on. The Riad host spoke not a word of English and us no French. This lead to an interesting first few days. Luckily, before our guide left we established what time the host would have breakfast ready and our general plan off attack for the next few days.

After he shared with us some weird steamed (I think nuts?) one afternoon we had an interesting conversation (or maybe more like anti-conversation) about our accommodation with him. He was trying to say we needed to pay tax on top of our booking. However, we had used this site a lot of times and it is fully inclusive. So we tried to explain with diagrams and arrows that our tax was included. In the end I think he just gave up. Was pretty funny though trying to think of as many different ways as possible to explain, including role playing.

Lunch

You would think that the food in Morocco was full of flavour. Rich with the coloured spices you always see on TV. However, in reality this was far from the case. Coloured with Turmeric was about as far as it went and if you were lucky there was cumin and salt on the table which you could add yourself. It was pretty disappointing that’s for sure. Although I think I picked up a couple of tips for making cous cous better than before I left. I have yet to try these out though as when you eat cous cous every day you get pretty over it. They don’t seem to have much variety in food either which was shame. 

Spain - only the parts where they don't speak much Spanish

Las Rambas

It felt different from what I expected; the airport felt forever away from what could be the Barcelona city. Farmland rushed past the windows with all kinds of crops and within 20 minutes we had reached the heart of Barcelona. Time to whip out a bit of that long unused basic Spanish. Or so I thought.

Northern Spain, that Catalylan state is not home to Spanish at all. Rather the people speak a somewhat related language – catalyan. There was the odd word that I could understand and most people spoke some Spanish, but not on first impressions.

Antoni Gaudi building

After we had adjusted to this (not entirely unexpected – but not such vast differences were anticipated) we settled into to our hotel and sought about making a plan for the next 5 days we had in Spain. There were a couple of touristy must do’s, but other than visit La Ramba, Montjuic  for my first European castle and some great views over the city, the waterfront area and one of the building by  Antoni Gaudi we decided Barcelona wasn’t our scene and it was time to head out (not without sampling a range of Tapa’s and wine of course).

View from the wall in Girona

Our next stop was Girona. Picked largely due to the fact that a) we could get there by train and b) it was a short journey. Girona proved to be a lovely ‘city’ with much more of a town feel too it. Much better value accommodation was appreciated here, although the beds were just as hard and uncomfortable as Barcelona and not so far from the discomfort we had grown accustomed to while in London.

The quality of the French bakeries was outstanding (although nothing of what we had experienced in France of course, but a decent step up from London all the same). With my vegetarian diet not proving to be the easiest in Spain, in fact the food in general being pretty disappointing, I ate more than my far share of pastries. I blame this for the wasteline I have recently discovered, which seemed to appear out of nowhere (undoubtly influenced by the consecutive colds which lead to no exercise in the last month we were in London). Regardless of the cause, the mission to get fit again is reinstated come Australia.

We walked the walls once surrounding once side of the city. From here you have amazing views over the city and a grand cathedral. Girona had been fought over many times, and the Roman and Jewish influences were evident in the architecture.

The wall

In Girona there is a bridge, Eiffel bridge, unsurprisingly designed by Gustave Eiffel who designed the Eiffel tower. It has got nothing on the tower, obviously. In fact it was just a small bridge, one of many which crossed one of the three small rivers that run through Girona. All the same it was pretty neat to have seen more than one of his designs in different parts of Europe too.

Our time in Spain was brought back to reality by the passing of Spike’s Nana in New Zealand. It makes you realise how physically far away from home you are. No amount of Skype and technology can make up or change the fact that Europe is, as minimum, over a full day away from New Zealand.

Before we knew it our time in Spain was over and we were on the train back into Barcelona to catch the next flight, on Air Arabia, to Morocco.

Buying some chocolate treats in Barcelona

Settle-Carlisle. One of the worlds top ten train journeys.

New years rolled around and most of our friends had headed out of the country to celebrate. We were just getting into the swing of income coming in and didn’t really have the chance to book any flights anywhere. Having read about one of the top ten train journeys in the world being the Settle-Carlisle we thought we might as well use this time off to see a little bit more of the countryside. So we booked a train trip to cover this journey. It involved a day right up almost to the border with Scotland, a couple of hours look around Carsile and then a couple more hours down to Settle to spend the night. A true old person’s holiday.

A cup of coffee meant we missed our 830am train. Watching the train pull away panic struck in as to what we would have to flog out for last minute new tickets. Luckily for a sympathetic platform man (who wrote we had missed it due to connections) we were on the 930 one without extra cost.

The weather was cold and foggy and by the second leg of our journey rather wet too. So the views were somewhat hindered – as one part we could barely see out the window. Arriving in Settle on New Years Eve we checked into the B&B and headed out for dinner. There was only a couple of places open and they were all booked out, so we ended up buying some cheese and crackers and drinking a bottle of French wine (we had from Paris) in our room before heading for a late dinner of Indian.  The night was somewhat a disappointment. But the little town was beautiful (if only it was freezing and wet as). A great way to see a decent chunk of England. An a tasty breki at the B&B J

In the afternoon after a day of walking around in the rain and struggling to find much open being new years day we headed home. After a few hours stop over in Leeds on the way home we finally made it back, cold, but pleased to say we have seen a bit more of the country before we leave.

Paris - the city of love

Early December we decided to take a trip ‘across the ditch’ being we are still living in London this referred to a weekend in Paris visiting our Friend Je, who we met while travelling through Myanmar. Much to our appreciation he agreed to put us to for the two nights and even spend a bit of time showing us his favourite parts of the famous city.

The weekend started off with a late arriving flight from Heathrow, and in true European style no early night – rather some mulled wine at the corner bar.

After a decent sleep we woke up to a treat of pasties and baguettes before being armed with a map book and set off into the sity. Though we visited the Eiffel tower the weather (being winter) was a nightmare and the highest parts were closed, so we opted not to go up. It was pretty disappointing not to get to climb, but that is the way sometimes – for one of many possible reasons you don’t end u doing something on many peoples ‘must do lists’ in various occasions. We also visited the biggest street in Paris with heaps of designer labels etc (forgotten its name) and the Arc that it descends from. And of course we went and saw the Louvre, again with our limited time we didn’t want to spend it wasted standing in line so only saw the outside. For anyone who does visit, it is highly recommended to hit this an hour or so before it opens to reduce your waiting time. I imagine it would have been at least 3 hours lining up to get in.

We hooked up with Je on the Sat evening to be directed towards a fantastic show – “How to be Parisian in one hour”, it is a one man show in English that he had seen himself and found great, a definite highlight of our short time in Paris. In my mind this would be the thing most recommended. So so funny and a real good sport about all the sterotypes of Parisian people (including the infamous attitudes!). It is shown in a small theatre of about 200 odd people and is on most nights. The star was told he would be unsuccessful by a number of theatres and no one would have him, but now he has done over 300 shows and is taking a one man act to the world. I have no doubt it will be a great success. He gets the audience involved too, which is a bit of fun. You can check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2fkM9VhE50

In true Parisian style we headed for a late dinner after the show (well it started out as a late dinner for us – about 9:30pm), however we were about 15mins late to the restaurant and our table was given away. Je was determined we eat there and at some crazy time later (around 11 I think) we finally got a table. It was well worth the wait. So much wine and cheese and fondue. Fantastic time.

Sunday we headed to Montmarte for a crepe brunch (something not very Parisian – but I really wanted crepes before we left). Great views, food and company.

Before we knew it was time for Eurostar home (the train system is a lot better in Paris than London, the trains don’t muck around closing doors etc.) But not without a trip to the supermarket to stock up and wine and cheese and the patisserie for some tasty treats (including the best pastries ever). Before we knew it the weekend was over. It was one of those times we reflected on to realise our favourite parts were when with/directed by Je – the impact of having a friend to stay with when you are travelling is huge. Your experience is completely different. There is no way we can repay him for such a great weekend (until he decides to take a trip to the southern hemisphere that is!).

The city of love. Dirt. Cheese. Wine. And anger J