And Finally Marrakesh:
Finally I got back here to finish the Morocco series. Different reasons why it took so long! First of all, we were too busy working on our new overland car build, if you haven’t read about that yet, find our build journey here.
The car build, takes too much energy and all of our spare time that we hardly had in New Zealand winter. It’s the peak season for my job and I barely have even weekends to work on anything.
Anyway, I’m back and planning to finish off the Morocco series and start documenting another trip which we’ve done years ago and I always wanted to document it in details. But first let’s focus on our trip to Morocco and finish it off before moving on. In the last post, we went through a four day trip from Fes to Marrakesh and while it was amazing, we were pumped to get out of the car and the planned itinerary and control our daily routines by ourselves. Having a tailored trip with a personal driver and a travel guide was definitely not for us.
Moving on from that trip, they dropped on the outskirt of Marrakesh Medina and called our Riad to send senone to collect us and our bags.
They waited with us till a big calm guy dressed up rather formal with the outfit of the riad that I booked few days back, showed us and got surprised that we have backpacks and were quite happy to carry our backpacks on our own and follow him to our riad. I was super excited about our riad stay in Marrakesh. There are plenty of them around and somewhere back of my mind, I always wanted to buy an authentic one in Marrakesh and stay there few months a year so I was looking for a riad like I’m really going to buy it! It was a peaceful and calm riad with minimalistic design in a quiet alley in Marrakesh Medina. After spending reasonable amount of time in Fes medina, we could identify some major differences between these two medinas and somehow I realized how much the Fes medina was more authentic comparing to the Marrakesh version of Medina at least it looked and felt that way on the first glance.
It was still 6:00 pm when we got our key to our new room so after dropping the backpacks, went out to see a bit of the medina at night time. As soon as we got out and followed the rest of crowd in medina, we found ourselves in the main square of the Marrakesh, Jemaa El Fna.
What to Expect in Jemaa El Fna:
Jemaa El Fna is somehow the heart of the Marrakesh Medina, and every time that you feel you are lost, you’ll find yourself in this big massive square! That is one of the biggest differences between Fes and Marrakesh Medinas. In Fes you could completely get lost for hours but in Marrakesh, you somehow find yourself in this square again and again. And no matter how much you’ve seen or read about this, you have to experience it on your own to get the real feeling.
In Marrakesh, we soon realized that everything is more commercialized for tourists and less authentic that the rest of Morocco that we’ve experienced and it’s fair enough. Most of tourists coming to visit Morocco ending up only in this city or use it as a hub so visiting simple tourist attractions was a hassle so we gave up doing any of that and instead, spent most of our time in this madness and chaos to see the life of locals around this big square. How it evolves through out the day and believe me it evolves to a complete different layout through the day and how locals life is affected around tourists in this ancient city aged more than a 1000 years, a major hub in west Africa. I’ve categorized main activities as follows:
Eating:
Well, eating out is the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to Jemaa El fna. From mazing world famous orange juices to a classic mint tea to typical bbqs, Jemma El Fna’s styles in one of many stalls that set up in the evenings, there’s something for everyone apart from of course alcoholic drinks.
Beauty Therapy:
From what we’ve witnessed, I would consider Morocco a conservative Muslim country. Even though the changes in a new generations was obvious looking at the way mother and daughters shopping hand in hand in the more traditional part of different cities were dressed, but it would still be considered a conservative country from my point of view and witnessing women getting different beauty therapy session in open air in the middle of the square was quite bizarre to watch!
Presence of Animals:
This one was one of the worst part of the displays in the Jemma El Fna. There were lots of exotic and non exotic animals on display in terrible conditions in different corners of the square. Locals and tourists were paying to have their photos taken with exotic snakes or eagles.
Odd Encounters:
Apart from what we could fit in a category, there were quite a few odd scenes that reflects truly the madness of such a compact space with two many people in it, here are some of them. Somehow some people were running an speech session and could manage to have some audience to talk to. Some dressed up oddly to attract tourists, the paradox between the tourists outfit and locals were outstanding as well too. Here are some photos to show one normal evening in the medina main square.
Life in the rest of Marrakesh Medina:
Well that’s hard to say that it is easy to see the real life in the back streets of Marrakesh medina. The whole old town is heavily influenced by tourism. I would say Marrakesh was the least favorite city of the whole Morocco for us. People were seeing you as dollar sign realy and the streets are not safe enough as well. I didn’t keep much in my backpack to get stolen but I found its front zipper open few times while walking through the old streets.
It’s easy to see what you love to see when you travel to an exotic destination like Marrakesh like nice shops, old streets and artisans workshops and I would definitely think it is still some gems to find in back streets of the old town but it is getting harder and harder to find these spots. I definitely wanted to add a shopping guide for Marrakesh but then we ended up picking nice pieces from different parts of the country so we’ll probably have a nice shopping guide for Morocco coming. In the meantime, let’s have a look at some photos of the Marrakesh medina corners.
We did went out of the medina to get a general vibe of the modern Marrakesh but hasn’t spent much time there to comment on it. From Marrakesh we travelled south to some interesting part of Morocco with more authentic vibes. We’ll talk about them in th enext post. Till then, take care.
