The Sand and the Fury

Take a look at the above image. What do you see? A collection of red mud buildings? Cell phone towers disguised as palm trees? A dirty parking lot? Now, let me tell you what you don’t see. A scourge of scammers united in confederacy against you; stenches so offensive they should be considered crimes against humanity; motorcycle riders with a wish for death…yours; and historic sites so mobbed with European tourists you’d think the French had returned to re-colonize the place. Congratulations, you now have the entire Marrakech experience and have no need to ever go! Okay, that’s an unfair representation of the Red City—there is certainly more to it than that. This past week, I had the opportunity to take a trip down south and visit a few different places in Morocco’s more colorful areas. Marrakech was our first stop, but certainly not our last, nor was it the best. Let me tell you about it. 

My opening paragraph makes it sound like Marrakech doesn’t have a lot to offer, which isn’t exactly accurate, but I will admit I was a little disappointed by it. Still, I’m getting ahead of myself—let’s talk logistics first. To get from Rabat to Marrakech, all 30+ of us loaded into a tour bus at 9:00am on Tuesday morning. Ahead of us was around a 3.5-hour drive, but spirits were high, and we weren’t about to be dismayed by a little road-tripping. Like any good group of college students, we diligently reviewed our Arabic readings and did speaking drills during the entire drive—never once stopping to sleep, eat weird Moroccan gas station snacks, watch tv shows, or stare out the window while listening to angsty music. No, we were the picture of studiousness. Around 1:00 in the afternoon we rolled into Marrakech and immediately went to lunch before heading over to our hotel. After check-in, we split into small groups to use our free time to explore the city for a few hours. My group decided to walk through the old medina on our way to visit a traditional madrasa (a madrasa is a school and this particular one was designed and built for Quranic studies). The medina was larger, dirtier, and stinkier than the ones I’d visited previously in Rabat and Tanja, but we eventually found our way through its maze of streets and alleys and arrived at the madrasa. Inside, we examined the detailed craftsmanship of the zellige tile and stonework carved with verses from the Quran. We had been instructed to travel in groups of no more than six students, but nearly everyone in our cohort had the same idea of visiting the madrasa, so there ended up being a group of almost 30 American students congregating in the middle of the courtyard—much to the chagrin of the other tourists there. Still, one really fun thing about going to BYU is that so many of the students speak multiple languages, so our cohort’s members were cutting it up in French, Spanish, and Chinese with many of the madrasa’s other visitors. After we’d had our fill of the madrasa, my small group wandered through the medina a little more before heading to the nearest major road to hail a taxi. Since we were in a larger group than usual, we needed to find a grand taxi instead of the typical petit taxis that we usually use, since those only carry three passengers. Grand taxis differ from petit taxis in that the price isn’t determined by a meter. Instead, you haggle with the driver beforehand and agree on a price to pay. We were told by our Moroccan guide that the going rate was about 10 dirham per person, meaning we expected to pay 60, but our driver didn’t want to transport us for any less than 80 dirham total. Since we were already running late, we agreed to the fare and rode the taxi back just in time to get back on the tour bus and head to the restaurant. Just a note, we ate every meal as a cohort, and we didn’t choose any of the restaurants—they were all decided for us by the guide. This particular restaurant had a rooftop dining area, and with the cool desert night, it proved to be a very pleasant dining experience. The food at this place was also some of the better stuff we were served. I ordered pastilla, which is a type of Moroccan pie made with filo dough, and it might be my favorite Moroccan dish so far. I actually remembered to take a picture of the food, but the lighting wasn’t great, so I didn’t post it. Anyway, after dinner wrapped up around 9:30, many students headed back out into the city to do some more exploring. If you Google Marrakech, one of the first images that pops up is of a plaza with a minaret tower in the background. This plaza is just outside the medina and is a central tourist location. All throughout the plaza, vendors hawk juice, swag, and those stupid glow-in-the-dark flying saucers that are ubiquitous in every tourist trap (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t waste your time finding out). I was most interested in the cobra charmers, but unfortunately, if you stop and watch too long or take photos, they’ll make you pay up. Before long, I got tired of the plaza and headed back to the hotel to sleep. For this trip, our professor split us up into new roommate groups so we could experience living with someone else for the week. I was in a room with two other guys, and I was lucky enough to draw the straw for the private room! After a cold shower, I gratefully went to bed to conclude my first day of travel. 

Okay, reading back through this, I’ve realized that I’ve already typed quite a lot and still have four days to go, so I’m going to try and condense things a little bit. On the morning of day two I awoke around 6:30, giving me enough time to shower, get ready for the day, and eat the hotel’s continental breakfast before meeting in the hotel lobby at 8:30. The plan for this day was to take a walking tour of Marrakech in the morning and go for a camel ride in the afternoon, with some free time built in. At 9:00 we left the hotel and headed to the Koutoubia Mosque. At this point, I want to mention that we had a guide, Driss, with us for the entirety of the trip, but Moroccan law demands that tour groups of a certain size have two guides for certain attractions, so we were joined by a second guide for this portion of the tour. I unfortunately don’t remember this second guide’s name, but he told us that he was taught English by Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador who was killed in the 2012 Benghazi attacks, which I found fascinating. For the morning tour, we examined the exterior of the Koutoubia Mosque (foreigners cannot enter any Moroccan mosques except for one, which I’ll get to later) before walking over to the Bahia Palace. I’m going to forgo going in-depth about any of the history or significance of these places because it’s something that is easily researchable online if you’re interested in knowing more, and instead I’m going to dedicate my time to sharing my own impressions. With that being said, I found the palace somewhat lacking. To me, it was a larger-scale version of the madrasa I’d visited the day before. The tile work and engravings were beautiful, but no more remarkable than anything else I’d seen. Additionally, all the rooms looked more or less the same, and, while this isn’t a reflection of the palace itself, it was also mobbed with more people than Versailles. Seriously, you’d think the French would have passed on the idea of timed-entry tickets during all their years of colonizing North Africa. So, the palace was pretty mediocre, but I got some pretty pictures, and it was nice to be there with my friends. After the palace we headed to lunch, an experience that was the complete antithesis of the nice dining experience I’d had the night previously. I knew that we were in for a long lunch when the menu provided to us was more comprehensive than the one you’d find at Applebee’s, but never in my wildest nightmares did I expect us to sit in the dining room for three hours. It got to the point where my professor got into a pretty heated debate (in Arabic) with the restaurant manager, who seemed upset that he had to cook food for 33 hungry students, even though he was warned beforehand. It wasn’t great, and the food wasn’t tasty enough to redeem the experience, but we made it through, and it all ended up being okay. After lunch, we drove out to The Middle of Nowhere, Morocco, in order to ride some CAMELS! This was so fun! We were first wrapped up in some traditional Moroccan garb, mostly to protect our clothes from the filthy camels, before climbing aboard our mounts and setting off. Riding these camels wasn’t like riding a horse. For one thing, camels are much taller, and my camel, named Scooby-Doo, was the only one in the entire herd who refused to kneel, meaning I had to do some gymnastics in order to get aboard (and dismount). Another thing about horses is that they have saddles, so there’s kind of a place carved out for sitting. There might be camel saddles, but these particular camels just had cut-up pieces of memory foam stacked on their backs with some blankets on top. Despite this cutting-edge invention, it still felt like I was seated directly on top of the camel’s hump, making it difficult to imagine how anyone could ever travel across long distances using these animals. Seriously, I might rather walk. Certainly, the camel ride was fun, but I did think it would be a pretty sad life to be one of these camels waiting around in the cat palms for some obnoxious Americans to come ride you in a circle. Having completed the camel ride, we rode the bus back to the hotel to kill a few hours before dinner. I was exhausted, so after running to the closest hanoot to buy some water, I took a nap until it was time to leave. Dinner passed uneventfully, though this meal was also one of the better ones we’d had, and afterwards I walked over to an ice cream shop to get a sweet treat before heading back to the hotel to sleep. 

At this point in the trip, we’ve arrived at the best singular day I’ve had in Morocco so far. I’d really love to tell you about it in detail, so I’ve decided to put writing about it on hold and save it until next week when I can really get into what made it so good. Just so you have an idea, we had the opportunity to travel up into the Atlas Mountains and visit a traditional Amazigh community. For now, I’m just going to skip this day and move onto the next one. Day four saw us leave Marrakech and travel to the city of Essaouira. My impression of Marrakech was that the city was mostly one giant tourist trap with a few hidden gems here and there. Honestly, I didn’t feel like it was all that much different from the other cities I’d experienced so far, and I wasn’t expecting much better from Essaouira. Fortunately, I can happily say that I was pleasantly surprised by this coastal town. It was very quaint, charming, and peaceful—maybe even a little sleepy. Whereas the medinas in other cities often feature vendors selling luxury clothing brand knock-offs, cheap trinkets, and weird lamps that definitely don’t contain genies, Essaouira’s was laden with shops selling handcrafted art, pottery, and clothing. After arriving and checking in to our hotel, we took a short tour of the marina, fish market, and some locations where Game of Thrones was filmed, then ate a delicious seafood lunch before being allowed to explore on our own. I ended up in a group of five girls who just wanted to shop, which I was fine with, so we contentedly wandered through the streets, poking around and buying various treats and souvenirs. Once we got bored of that, we headed to the beach to meet up with a number of other people from our group who wanted to watch the sunset and play games on the beach. This was fun, though we ended up getting sand all over the hotel room. You’d think that a bunch of 20-somethings would have figured out how to avoid that problem, but apparently not. After the beach was our last dinner together on the trip, followed by a little more shopping before turning in for the night. The next morning, we awoke early to get a good jump on our day because we were staring down five hours of driving to reach Casablanca in order to tour the Hassan II Mosque. We ate our breakfast of inevitable Moroccan bread and accoutrements before boarding the bus for the lengthy trip. Personally, I like riding in the car, so it passed quickly for me, thanks in part to my friends Enya and Olivia Rodrigo. The mosque we visited in Casablanca was gorgeous. It is the largest mosque in North Africa and the only one in Morocco that can be toured by foreigners. I think it was probably one of the grandest structures I’ve seen, and it was a trip favorite for a lot of people. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see much else of Casablanca, but my impression of it was that it was by far the most European of the Moroccan cities I’ve visited. I would like to go back before I leave, so hopefully I’ll be able to fit that in, but we’ll see. Once our visitation of the mosque was completed, we boarded the bus and headed for Rabat to conclude the trip—arriving just after 7:30 in the evening. 

Overall, this trip was a phenomenal experience and one that was well-needed. This break allowed me to connect with new places, peoples, and cultures, and grow closer to the people in my cohort. In reality, there are so many things about this trip that I want to share but just don’t have the time to right now. Maybe in the future I’ll be able to write about it some more or answer questions if there are any. Also, my account of this trip is a little less refined and well-written than I’d like, but maybe that means this study abroad is teaching me to be a little more flexible and less of a perfectionist than I was before I left, which is probably a good thing. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I liked recounting it. Now, I just need to edit it (ugh). Until next time!