19.06.18

No need for an early start today as our only plan for day was to get ourselves from Casablanca to Marrakech on the train. The train station isn’t even 100m away from the hotel so it took us a grand total of 5mins to walk over, find the tix machine, press the English flag and order ourselves 2 tix, first class to Marrakech. Trains run every hour (and considering we’re staying across the road) so we bought our tix for 30mins time and went back to hotel to check out and get ourselves across to the train.

The train to Marrakech has two classes, first + second. First class is just one carriage, divided into seven or eight compartments with 6 ppl sitting in each compartment. What appealed to us about first class?.. slightly larger seat sizes, $15 more and aircond… apparently!

So we get on the train to discover that we are sharing our compartment with one other.. no probs we say and sit back in our large chairs as the train pulls away. 10min later and the train stops and on get another two ppl into our compartment! By now both of us are starting to feel a bit warm and are surprised that our compartment is almost full (and are thinking that the train must be fuller than we thought).. Another 10mins down the track and we are both perspiring and decide to get up and go for a walk down the carriage, to discover that most of the compartments are dead empty and that the train is bloody hot!

We grab our day packs (leave our big bags up in the racks) and hot foot it (no pun intended) out of the hot box and into an empty (albeit not much cooler) compartment to play some cards. We whittled away thirty odd minutes all the time getting hotter and hotter.. so much for aircond! Eventually the food truck came by, which enabled us to get ourselves a cold water, coke and some pringles + then surprise, surprise the aircond kicked in! Before I knew it I was donning my jumper as it went from boiling hot to freezing cold in less than 15mins. More card playing and before we knew it the three and a bit hours had passed and we were pulling into the ornate Marrakech train station.

Off the train and out into the heat.. thirty mins later and we had walked the 2km from the station to our Riad within the Medina. We had booked our accom the other evening at the Barca airport and although we knew the Riad was good (it scored over a 9 on booking.com) we had no idea it was SOOO good. On arrival we were greeted with some Moroccan tea (hot mint tea—very refreshing after lugging around 20 odd kgs for 2km in over 30deg temps) and two very comfy chairs under shady trees. We were shortly greeted by the Riad pets.. three super cute tortoises who also call the Riad home- one of them even tested out my toe by having a little nibble of my shoe! 40min or so later and we were taken up to our room which turned out to be this friggin’ palace! We’d booked a suite (as it was the only thing left in hotel—and wasn’t super exy) so we knew we’d be comfortable but we were given the Royal Suite! Seriously bigger than our cute little house in Melbourne! Two bedrooms + two bathrooms! One of which is honestly bigger than our kitchen and dining room in Melbourne. Not only are the rooms massive but they are completely decorated in the Moroccan style, complete with a huge octagonal sky light that you can open or close depending on your mood! I can’t describe the room, hopefully the photos do it justice!!

We kicked back for the afternoon at the palatial Riad, enjoying a swim, a hot shower and a rest up under the trees. We had agreed to stay for dinner at the Riad so dinner time rolled around and we feasted on a traditional Tajine of lamb and veges, gazpacho soup + cremé brulee… yum yum! From dinner we headed out of the Riad and down to the heart of the Medina to check out Djeema el Fnaa. This is a “must do” thing in Morocco. It is a huge square outside of the main mosque that houses hundreds of little food stalls and hundreds of singers/ players/ acrobats/ story tellers/ junk sellers.. I’ve never seen anything like it.. A cacophony of sights and sounds greet you as soon as you get near.. Thousands of people in this huge square and everywhere you go you hear drums playing/ people singing/ yelling out/ dancing. Nothing like I’ve ever seen before and probably won’t see again. The square has been hosting people every evening since 1000AD and I’d agree that some of the sites/ sounds probably haven’t changed in that time.. biggest thing that has changed is the mobile phones + neon lights that now grace the entirety of the square but otherwise you can tell that the good times have been had in this square for many hundreds of years. Djeema el Fnaa, we’re going to visit you again and again whilst we’re in Marrakech!  IMG_3381 (2)