Our route to Marrakech was a little wonky, courtesy of having to drive back to Casablanca to drop off the rental car before catching a train to Marrakech. We effectively travelled two sides of an isosceles triangle, making what could’ve been a 2-hr journey take about 7 or 8. Being that it was the only downside to having the rental car (sketchy police aside), it was a detour we could live with.
We arrived in Marrakech feeling buoyant about the long weekend ahead of us. I think Rich and I were equally excited to be meeting up with friends, and for lots of reasons beyond just having other company for the first time in four full months of travel together – the first being that we didn’t actually think Dean and Giselle would be able to accept the invite to come join us.
After gleefully making a grocery and wine stop (other than a couple of glasses in Kathmandu and Istanbul, I hadn’t had wine since December!), we started our time in the city by once again getting stung by a taxi driver, which didn’t set the tone I’d been hoping for. Note: insist on the meter, even when the taxi driver pushes back. I thought his resistance to turning on the meter (that he confirmed he had prior to us getting in the cab) was suspicious and was cross with myself afterwards for not trusting my gut.
Dean and Giselle were arriving in the early part of the evening and we had plans to enjoy dinner at the riad so as to make life as simple as possible that evening. We hadn’t seen them in about a year and had plenty of catching up to do while we enjoyed the beef tagine with peas and artichoke hearts (‘tis the season!) and side dishes prepared for us by our wonderful housekeeper Fatima.
We had a city tour the next day that ended up being a bust, being extraordinarily heavy on history and Moroccan supremacism and light on personal interaction. For way longer than we needed to, we toured Slat Al Azama synagogue, since none of us had ever been in one; and admired the tilework at Bahia Palace, where I laughed when our guide told us it was pointless to take photos of the elaborately decorated ceilings because he’s never seen a photo that does it justice.
Amidst the tedium, there was some levity. In the synagogue, we saw a circumcision chair that resulted in far more questions than any of us had the courage to ask in the moment. Boy, did I have some weird Google search history afterwards, though! Bahia Palace led to some interesting people-watching and perhaps some intentional photo bombing. Dean and G got their first real walk (although it was more of a frogmarch) through the medina, where we also unexpectedly walked straight into the action in an avian slaughterhouse. Our guide’s relentless repetition of the fact that there are two stories to go with every detail of the city’s history resulted in us spending the rest of the weekend offering the response, “There are two stories…,” when anyone asked just about anything. So, perhaps it wasn’t a total bust.
Along the way, we also managed to make a morning stop for Moroccan doughnuts, served piping hot alongside tea that pairs well with the unsweetened dough and eaten at a streetside table for the best people watching, and lunch was our chance to introduce Dean and G to mechoui (lamb that is slow-cooked in a pit underground) that we ordered by the kilo and ate, fingers slick with grease, with flatbread and cumin salt. I’m convinced it’s one of Morocco’s most indulgently simple meals.
We had a bit of time at the riad that afternoon before heading out for an evening at the home of the mother of one of my industry contacts, where we enjoyed a spectacular dinner of tagines, vegetables and a show-stopping seafood b’stila made with luxuriously spiced rice vermicelli, shrimp and fish all wrapped in layers of pastry, each one so thin you could just about do an eye exam through it. Our dinner companions were some of Youssef’s friends and four American tourists – decades-long friends travelling together for the umpteenth time. Conversation was both easy and entertaining, and before long, it was 11pm and some of our other local companions were falling asleep at the table. Time to go.
We had a hike planned for the following day, so met our driver first thing in the morning and headed into the Atlas Mountains. Our first stop was a Berber women’s cooperative, which I knew was done explicitly for tourists, but was worth our friends seeing. The poor woman who ran us through various explanations of different products had no idea that we were about to inadvertently put her patience through the ringer. These cooperatives are based largely around argan products, many of which are scented. Sometimes, I just pretend I can smell because it’s easier; but when someone’s English is strong enough (as in this case), I tell them I can’t smell and save us both some trouble. As she held out a wand laden with scented oil meant for cuticles, I said, “Oh, I don’t have a sense of smell.” Without missing a beat, she lowered the wand, brushed some on my middle finger and moved on to Dean who sniffed and then, pointing at the gap where his middle finger would be, said, “Oh, I don’t have a finger” – at which point our table burst into giggles because really: what are the chances that you’d get two people in a row missing the two things used for sampling a single product?! Our hostess was good-spirited and understood the laughter wasn’t aimed at her, and we all made it through the rest of the sampling in good humour.
The hiking route was interesting, with river crossings, spectacular valley views, and a healthy dose of rocky scrambling. Midway through the hike was, however, probably not the right time to learn that G doesn’t do especially well with heights. Or bridges. She managed to keep that well under wraps for the first few kilometres, but a photo stop on a particularly large rock near a drop-off was enough to make her vocally choose more solid ground. There’s a long-standing joke that G’s body thinks out loud, so we had some very long and loud bouts of laughter when looking back at photos from the day and discovered one particular shot of her descending the trail: with her fingers splayed and outstretched foot pointed, she very much looked like she’d prefer to kick-ball-change her way right off that mountain.
On our way back into the city, we stopped for lunch at a butcher shop, where you order your kefte beef by weight before the butcher grinds it and the neighbouring grillmaster finishes the process and serves it alongside grilled vegetables and flatbread. Yet another way that Morocco does simple food beautifully! We climbed back into the car for the drive along winding roads and back to the city, full of food and smelling of beef and charcoal smoke.
Late lunch and evening champagne (oooh!) meant we opted for pizza and laughs on the rooftop before a terrible effort to introduce Dean and G to euchre – a rather significant challenge after several bottles of wine and not playing for a number of years, but we got there (mostly) eventually! We rarely get a chance for visits that are longer than a few hours every 8-12 months and there’s often jetlag involved, since “Hotel Smith” is usually our crashpad during each trip to the UK. Having time to do something as frivolous as enjoying multiple rounds of cards after a full catchup felt seriously luxurious.
After a whirlwind start, the weekend gradually slowed in pace. There were some morning runs with G, who is possibly the best running partner for each of us in different ways; a leisurely breakfast in the riad and coffee runs to get Dean and I a morning caffeine hit while the other two enjoyed their tea. Walks through the medina included wrong turns both intentional and not, but always included a stop for fist bumps with the boys in our alley. A spectacular dinner at Le Troup Au Mur taught us that meatball-stuffed offal tastes far better than it sounds and was followed up with an evening meander across Jemaa el-Fna, where we watched Berber folk musicians and I got to introduce the others to my favourite game: fishing for pop bottles (yes, it’s every bit as random as it sounds).
One of two lasting memories from the weekend will be our group outing to Hammam Mouassine. We pre-booked our hammam timeslots and massages for afterwards, and we parted ways at the door as we headed to our hammam in gendered pairs. I’d read a helpful bit of info beforehand about what to expect, which was useful as far as preparing us for a certain level of nakedness, but the comedic relief that would come along with said nudity was not something for which I was fully prepared.
Hammam Mouassine is a local hammam, not a spa. You’ll find Moroccans using it as their neighbourhood bathhouse, since that’s exactly what it is: a no-frills, no-privacy (and sometimes no-dignity) situation. Come in, strip to your bathing suit bottoms, and follow the abrupt instructions gruffly given (or gestured) by your hammam attendant.
When G and I entered the changeroom, we undressed and waited for instruction before entering the washing room. We entered a space with arched ceilings that are hundreds of years old, and I was utterly captivated by the small holes in the ceiling where pinpricks of sun shine through and light up the steam, even holding up my leg so I could stick my toe in the light beaming down from the ceiling. It’s a photographer’s dream, really (apart from the minor detail that you’d never be allowed to take photos in there).
Brought back to the present by a dousing of water, I tried to take in the details as we were each unceremoniously soaked, scrubbed and rinsed by women who were clearly catching up on the gossip. Giselle’s attendant had good multi-tasking skills, but mine clearly couldn’t simultaneously rant and rinse: there were multiple times where I wondered if I was done, only to have the scrubbing resume with an intensity best described as an attempt to erase the very fabric of reality.
We were shifted from lying to seated to standing to seated before being bumped to the adjacent resting room – where I noticed a streaky handprint on the wall and the word “help” written above it, so I suppose it’s not all dreamy light…. We were then moved back to the main room, where G was told to sit on a new mat and I perched on the bench opposite. As I did a further creative study of the ceiling light, G’s bathing suit bottoms were yanked off and then sharp movement caught my eye and I adjusted my gaze just in time to watch Giselle get slapped in the face by an entire bucketful of water. The resulting gasp and look of shock was worth the price of admission, and I’m pretty sure my laughter could be heard in the depths of the medina. The rinsing process was so thorough that it seemed impossible that two hands could create such a constant onslaught of water.
I can’t help but wonder if locals find it bizarre that foreigners need instruction on how to bathe, but the process feels so unfamiliar at first because it seems somewhat ritualised – and having someone else scrub your back as though trying to erase three generations off your family tree is, I suppose, part of the experience.
After having 173 layers of epidermis scrubbed from our bodies, we moved on to a massage that would’ve been relaxing if it hadn’t been so…slippery. Giselle is a trained sports massage therapist, and she has commented in the past that her instructors made it explicitly clear that therapists are not there to turn clients into salad – that is, don’t douse them in oil. I can’t say that our therapists that day had ever received the same instruction. I slithered off the table after 30 minutes and, as I felt essential oil trickle down my spine, I half-wondered whether I could turn the locker room into a group Slip ‘n’ Slide using only the oil remaining on my skin.
We reconvened with the guys as they were enjoying their post-hammam tea and proceeded to laugh the entire way home about our experiences, which I best summarised as “everything, everywhere, all at once.” That laughter may not have been the intended result, but it was worth the few pennies it cost us, even if it meant we each had to use about a litre of soap to try to get half of the oil residue off afterwards.
On our final full day together, we chose to do a food tour that Dean found through Air BnB Experiences and it was the best decision for our group, being as we are, four friends who most commonly come together around a table of excellent food. Not only did our passionately political female guide give us an interesting counter-balance to the pro-Morocco masculine perspective offered by the guide for our city tour, but we also sampled our way through offerings from vendors in a truly local neighbourhood that was, ironically, almost walking distance from the airport. We ate our way through flatbread rolled with lamb and fermented butter; skewers of chicken and pita stuffed with sardine meatballs to die for; got to see the furnace room of a local hammam so we could understand how these do double-duty as public ovens; we ate yogurt that tasted like creme brulee and dranks fruit smoothies made in layers so that the flavour changed every few sips. It was a memorable introduction to some foods that tourists don’t always find and others that they might not be willing to try without an introduction. We left our guide with big hugs and I felt so grateful that Dean had done a little digging so we could take a small chance that would reap such a huge reward.
The next day, we packed our things and said our goodbyes, leaving Dean and G at a lunch spot as we headed off to pick up a rental car that would take us towards the Algerian border.
Grateful for: friends with adventurous spirits