Berber Villages of the High Atlas Mountains Part 1- Marrakech

Oh man this is going to be so frustrating to type out without being able to upload photos or videos yet! Basically, I went on the SAS sponsored trip called “Berber Villages of the High Atlas Mountains.” It began on Friday (the 10th of September) and I am writing this entry now that I’ve gotten back on Monday the 13th. Okay here goes, hope I’m not forgetting anything.
Exchange rate: When I withdrew my Moroccan cash, it was 8.7 dirhams to the dollar; by the end of this trip people were getting about 8.5 DH to the dollar. Apparently the dirham is notorious for fluctuating wildly against the dollar.
        Day 1
        We departed Casablanca to head to Marrakech. On this first day the group of about 60 total was just in Marrakech, not in the Atlas Mountains yet.  Anyway, we met our guides Hassan, Muhammad (who always wore an orange hat), Muhammad (shaved head), and Hussein at the Casablanca train station, and then we waited for an hour and a half because the train was late. Awesome. But eventually it showed up and we boarded. I was in a cabin with 3 other tripgoers and 2 men from Kuwait. One of them spoke English and he said they come to Marrakech basically for discount shopping. It was pretty cool to talk with them. He said Kuwaitis love America, which is pretty nice to hear after the diplomat said that only 16% of Moroccans would say they approve of the US.
        Anyway the train pulled into the Muhammad VI train station in Marrakech and it was about 110 degrees there. Casablanca is pretty mild by comparison, but its downfall is that its big, dirty, unsafe, and ugly. In Marrakech we left the Muhammad VI train station and walked along Muhammad VI avenue (fun trivia: guess whose face is on all the money?) to the Hotel Oudaya, supposedly the nicest one in Marrakech. It was about 2 once everybody had finally gotten into their rooms and stuff, and then we had until 7 to wander around the city on our own. This is the point at which everything became extremely unfamiliar and extremely Moroccan.
        To get to the medina, the city center with the famous bazaar, you had to take a cab. The guides told us this should cost about 30 dirhams, or a little more than 3 dollars. But it doesn’t always because this is Morocco and there are very few fixed prices, especially in Marrakech. Anyway, myself and 3 others managed to talk the driver into 40 dirhams to get to the Souk (marketplace) but it wasn’t a big deal to have paid a little more since 10 minute cab rides in the states are like 25 dollars instead of 4.
        10 minute cab rides in the US can be scary, but Moroccan driving is an absolute free-for-all. For some reason I wasn’t actually that afraid during our numerous brushes with death and dismemberment; I just drank it all in as part of the experience. First thing you should know is most people are riding mopeds, bikes, donkeys, power wheelchairs, etc. Only about half of the vehicles on the road are actually cars, and I only saw one bike in all of Marrakech that was an actual motorcycle. Moroccans treat the dotted lines in multilane roads less as rules and more as suggestions. It’s much more common for everyone to just drive right down the middle of the road. And if the cabbie wanted to pass someone who was going slow in the left lane (this happened a lot), he’d go all the way across the double yellow line to do it. At one point our driver crossed the double line, passed in an intersection, ran a red light, and was speeding all at once, which would get him about the GDP of Morocco itself in tickets if he did it in the US. Anyway all this doesn’t quite create a picture of just how absolutely nuts traffic is here, especially inside the old medina, which I’ll get to later.
        So then a few friends and I went into the souk. I was immediately accosted by some snake charmers who were SO sure that I wanted to pose for a picture with their cobras that they put a smaller snake around my neck, led me to a box to sit on, took my camera, and snapped a photo of me with the snakes. What service! I didn’t even have to ask! This wasn’t going to be free of course. They demanded 200 dirhams, and I haggled it down to 100. My trump card was saying that posed photos like that were free in the United States, even though they probably wouldn’t be. I guess that’s an okay price for a compulsory photo though. They did have snakes after all, so I didn’t want to get them too angry. I heard later from other people that they’d throw the snakes at your face if you didn’t pay enough. Other people had to end up paying 200.
        After that I wandered around the market. Some places were outdoors and others were in a covered street. This was very welcome since if you’ll recall it was 110 at 2pm. Anyway the salesmen were very pushy by American standards and would always want you to come and look in their shop if you so much as glanced inside or made passing eye contact with them. I really began to realize that salesmanship is like an art form for them, especially in touristy areas like Marrakech. Besides giving you a good price, they have to work fairly hard to make you choose their store since so many of them sell basically the same bunch of Moroccan crafts and tourist souvenirs with only very minor variations. I bought a white Marrakech t-shirt for 120 dirham (asking price was 180). I also tried the legendary fresh orange juice out in the open part of the market. This was some of the best orange juice I’ve ever had and it was only 4 dirhams for a large glass.
        The next purchase I made was a cedarwood box with brass decorations that the shopkeeper had handmade. Or so he claimed. He showed me some of the big decorative mirrors he was working on carving as well as his toolkit. I have only his word, but it’s still a pretty nice box and he was very pleasant to talk to. He was also a pretty stubborn bargainer since he was in fact the only guy making boxes like these around (the standard move if you want the price to go lower is to say “well I’ll just go see if I can get this cheaper at some other shop.”) He asked for 250, I started at 150, and we met at 210; I only got it to 210 from 220 because it was the Eid al Fitr (basically Muslim Christmas) and he gave me a “holiday discount” on top of my “student discount.”  But anyway 24 dollars or so isn’t a bad price for it and I’m fairly certain it was genuine since unlike most of the crafts and clothes I saw, they weren’t for sale in literally every other store. This was one of the 2 souvenirs I wanted most from Morocco: a genuine locally made handicraft and a big box of mint tea. Would I find the tea as well? You’d better read this entire massive post to find out. (That’s me trying to create suspense so you’ll keep reading. Did it work?)
        As the evening approached, the souk began to get extremely crowded as food stalls were being set up in the open areas. I would have tried some food at a cleaner-looking one, but we had a dinner engagement at 7. It was supposed to be a dinner as if for Moroccan nobility with a belly dancer show at the end. Where was it? We had no idea. Somewhere in Marrakech. We hopped on the bus and it took us into the medina.
        Oh man... the medina. Imagine an ants nest with countless ants all swarming around everywhere that its too fast to see any individual ant. Now make all those ants people, make half of them cars, and put them in streets so narrow that our tour bus had to stop eventually because it didn’t fit. But minivans, compact cars, motorbikes, and donkeys still fit. The medina of an Arabic city on a Friday night is the most chaotic place I have ever been in my entire life no contest. And these narrow streets are not straight or in a grid but are actually so confused and chaotic that its as if you’re meant to get lost in there. We stumbled from the bus through side street upon side street, past all kinds of shops, bars, restaurants, bicycle repair places, homes, intersections where a stopped mule was holding up a bunch of kids on motorbikes, and just about every other thing that you can possibly imagine. Finally we arrived at the restaurant.
        Dinner was rolls and wine (food was paid for already but wine was on us... not an issue since it was low prices for high quality) followed by Moroccan salad, which is basically an assortment of all kinds of “I don’t know what this is but it’s really good” types of vegetables on little plates that everyone shares. Then came the main course. The desert is as hot as the medina is crowded as Moroccan lemon chicken is the absolute #1 best chicken I have ever eaten or will ever eat. There might’ve been better chicken in the past but I don’t remember it and if I don’t still remember it now then it wasn’t better. If you’ve never eaten Moroccan lemon chicken, go find the recipe right now. Its okay, I’ll wait. If you have had it then you might know what I’m talking about when I say it was divinely tender and tangy and I’m making myself hungry just thinking about it.
        About a dinner and a full bottle and a half of wine later (girls at the table couldn’t finish theirs themselves...) the meal ended and the belly dancers showed up. It was audience participation. They’d come and find guys sitting on the outside of the tables (where I was) and dance with them for a few minutes. Some of our professors got chosen and they were surprisingly good. Thankfully I wasn’t one of the guys that had to dance solo with them while everyone watched.
        After everything had ended I went back to the hotel and passed out fairly quickly (it might’ve been wine-related.) This is part 1 of the big Morocco post since I have a data limit on emails that I send to update the blog. Part 2 coming right up...