The Adventures of Doug and Bec: Morocco

After a rest night in Marrakech we headed down once again to the train station, this time to catch the train to Casablanca and eventually Fez. We had planned to stay one night in Casablanca and then head to Fez, and luckily we did as we found the city of Casablanca to be dirty and disgusting. We had heard fairly mixed reports about it from other travellers and wanted to see for ourselves, but all we found was a very dirty and run-down city. The only noteworthy aspect was on the walk along the coastline we saw the Casablanca Mosque, which was an incredible marble/sandstone building of amazing height. Despite the disappointment in Casablanca, we did not lose any travel time, as to get from Marrakech to Fez we had to travel via Casablanca anyway.

After the night in Casablanca we resumed our train ride to Fez (Marrakech-Casa and Casa-Fez both about 3 hours). We had been told by a number of travellers that Fez was the best place they visited in Morocco so we had relatively high expectations of it…. Compared to Casablanca at least! Once again the train station turned out to be a good new facility. Indeed all aspects of train travel in Morocco seemed good except the lack of online bookings. The trains were clean, frequent, on-time and had good food carts.

Once again we got a little harassed by taxi drivers when exiting the train station, but we finally found a driver willing to take us and who knew the hotel we had booked called Hotel Delilah. We shortly headed off (with bags on top of the taxi not tied on… got used to this) and headed the 10km from the train station to the Medina area which for once was on the outskirts of a city rather than in the centre. We got to Delilah easily and quickly and checked in. The hotel manager showed us a number of rooms that we could pick from, and even advised us that their best room was full that night but we were welcome to swap the next day, a very good welcome overall. The rooms were large and bed fairly comfortable. The buildings were a little old but in relatively good repair. The rooms all had different colour/pattern tiles on the floors and half way up all the walls which we had learnt was very typical for Morocco.

After settling in to the room we were offered to be showed into the Medina to somewhere for dinner. Because it was already about 9pm we took this up readily and had a nice dinner of mixed salad, chicken skewers and fruit before getting to bed.

The next morning we slept in a little and then swapped rooms. We had noticed the night before that our bathroom windows faced a street and kids were jumping up trying to look in the windows! We ended up in an even larger room with a bathroom and a double and a single bed. Very good for the under $20 per night we were paying. After getting a room change sorted, and doing some in room clothes washing once again, we headed out to explore the Medina.

We had read that the Medina in Fez is the largest city area in the world where you are not allowed cars. It quickly led up to its reputation for size and amount of shops, and we were pleasantly surprised about how nice the people were. They would ask you to have a look at their shop as you passed, but when saying no they were nice about it and told u to have a nice day a lot of the time. This was a new experience after being in Marrakech! The whole Medina area is surrounded by 30ft walls and there are only a number of entrances to the area, each called a ‘Gate’. Our first stop in the Medina was Café Clock near the “Blue Gate”. This café was a four story plus terrace building that had tables on all levels. We ended up having a nice $10 lunch on the roof where we witnessed the hour “call” from all the Mosques in the area. I cannot say the ‘chanting’ was nice, but it was definitely a good experience!

After lunch we looked around a few shops and bought a couple of leather bracelets and Bec bought a little tea pot like the ones she had been eyeing off throughout Morocco. We actually ran out of money (not that we actually had much on us) and had to head back to the Hotel to find an ATM.

After doing some research on Tripadvisor, we discovered what had been rated as the best restaurant in Fez. This was to be a tapas type restaurant (where we actually were the only ones dining) where we ate camembert bruschetta and chicken pastry before turning in again.

On our second full day in Fez we both came down with a bit of a stomach bug so spend a bit of the day in bed. In the afternoon I ventured out to print out our Ryanair boarding pass for the following day. For those not familiar with the airline, you have to have a printed ticket otherwise they charge you 100 euro ($125) to reprint it! They are a disgusting airline but by far the cheapest! After finding a printing shop I did a little bit of shopping and found that most of the store owners were more interested in bargaining with a male shopping by himself than when I was with Bec… I managed to by seven items of jewellery (earrings and bracelets) for $4 when they were meant to be $8.

On our last day in Fez we did some more shopping as everything was so incredibly cheap. We ended up buying a Tagine and some nice cactus silk poofs that matched the blanket we had bout in Tangier. The hotel was nice enough to let us check out at 4pm rather than 11am which was excellent. After a day of shopping all we felt like was a shower, and we managed to get one before packing up our bags and purchases and heading to the airport that was 20km from town to catch a night flight to London to continue our journey.