So, This Is Morocco

Hello, lovelies! I’m back from my Intrepid trip into Morocco, and settling into solo travel again. This trip was *lifechanging* – not a word I take lightly. I have so much to tell you all! I’ll start here, with my journal entry from the first couple of days in the country. :)

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Morocco – December 15th.

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Well, here I am in Morocco. This is a new country for me, though not a new continent. I’m excited. The past three days have been hectic, overwhelming, and challenging. I left my heavy fiddle case in Seville with a lovely couple and boarded my dreaded RyanAir flight to Marrakech. I legit have a scar from the last time I flew RyanAir. It’s on my knee. I can show it to you sometime.

I feel like all the nerves in the world are justified when flying with a company famous for scarring people financially, emotionally, and yes, physically.

But hey, you get lucky once in a while, and this flight went miraculously smoothly. I squished things down and yanked on straps and even took the hip belts off my backpack so that it would qualify as a “Priority Bag” and fit on the flight. Yay, Tortuga Backpacks. I got on just fine, had a fabulous flight over the 14km stretch of sea, and landed in dusty Marrakech just as the sun set behind the Atlas Mountain Range. 

Wow. 

From minute one, Morocco has been wildly intoxicating.

I haven’t felt this heady with adventure in years. Central America is like a second home, Europe is fabulous but not tricky, and let’s be real – I didn’t really get around Indonesia much on my own. This is the first time on this trip that I’ve felt like I’m *really* honest-to-god traveling. Crazy, right? 

My riad was a cozy little place in the center of the Medina. I had a guy from the riad pick me up at the airport to avoid wandering the unfamiliar maze of the Marrakech marketplace at night – which was a good call. I would never have found this place. 

The universe arranged the BEST surprise for me – dear travel friends Will and Jess Sueiro and their two fantastic kiddos were in town at the same time as me, completely coincidentally. There’s nothing like landing somewhere strange and a little intimidating only to find that you have people there already. This was such a gift. They found my riad and took me on my first dive into Moroccan culture with a fish dinner in the main square. I’ve been on my own again since then.

This place is redefining color for me the way that Guatemala did the first time I visited.

The Medina is a virtual whirlwind of color and light. I’ve seen many marketplaces and town centres around the world, from the fish markets in Vietnam to the crowded square in Chichicastenango, but medinas and souks here are their own thing. It’s as if they’ve stood there, unchanged, for the past 12 centuries – because they essentially have. When you walk through the medinas here, there’s a sense of permanence along with the ever-changing throngs of people and goods and donkeys and stray cats. It’s like, no matter what changes in the outside world, this place will always exist in more or less exactly the same way it does now, as your feet lead on aimlessly down the corridors. 

I saw an “escape room” advertised inside the Medina and had to laugh – like I’d need to pay for that experience here! Ha. 

I wandered for a long time, wrapped up in a new shawl and enjoying the feeling of nowhere to go, no schedule to adhere to. I walked past old women in thick wool capes, past pink-walled palaces and intricately tiled walls, through little tunnels and across wide squares. A man rattled past me at top speed, swaying upright like an acrobat in a tiny cart pulled by a very determined-looking donkey. 

It was hard to really see anything, or to feel like any of it was even real. There’s a soft golden-pink haze that hangs over everything in Marrakech, blurring the lines in the distance and giving a dream-like feel to the world. I sort of floated around in it until I was hungry, and then I sat in the square and watched monkey handlers walking hand in hand with their little beasties and touts selling sunglasses to grumpy-looking Englanders until my lunch arrived.

The food here. Um. Yes. To be honest, it’s not that creative, but it’s fabulous. The most common dish is tangine – a sort of stew made in a special clay pot. The ingredients vary but the outcome is more or less the same. Tasty! Add to that some freshly baked bread, some little Moroccan cakes with almond paste, and mint tea, and you basically have the Moroccan menu down. 

It comes boiling hot. I burned my mouth before learning to slow down and blow every bite. At dinner, I had another bowl of tangine and watched the smoke from the vendors grills roll underneath the tarp above me until it spilled out and cascaded up towards the full moon like a topsy-turvy waterfall. The story tellers chanted and stomped and threw rifles high into the air in spinning arcs nearby. 

So, this is Morocco.