We found ourselves with a bit of time up our sleeves in Spain, so we decided to hop over to Africa for a taste of Morocco! We flew into Marrakech, spending our first night in a beautiful 4 star riad. The next day we moved to a cheaper option, but we were right in the thick of the action! Our hotel was about 50m from the main square, Djamaa el-Fna which absolutely comes alive at night! It i s full of people, colours, smells and sounds. There are open air restaurants cooking everything from seafood to couscous, snake charmers, henna tattooists, dancers and story teller. To the north of the square are the crazy winding laneways of the souqs (the markets) that sell everything you could imagine and are just the place for getting lost! We spent most of our time in Marrakech as we just loved the vibrancy of this city. The people were so friendly and it was like no other place we had ever been before.
But we left Marrakech for a 3 day expedition to the Sahara Desert, which was an experience that we will never forget. We rode donkeys across a river to visit a kasbah, we rode camels at sunset into the desert and camped in tents. We surfed down sand-dunes under the light of the full moon and we rode camels back out of the desert at sunrise. We visited a huge gorge and saw with our own eyes that oases really do exist in the desert. We drove over the huge High Atlas Mountains and even experienced a freak snow storm in the desert! The people here are so warm and beautiful. Our experience in Morocco is almost too difficult to put into words and is a place that we cannot wait to return to and taste again.
