My Marrakech Escapade

The air is close, the smell is noxious and everyone is very noisy. I am completely lost, in a tight maze of enclosed back-alleys that make up the Souqs. Marrakech is like nowhere I’ve ever been before. As I wander aimlessly, ignoring the beck and call of merchants who are so desperate to peddle trinkets on me (mostly likely from china), I’m on the look out for any obvious tourists, so that I can ask them, in broken French most likely, for directions back to Djemaa el Fna - the central square.

You can’t ask the locals for directions, if they don’t know where you are going, they will simply choose a direction to point you in, in an attempt to be helpful; if they do know, they will offer to lead you there so that they can extract a fee from you at the other end. This is the land where everything is cheap, but nothing is free. If you want to look at your map you have to be cautious as the locals will swarm on you to offer their help. Hardly any of the streets are actually signposted and and the backstreets are such a labyrinth I’m sure that the map is only a rough guide anyway.

Getting back to the Riad (guesthouse) is a real relief, stepping through the huge reinforced wooden doors through to the central atrium, the transition is stark: calm suddenly descends upon you, incense covers up the smell of sewage from outside and the only sound you can hear is the babble of a fountain. In this large, quiet, reflective room, you feel you can actually let your guard down and relax.

Before I arrived at my hostel I had just gotten out of the taxi from the airport when a young man, in a djellaba (a Morrocan kaftan) but with Nike trainers and a baseball cap, pulled my bag out of the boot of the taxi and said he would show me to my hostel. I followed him for about 5 minutes cautiously eyeing my bag. As we reached the door of the hostel I had to barter for the cost of this short walk. I originally wanted to give him about two pounds worth of Dirhams, only to have him beg and plead with me. When the owner of the Riad opened the door, the man followed me in until I gave him and extra 3 pounds.

I leave the hostel again to go have dinner and as I eat, I can here the call to pray: the old city is covered in Mosques with towers that have loud-speaker on them. Hearing the Imams chanting is eerie and surreal as I sit there eating your tangine. At the end of such a tough day, I would love a beer, but the only place to get alcohol is from the big supermarkets and you can only find those in the French Quarter, on the other side of the city.