Castles, Cobblestones and Crepes: Morocco

Ok so, It's been 6 months since I've updated this blog!! Whoops, so here it goes, as I try and remember the last wonderful months I had in Europe!!!

Lavinia, Shanon, Emily, Mark and I, took a week long trip to Morocco! And boy was this an experience of a lifetime! One that I have reflected on many a times since. We knew Morocco is not everyones first, second or even third top choice of travel designation, but you know what, we are Erasmus students studying abroad in Germany, that's not everyone else's first choice either in their third year of University. Shanon and I both have an interest in the Arabic world, considering we both have taken some language training in Arabic. I took Arabic my first semester in Heidelberg, but in Arabic to German! That was actually really fun and not to complicated. Lavinia is my right hand lady and she goes where I go, ok not entirely, but she also has an immense urge to travel and see the world. She has a little bit of the middle eastern lineage in her heritage, so she even had closer ties connection to this far off wonder. With all of us pumped and ready to go, we eagerly sat in our seats for the 3 hour flight to Marrakech. Which to me is so insane to fly only three hours and be not only in another country but another continent! AFRICA! I drive five hours just to get to my University to home back in Oregon! Upon arriving into the airport in Marrakech, everything felt normal, just another airport, we did have a few problems getting a bank card to work to rent our car, but after several tries and methods, we successfully had a car. But guess what, we're not in Europe or Amerika anymore, this car was nice, we named her "Chocolate thunda", but rather quite small! It fit all five of us in a tight sardined type way. And on top of that, the trunk was limited to only three bags and the others were thrown on top of everyone in the back seat and the passengers seat! We had that baby loaded down. And later to find out, the poor thing barley had any horse power to haul our fat asses around. Only two of us had a license, Mark and I, so we said we would take turns driving, as we planned to drive through and around the whole country in one week. He started off the trip driving, that lasted 5 minutes, all the way to the gas station. I then volunteered and took over. If you ever thought driving in Portland or New York or some other big ass city was hard, no no no no my friend, you are wrong. In Morocco there are no speed limits, there are no lines on the road, there are stop lights but not the best, and whole families of five on one scooter buzzing around. At this time, it was night time, I'm guess rush hour, or it's always rush hour, and dark. You had to be aware at all times and in every direction what is going on. And so much for road rules, it's all for yourself out there, you gotta be on complete bitch stat. If you are not already driving forward two seconds before the light turns green, you will get a nice little honk directed straight to you. Eventually after getting lost a few times on the way out thanks to our wonderful GPS, we named her, but I forgot her name, probably something along the lines of cranky old hag, we got out of the city of Marrakech and on the road south to our first destination Ouarzazate. Our GPS told us something along the line of like a 4 hour drive or something, hmm not to bad we all thought to ourselves. I told them they could sleep if they wanted, but that would be that last thing on anyones agenda for the next five hours. We kind of failed in researching our actually road plans, what we had in store blew us out of our minds. This journey was to cross the High Atlas Mountains, but not just any mountain pass, one that I personally would never cross again consisting of narrow roads and hairpinning bends. The highest peak of these Mountains reach above 4000 meters and we were at times at the peaks of this mountain, with direct drops off the mountain to either side of us. We had no idea this was in store for us. We were all at the tips of of our toes the entire drive. I would like to thank my mom for teaching me how to drive, or else I honestly think we could easily of have had an horrendous accident. This road was just insane. I mean at points when you could see if you were to in anyway go off the road for any reason, our car would've rolled, rolled and rolled all the way to the bottom. I am glad we drove it at night or else I think I would have shit my pants. And with countless blind corners, good thing we had the advantage of seeing their headlights in an event of meeting traffic on this drive. I later found out Emily was about to have an anxiety attack the entire drive. Al-Hamdolilla we finally made it safe and sound to our first stop. Later laying in bed, Lavinia and I couldn't still fully grasp the concept that we actually just survived that drive, it felt surreal. For each of our designations in Morocco, we stayed about two nights in each place then moved on to our next designation. Ouarzazate was a spot on city of what most would think of Morocco, desert and dry. It's a little town out in the desert with a lot of history. Buildings were made of sun dried brick dating all the way back to the 17 century! It was a touristy little town, so lots of cheap stuff to buy, we had to quickly learn how to haggle! At first seemed a little strange, but by the end we were masters at bargaining. We even got the opportunity to have a real Tajine dinner and tradtional "Berber" (native Moroccon tribe) music, some locals invited us back over to their shop later to enjoy in on the festivities, something I think most don't get the chance to experience. Being a Muslim based country and with direct sunlight all day, the natives dressed in long clothing covering their entire body with clothing and for the women their hair was to be wrapped in hijabs or their entire faces covered too known as "Burqua". You could spot the tourist out like a sore thumb. The temperature to us was warm! We wore tank tops and shorts, but to them being in April it was still rather chilly. We quickly came to recognize the common local food in Morocco was Tajine, consisting of meat, vegetables and sauce, not only was it very tasty, it was fairly cheap. Fruit drinks were also cheap! A glass of fresh squeezed orange juice was I believe only in 5 cent Euro. Their money was the Moroccan Dirham. The exchange rate was about 1 euro to 10 Dirham, so a fairly nice trade off! Luckily we were visiting in the off season, so our hostels were are all relatively cheap and we pretty much had the whole thing to our selves! Which meant breakfast was all to our selves too!

After Ouarzazate we drove to the real desert with the gigantic dunes to the city of Merzouga. Here we got the chance to go see some live local Berber dancing, a little trek through the dunes in a Jeep, where we got to see where some old rock mining was done, how a little local family of two women and little boy live off only the land all year long while her husband is tending to the sheep day in and day out, and on our back we got to stop and witness the sunset over the dunes. The next morning we had to rise and shine bright and early. We took a camel ride through the desert to see the sunrise. What we didn't know is that we would have to climb to the top of the biggest dune upon reaching it, that was a little harder than planned. Let's just the the little skinny ones made it, but Lavinia and I didn't quite get to the peak. But none the less, we did get to experience a once in a lifetime sunrise over part of Sahara desert known as the Erg Chebbi Dunes. Freezing our little bums off was well worth it.

Our next stop was the city Fez, which is one of the bigger cities. This drive was rather different than the first two. As we drove north we went from the desert to more of a tropical greener climate. At one point in the road we even pulled over to stare at some monkeys just chillen on the side. Fez was a very busy little city with lots of shopping. Here is where I bought myself, my and my two nephews all matching little woven type jackets. Here we visited the tanneries, where the hide from animals is made into leather. I would not care if I were to ever go there again, it smelt so bad, I could not breath through my nose, it was disgusting, but interesting, not sure how people could work there, props to them.

From Fez we traveled West to Casablanca, and thus ever more changing scenerey. Now we are at the top of the country and reaching coastline. Here right from the very beginning we met a local boy, who had the hots for Lavinia, him and his older friend ended up showing us around the city for the next two days. Well Lavinia and I, the group got split up here. We ate seafood one night, with our plates heaping with seafood, we thought shoot, this is gonna be expensive, nope, turned out to be only 5 euros! Which easily could've been 60 euros or more in Europe! We also got to ride little ponies on the beach, how cute, all the while the ten year old boy leading my pony kept caressing my leg, I guess he was a just a little curious. Hey, but I'm not complaining... hahah jk.. I felt sorry for the poor pony, I was bigger than it! But it was fun! Our last night there we ordered in Pizza (so american) and got a cake to celebrate Emily's birthday, was a great surprise for her!

Our final destination was back to Marrakech where we were to fly back out of. Our flight wasn't until later in the afternoon, so we left Casablanca early and got to Marrakech early and walked around. This was by far the most touristy city, but that is to be expected, it has the biggest airport in Morocco and also my least favorite city of Morocco. Here finally we got henna tattoos! We did ask around first at how much they were, so we kinda got ripped off and paid more than we should've. Damn, they got us! Here was also the hottest, we were nice and sweaty for the plane ride home.

At this point we all had survived the bizarre driving, men haggling us, exhausting days, and early mornings, up until about 5 minutes before arriving back to the airport where we almost died. So I'm cruising along the main back, probably going around 65 miles and hour, and it being the main road, I wasn't aware of the stop light in the middle of the route, by the time I saw it red and the intersecting traffic quickly emerging in my path, I at first hit the brakes then quickly realized there was no way in hell we could stop in time, so I gunned it and swerved right around the oncoming truck missing him by no more than a few centimeters. I have no idea what thoughts were going through my head at that except that we almost died. I don't think no one else even noticed until I said something. But none the less, finally we made it back in one piece. We gave the car back, grabbed our bags and loaded the plane.

This trip is one of a lifetime and one I know I'll never forgot, but I'm honest to say, I was happy to be going home, to Germany.