Morocco, Part 1: Palm Trees in the Desert?

Hi all!

I’m back on the ship and sailing for home! I still can’t believe that I’m done with my last port!

Anyways, I have four days of stories to tell from Morocco. Here goes…

On the first day, I headed out on my trip to Marrakech and the nomad camp. It took us four hours to get from Casablanca to Marrakech by bus. As we were driving through Casablanca, I realized there wasn’t much there, so I was glad I wasn’t going to be spending any time there. I do wish that I’d been able to go to Rick’s Café, though! Yep. It exists. Apparently some woman who used to work for the US Embassy in Morocco quit her job and opened it.  Pretty cool.  Some of my friends went and said it was awesome, so I was pretty jealous.

When we got to Marrakech, I was so surprised by how gorgeous it was! There are palm trees everywhere and all the buildings are painted this pretty pinkish-red color. And unlike Alexandria and Cairo, it was so clean! That sounds like a really weird thing to notice, but after seeing how congested and dirty Egypt was, I was expecting Morocco to be similar. Not one bit, though. Most Moroccans can read and speak both Arabic and French because France occupied Morocco for a period of about 50 years in the 1900s. Also, the culture is so much more liberal than I expected! After Egypt, I figured that Morocco would be super conservative, but they’re not nearly as conservative as the Egyptians. I mean, some of the women were covered up fully, but for the most part, we all felt comfortable wearing whatever we wanted.

Our first night, we went to dinner and got to see a belly-dancing show, which was cool. After that, a lot of SAS-ers went out to this club called Pasha, which was supposedly the biggest club in Africa.  My friend Kallyn (who I met/hung out with in Mykonos) and I thought about joining them…but then opted to drink a couple of cokes and hit the sack early, forgoing the possibility of a hangover on the next morning’s 7-8 hour bus ride to the nomad camp. I felt lame at time…but was grateful for my brief lapse of responsibility the next morning when half of the people on the bus felt like shit.

Our 7-8 hour bus ride turned into a 12 hour bus ride because our tour guide liked to stop what seemed like every half an hour for the bathroom or to take pictures. I appreciated the picture stops, but the bathroom breaks were unnecessary. If one person expressed their need to pee, we stopped. If, twenty minutes later, some asshole that didn’t get off the bus at the stop before expressed their need to pee, we stopped. Then, after about 8 hours, one chick told the guy she needed to find an ATM…so, obviously, we stopped. I honestly wanted to ask her if she realized that we were going to a NOMAD CAMP. Where the hell did she think she was going to spend it!? Little did I know…

The drive was beautiful.  There’s one road that goes down the entire country and weaves its way around the mountains, so the view was amazing the whole time. After the mountains, we went through a town called Ouarzazate which has a bunch of movie studios, including the biggest one in the world. It’s where Sex and the City 2 was filmed! (We also passed by the hotel that was in the movie back in Marrakech. So cool!)  Before we got to the nomad camp, they told us we’d have about a half hour walk through the desert to get there. Our 30 minute journey through the desert turned into a 5 minute walk down a sand dune.  Glad our tour-guide was so well-informed.

There were palm trees scattered everywhere in the desert too! Definitely not how I pictured the Sahara. The nomad camp was so awesome, though! There were tons of 6-person tents held up by big wooden poles and covered with brown cloth…and they had mattress pads!...kind of sandy and dirty but I was content. There were also two dining tents with a bunch of little tables and pillows to sit on. And the bathroom tent had TOILETS. I mean, we obviously didn’t sit on them…and there were basically just holes underneath them…but the shiny, white porcelain that we got to awkwardly hover over was comforting, nonetheless. Privacy was a slight issue, though. There were these weird flaps that covered the top half of your body, so you could remain anonymous, but left the rest of you for the world to see. And you couldn’t pull the flaps together to close it because that would leave your neighbor hanging. We pretty much just took turns standing in front of the flaps so we could all pee in peace.

Stay tuned for the interesting stuff...