All Aboard the Night Train…to Marrakesh
Back-dating this to Saturday, October 21st, 2017, at the time of the train ride mentioned, even though it’s June 6th 2020, by the time I’m posting it
Our journeys to and within Marrakesh are exceptionally sound.
I should here take a brief moment to make a public service announcement in support of Moroccan tourism:
- The country is very safe: I was just earlier today saying how I feel safer here than I do in Boston. Sure, there are some hustlers, but as our concierge in Marrakesh says: they may follow you, but they’re only looking for a little business. I feel safer here when a man approaches me than I do in Boston. In Boston, men feel entitled to make uncomfortable sexual advances, to touch me, and to have the audacity to raise their voices in return when I call them out for their inappropriate behaviour. That sense of entitlement is nonexistent in Morocco, and it has contributed a great deal to my being able to relax here in a way that I never can in America.
- Travel is a breeze: We’ve taken trains or negotiated cars between cities here. The rail network is reliable, extensive, and exceedingly affordable. Prices for car travel from city to city are posted nationally, as it’s a common method of transportation for tourists, and the country goes to great lengths to make tourists feel as comfortable as possible. We split a ride with our two Dutch friends to Chefchaoen, and we took a shared taxi to Tangier. Both were simple, we never felt swindled or unsafe, and the drivers were very competent. Weirdly I’ve also had less carsickness here than I expected, although still some—mostly when I’ve exercised the poor judgement to read on winding mountain pass roads.
- It’s cheap: Prices here are affordable to the point of making haggling feel shameful, although we still do so as a matter of personal pride—I wouldn’t want anyone to think me a pushover or a fool. Tea or coffee is a dollar. A three-course meal costs twenty dollars. A night at a converted colonial mansion, lavish breakfast included, costs sixty. A four-hour air-conditioned train ride in a private coach that seats six is fifteen dollars. The train transport here far exceeds the T, and even Amtrak.
Finally, each and every person we’ve met—whether in the hospitality trades or not—has demonstrated real personal concern for our well-being and comfort, wanting to ensure that our time in Morocco is as pleasant as possible—and hoping not only that we return, but also that we tell our friends to come, too.
So I do.
I’m sitting on a train now composing this, in a cool coach of six. I almost remarked to Ryan that the car was all women, forgetting momentarily that he’s male. (It’s been weirdly nice to see women travelling alone, women driving their friends, old women on scooters. It’s worth noting that I’ve been sexually harassed here far less than I am in America, although that could be attributable to a number of factors.) A woman wears a red tank top and has a hennaed arm. Another reads. An older woman in a headscarf is using her iPad, and a fourth older woman with uncovered hair is listening to parliamentary debate on her phone. Ryan reads; I write.
We arrive in Marrakesh, check into our riad, and immediately begin scheming how we might never leave. Determining to keep our appointment to the desert, we decide to partake of the riad’s spa upon our return, and book a hammam and massage.
What a reception: Tea, cookies, a courtyard where both large plants and tiny birds live, and…more…cats…
We went on a short walk around the area and snagged an afternoon meal complete with yet more some unwanted attention. The cats in this country will. not. leave. me. alone. even as they largely ignore Ryan.
At six-thirty the next morning we descend in the dark to breakfast, Ryan still sceptical that I am actually awake at this hour. (I can do so only when I have something to prove!) We walk to the end of the road to wait in the square for our transport. When he arrives and I produce not tickets, but a conformational email in English, which he doesn’t read, he walks us back to our Riad and confirms that the two white people waiting with a day bag at the end of the road in the dark really are the ones he’s picking up.
We travel several hours by bus to the desert, stopping at some ruined kasbah—Morocco’s flavour of dilapidated medieval castle—that’s been partially rebuilt to serve the ancient desert scene needs of Hollywood and Game of Thrones.
Some Game of Thrones shit, supposedly
We ride camels an hour or so into the desert to tents where we watch the sunset and share tea with our travel companions before dinner.
John, the name I bestowed upon my worthy steed. Naturally I am in the lead.
I spend most of the camel ride lamenting the state of animal welfare in this country before I remember that I should probably also lament the state of human welfare as well. But I can’t help but think of all of the cats and dogs we’ve seen, the flies that swarm the head and suck on one of the wounds on the neck of my camel John (I didn’t understand his name in Arabic or Berber), and how I would care for them given the time and resources. I am ashamed at how I shrink away from the contact of cats, worried about their visible fleas. Weirdly the cats in this land are attracted to me, continually choosing my seat of all the available ones to sit under, my leg to rub against, my bag to sniff and scratch. Where have I gone wrong.
At our desert camp, on giant carpets laid out across the sand in the midst of a semicircle of tents, the we have tea and talk with our companions from the bus tour: five Spaniards, a Frenchman, two Slovaks, two Italians, and a Russian woman. We speak a broken mix of Spanish, French, and English, with Castilian Spanish take predominance, all that lovely lisping. I manage to bring up politics at dinner, which in served in the largest tent at the Center of the semicircle of tents, and the woman from Barcelona demeures answering her opinion on the Catalonian vote before the Italian woman asks me whether I know any Trump supporters. We discuss the inherent fear of xenophobia present in any nation’s nationalistic tendencies, and the complete schism between ‘Americans whom you would meet travelling in Morocco’ and ‘Trump supporters.’ Complementary distribution, at the major loss of one of the parties.
After dinner, back outside the tents on the carpets, we lay under the stars and navigate the night sky, finding the words for the Milky Way and several constellations in the various languages. It turns out ‘the milky way’ is the same thing in all of them: la via lactia, la voie lacté, etc. Eventually we sit up, and two of the tour guides start an awkward drum circle, even though neither of them has any rhythm. We go around obligatorily until a group of us decide to ditch and wander to a nearby group of tents where the drumming is better.
Performance over, bedtime drawing in, and back our tent (which appears to sleep 8 or so, but which tonight is sleeping only us) the backlight of my Kindle reading in bed attracts some earwigs across my pillow, so I don’t sleep as soundly as I might have.
The camel ride in the morning is shorter: the cars manoeuvred to a closer road we didn’t notice yesterday, the novelty of a camel ride worn off like our saddle-sore asses. I remark at my good fortune to find a camel who identifies himself as Bob, and I think of the toast to my grandfather that Ryan and I will make in Casablanca the next day, stationed and fighting here during World War II. One of the Spanish women, who has had particular difficulty balancing atop her steed, remarks in Spanish how good I look riding my camel. I smirk despite myself and am reminded of the teasing I once took in the back of a pickup truck in Kenya. Straight posture: the key to looking elegant regardless of your method of transport.
We return to our riad late that afternoon and confirm our spa and dinner plans before freshening up. At dinner on the rooftop terrace we reflect upon our many meals here in Morocco, and which has been our favourite. I like this meal the best because it’s the tastiest, but our breakfasts at our riad in Fez were also the best, and I particularly liked a Berber omelet—spiced and served in a tangine, with plenty of harissa that I was able to secure poured on top—on the route back from the desert. The best tea was at the rug co-op in Fez. The traditional flat bread is slightly different everywhere we have it. The desert excursion is too touristy. The dinner in Chefchaoen was the best value.
We go to bed early, relaxed after a hammam, a massage, and a bottle of Moroccan white wine with dinner. Ryan makes a joke about waking up at seven and I shoot him an angry glare that says, ‘I’ve had to be ready by six-thirty the past two days, and rising early is no matter of levity.’
Soon, at the end of this train ride, we’ll arrive in Casablanca and hopefully meet up with Abdul from the train station at the start of our journey. Bonne journée, bon voyage, everyone wishes us sincerely. I’ve finished four books this trip, and Ryan nearly two. I haven’t gotten enough sleep, but I never do. The Pats won and I’m hopeful I can talk my way into an earlier flight from New York to Boston so I can catch the tail end of the Super Bowl rematch instead of watching it from JFK or wherever it is I’m flying through.
I’ve sufficiently removed myself from my daily routine to cultivate a healthy sense of apathy towards it. I’ve followed Catherine’s sage advice and taken Monday off for a Sunday day: laundry, lunches, errands, readying myself for the week.
I know where I’ll go if I ever return to Morocco (March is the time of year to visit, apparently), and I’m already impatiently wondering where my next international trip (after Paris Weekend in the winter, of course) will be.