A bit of culture

To be honest, I wanted to spend my Christmas holiday in Agadir lying in the sunshine and reading books. I took a walk along the beach and tossed a volleyball around a couple of times and that was enough for me.

But my two buddies and I felt a bit guilty and thought we should indulge in a bit of culture while in Morocco. So, at 6am we boarded a coach to the city of Marrakech, arriving four hours later relieved we were still alive. The coach driver thought he was behind the wheel of a Porsche.

We were dumped outside a huge mosque and told we had 15 minutes to take photos before we were whisked off to the old city of Marrakech and left with a guide who was quite keen that one of my friends needed a husband and should swap the journey home for a lifetime of couscous and camels. She politely declined.

Anyway, the guide clearly didn’t know what to do with us and after a short tour around a palace of some sort we entered the souk – a maze of stalls and small passages where the chances of being run over by a motorbike were pretty high. There were 10 of us altogether – seven English and three French – and we all avoided eye contact with the stallholders wanting to offer us “good price” and the man carrying a goat carcus in our general direction. Raw meat and fish stalls loomed on every corner and although the stench was almost unbearable, it was sad to see so much poverty and a life far removed from ours in Blighty.

We emerged unscathed from the souk into Marrakech Square, which was kinda like an outdoor circus. Men charmed snakes by playing music, then charged money to drape them around your neck, and an old fella found great amusement pulling two hedgehogs and a guinea pig out of his duffell bag and watching them run straight back into it. Your guess is as good as mine.

Now, I hate the dentist over here, but dental work in Morocco is a real toothache. A miserable looking chappy (the dentist presumably) sat at an outdoor stall (I say stall, but really it was a table) which was covered in dentures and individual teeth. Gross. I guess you picked the teeth you wanted, popped them into the denture with a bit of superglue, and chewed your way through another day. Eek!

Anyway, following lunch and chit-chat with our travelling companions – who were all equally as unimpressed with Morocco as we were – we headed home on the coach. The driver must have been as desperate as us to get home because he overtook at every opportunity, slammed his brakes on at frequent intervals and had a couple of very near misses. I had no idea whiplash was included in the price of our trip.

At 8.30pm we arrived at the hotel feeling disappointed at what was supposed to be a cultural visit. Yes, we saw the poverty of Marrakech’s old city and glimpsed a couple of historic buildings, but we got the sense we’d ben ripped off. We were dumped in the city, followed a “guide” around for a couple of hours and then left to do our own thing in a city which was very intimidating and without so much as a map to navigate our way back to the meeting point.

I can tick Marrakech off my “to visit” list now with the knowledge that it’s not the destination for a romantic weekend, more a reminder of how basic the lifestyle can be in Morocco. They haven’t grasped tourism fully yet, but could probably send visitors home with a better impression of the place than the one we left with.