The Long Way to Marrakech
Morocco Road Trip
The alarm went off in Antwerp at an hour that has no business existing. Marrakech calling!
We loaded our snap suitcases into the baskets of two a-velo shared bikes and pedaled to the station in the dark, the kind of early morning where the city belongs entirely to bakers and poor decisions. First train to Brussels Airport. Then the flight south.
April 10 was the first day of the new Schengen border control system, which made us very glad we had left when we did. As it turned out, the border was not our problem.
The Moroccan border agent was.
He had the particular energy of a man who has decided that his small booth is a kingdom, and that no one enters it without learning that lesson. I had stepped forward a half-second before he summoned me. He made sure I understood this. There is a specific type of functionary who finds his authority most satisfying in its pettiest application. We met one. We moved on.
The car rental desk offered its own version of bureaucratic theater. No queue. No other clients. Plenty of time, nonetheless, to do nothing with great seriousness before eventually locating the reservation and, somewhat later, the car. Morocco was already teaching us something about the relationship between urgency and reality.
The Marrakech Medina Swallows the Car
We drove into Marrakech with confidence. We drove almost into the Medina with considerably less. The streets narrowed in the way that streets do in old cities, which is to say gradually, then suddenly, until the car was less a vehicle and more an embarrassment. We left it where we could, on a busy stretch of road that had no cars but every other form of movement: mopeds, donkey carts, pedestrians with better things to do than watch us panic. The mosque was closed. Friday prayer was coming. We grabbed our bags and walked.
The riad received us as riads do: quietly, coolly, with mint tea that arrived before we had finished the sentence. After the morning we had just survived, it tasted like a pardon.
The Car Problem, Resolved
We went back for the car. Turned it around. Found a parking garage ten minutes later. The attendant tried to charge us the tourist rate, and I paid it without complaint, because I was done with the car and the car was done with me. Some expenses are worth it just to close the chapter.
Standing on the street outside the garage, bags no longer in hand, nowhere urgently to be, we looked at each other. That was the moment. The stressors had been left behind. The vacation could now, finally, actually start.
The Medina, Properly
The center of Marrakech does not ease you in. It simply begins. Spice stalls bleeding color into the alley light, cumin and paprika, and something sweet you cannot quite name. Leather goods hanging in doorways, soft and dark, swaying when the crowd passes close enough. Someone is grilling something nearby, and the smoke goes wherever it wants.
The vendors operate on a spectrum. Some are content to let their goods do the talking. Others have decided that talking is the product and will open with a compliment, follow with a question about where you are from, and pivot to a price before you have fully processed the compliment. We smiled, kept moving, and tried not to make eye contact with the third row of scarves.
We were on a mission. Postcrossing waits for no Medina.
The Stamp Situation
The post office was findable. The security guard inside was helpful, in the Moroccan sense of helpful, which is to say he pointed us not to a counter but to a man sitting in a chair near the wall. The post office, he explained with the calm of someone delivering entirely unsurprising news, had no stamps.
The man in the chair, however, did.
Fifteen dirhams per stamp. We had no particular reference for what the official rate should have been, and the man in the chair was not volunteering the comparison. We bought a few, thanked him, and walked back into the noise and light of the medina. Whether we had paid a premium or simply the going rate for the stamps in question, we may never know. They were stamps. They were ours.
(We learned later that a stamp costs just under 10 dirham, so the tourist tax we paid was about 50%)
Couscous and Rain in Marrakech
After a nap, the sky opened. Rain in Marrakech is a committed kind of rain, the sort that turns the alleys into rivers and gives everyone the same idea at once: find somewhere warm with food. We found a small restaurant, steamed up and cozy in the way that only happens when it is properly raining outside. We had couscous. It was exactly right.
We went to bed early. Day one, accounted for.
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