The night we arrived in Marrakech we joined a Street Food Tour. We both love food and find that doing a tour on the first night allows you the possibility of meeting other travelers and helps you get your bearings of the new city. We met the group around 6:30pm and didn’t arrive back to our riad until around 11pm. We walked through the medina, learning about different vendors and trying around 8 different food items. None of the food was a homerun on the tour, but we tried a lot of items that we otherwise would not have tried during our time in Morocco. One of the more interesting items we tried was preserved beef, which reminded us of beef jerky. The tour host explained to us that Moroccan culture preserves a lot of food items because historically there were no refrigerators of course, and having one today is not necessarily a given in Morocco. The beef was preserved with salt and the fat from the animal. It is an interesting and different site to see in the market, as it looks like a mound of butter because there is so much fat that you can’t really see the beef. We also tried a Moroccan spiced drink, soup, various other handheld meat items, a refreshing juice, and some traditional Moroccan almond sweets. We met some nice folks on the tour, specifically an older Dutch couple that took an interest in our year-long adventure, but we did not meet up with any of them while we were in Marrakech.
On our second day we wandered through the medina and souks and visited Madrasa Ben Youssef and Le Jardin Secret. The Madrasa is an old college with beautiful tile and architecture. Jen snapped some great photos with her new camera and we were able to pose for the “I went to Morocco” photos on balconies and in front of large ornate doors. The gardens were a nice way to escape the loud and chaos of the medina. It is broken up into two sections, one with plants and trees that are indigenous to Morocco and the other with plants and trees that are from other countries around the world but have a similar climate to Morocco. I personally enjoyed seeing 3-4 different agave plants next to each other and realizing how different they can be from one another depending on their origin. After being a tourist in the morning and afternoon we grabbed a taxi to the only rock climbing gym in Morocco, outside of the center of Marrakech. It was nice to get on some routes before we headed to Todra, and met a few local climbers that were really nice and gave us some insight into climbing in Morocco.
The next day we took a tour into the Atlas Mountains to do a day hike. Before our trip we contemplated doing a longer trek in the Atlas but decided it was most likely going to be too cold to do a multi day trek or try to summit Mount Toubkal (the highest peak in Morocco). There was one other couple from Budapest doing the day hike with us, and we took the 1.5 hour drive to meet our guide. Along the way we stopped in a Berber village for a “Berber breakfast” which was just bread and some dips. We were happy we grabbed breakfast to go from our riad before we left in the morning. We got to see how argan oil is made with a stone device and manual labor, and of course we were given the opportunity to purchase an endless variety of cosmetics and oils.
The hike itself was not strenuous, but it was really nice to get out into some nature and get a sweat going. The hike began in a mini forest with a bunch of pine trees that were planted only a decade ago after there were a lot of landslides into the villages. We got some nice views of Mount Toubkal and experienced some of the nastiest wind I have ever experienced while hiking. I’d guess the gusts were up to 35 mph and pretty constant for around 1 hour. We finally descended the mountain into a protected valley where we had lunch and then continued our descent into a village. We again were offered plenty of opportunities to buy rugs and trinkets. Descending through the village would not be my first choice, but luckily the lower village was really pretty and they have a cool aqueduct style system to get fresh water from the mountains into the villages. The hike consisted of more downhill than uphill and was super chill, so not something we would recommend to our adventure friends back home but like I said earlier we were just happy to be outside and see some nature.
On our last day in Marrakech we again walked the medina, but this time with the intention of Jen being able to snap more photos with her nice camera. We accomplished this mission and grabbed a nice pita lunch from a stall we had passed the previous day. Later in the evening we met up with one of Jen’s friends she met in Croatia while traveling last year and had a nice chat over tea and juice (the Moroccan way). The medina in Marrakech is quite hectic and the many motorbikes going through the narrow streets gets annoying and overwhelming, but we found the city to be vibrant and more enjoyable than Fes. Marrakech is also more touristy than Fes, so we got hassled a bit more continuously there but nothing overbearing and it was easy to ignore or walk away from. We also found Marrakech to be a bit more expensive (presumably because it is more touristy), but still very affordable and great meals!
