Marrakesh | A city that is truly Enchanting, Vibrant & Bustling 🌇

Modern day Marrakesh

In Marrakesh you can visit the most amazing Palaces, Medinas, Holy Buildings, Jardin’s, Museums & Restaurants. Whilst Marrakesh is utterly alluring, the trip was certainly not without hiccups shall we say!

For the first time, I brought my Kilt on this trip & bought a camera tripod so I could try & get some semi respectable photos to share on this blog. This is where the dramas began. I had found a beautiful place to take some photos (Parc El Harti), getting there early doors to avoid the massive crowds. Like a true amateur I had not done a trial run with the tripod / camera delay for photos. The tripod came with a little bag, which I placed on the ground beside the tripod when taking photos. As I was pulling a pose, a stray dog came running by & scooped up the camera bag & hightailed away from me. So I had to chase after the dog to get the bag back, he was having the time of his life, completely mugging me off, eventually I successfully managed to retrieve the bag.

As I returned to my tripod out of breath & almost dead, a couple of the gardeners had spotted the commotion & were fairly amused, I tied the bag around the neck of the tripod & then I tried to reattach my phone to the tripod stand. Disaster strikes, I drop my phone on the ground, the screen doesn’t even smash but it goes black & switches off. Now, not having a phone isn’t the end of the world, so long as you aren’t in a different continent with no idea which streets are which & you don’t speak any of the languages the locals do!

The gravity of the situation suddenly dawned on me, I had no way of knowing my way back to the hotel, but also lost my flight details, travel plans to get to Agadir (there isn’t a simple direct train, you have to go by bus) & didn’t even know the name of the hotel in Agadir I was supposed to be staying at. I was also upset that I had lost all of my photos from the first night.

I kick into Bear Grylls survival mode & manage to get myself back to my hotel (all whilst still in my kilt & attracting a fair bit of attention from locals). The hotel reception let me log into my Outlook account so I could print out everything I needed, as you can imagine I forgot my password, so had to do one of the ‘prove you are not a robot’ tests, but the test was bloody hard, you had to match off icons to an orbit, which I failed at twice. Not to panic, I checked Skyscanner & there was a flight home for the measly price of £450 (when the original flight to Morocco only cost £55 return) 😂.

Undeterred, I formulated a new plan, I would just buy a new phone, get logged into my Ryannair, booking.com, google maps & Barclays accounts from there, if I managed that I would be able to stay. I mainly needed the map capability. I found an Orange store on the map in hotel computer, went round & sat outside until opening time, turns out they don’t open on Sundays. The chap at hotel had forgot it was Sunday so said it would open, he then told me no phone stores would open on a Sunday. So I decided to go for a walk around a couple of blocks & clear my head. By sheer chance I stumbled upon a tech shop. From the outside it looked like your Young Gangsters Paradise, selling electric scooters & big ass speakers but I thought let’s give it a try & luckily I managed to get a phone. This whole ordeal almost broke my spirits, however I am truly blessed to even be in a position to go on a trip like this, so you just have to laugh when these things occur & power on!

The new phone cost me £250, which was pretty much my whole fun budget for Marrakesh🥲. This ordeal took up a half day & subsequently I did not get to see as many tourist sites as I had hoped. However, the ones I did visit were stunning!

Tourist sites ☀️

Marrakesh has a plethora of amazing things to do & see. I did not take a guided tour & walked everywhere as my hotel was only 15 minutes walk from the Medina & all of the action. It is important to call out, a lot of the tourist sites only accept cash & most of them charge 100 dirhams. This might sound trivial but the sites aren’t massive, so you could be getting through 4 or 5 in a day & the cost quickly adds up.

Places that I would definitely suggest visiting; Bab Doukkala, Dar El Bacha Museum, Ben Youssef Madrasa, The Medina of Marrakesh, Jemaa El Fnaa Square (utter chaos!), Le Jardin Secret, Koutoubia Mosque, Bahia Palace, Tinsmith Square, El Badi Palace & Le monde des Arts de la Parure. Although my phone broke, I have managed to salvage some of my photos from the first day, as I sent them to my friend Raj that evening, so he sent them back to my new phone, which was very lucky! Here are some of my favourites…