Day 4 – Paris and Marrakech

Temperature was -2, not nice, hands and face felt he cold.

Didn’t have anything planned, the flight to Morocco was at 14:55. Popped into a cafe and had a coffee and danishes, then went to the Champs Elysees again because Song wanted to buy some more clothes.

Took the train to the airport and had the longest queue for security I’ve ever seen. It took an hour to get through. Song and I had to split up because I have a European passport, and we finally met up just before 14:55 only to see that the flight was delayed until 16:30. Did a bit of shopping, got to the gate at 16:00 only to find it was now delayed until 17:15. That was around the time we were supposed to be in Marrakesh so a bit annoyed.

Flight was good, only 3 hours and we had an empty seat between us so a bit of room for a change. Landed to a temperature of 22C – big difference to the -2C we left behind in Paris. Took a taxi to the hotel and it was probably the most frightening 15 minutes of my life. They have traffic lights but they seem to be advisory since most cars, bikes, mopeds, buses and trucks decided when they would stop or go and if it coincided with the correct colour then it was a stroke of luck.

I don’t know how big Marrakech is, but I’m guessing it’s not too huge, so the taxi driver didn’t inspire confidence when he had to stop and ask the way to the hotel from a 10 year old kid. Luckily it was just down the road. When he stopped another couple of kids tried to help us with our bags and insisted on showing us to our hotel down a small dark alley. Fortunately there were a couple of police standing by so I made a point of asking them and making sure they saw the kids so could find them again in case we went missing.

Actually without the kids we wouldn’t have found the place and actually felt a bit guilty when they held out their hands and we didn’t have any small change. I don’t think they had credit card facilities.

The hotel is quite boutique, only has 5 rooms, and ours is a bit small. Neither of us was hungry so just stayed in the room and did this.