Casablanda

We were expecting our bus to Casablanca to take a whole day, maybe 7 or 8 hours, but it only took 5, for which we were extremely grateful…

Now I’m going to be honest with you… This is going to be a pretty short entry. Most people will tell you, if they have been here and are being as honest as me, that you can safely skip Casablanca.

The word “scumhole” gets thrown around a lot but in this case it’s appropriate.

We got off the bus and had the taxi drivers telling us it was 50d or 100d to get to our hotel, which was less than 2k away on the map. We tried the walk away but they didn’t buy it so we did in fact walk away, all the way to our hotel. It took about 15mins and wasn’t far at all.

Here’s some photos of all the awesome things we saw on our walk.

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see what i did there? We actually only took one photo the whole time we were in Casablanca… It’s down the page a bit.

Anyway our hotel was well located, had good WiFi, a nice bed and good hot water so we were pretty happy on that front, although the accommodation here is about 30% more expensive than anywhere else in Morocco because no one wants to stay here.

We got some takeout pizza from a place around the corner of the hotel for dinner (no more tagines for us!) and then tried to sleep, which was trickier than expected because Casablanca is a very loud city.

I took this photo of Penny after she saw herself in the mirror and claimed “this is what Morocco has done to me…”

I’m actually a big fan of what she calls her “ghost hair” in this photo… Anyway before she would let me post it i had to agree to post an unflattering photo of myself. She chose the one where a look like a cross between a chubby lesbian and a washed up 80s rock star:

The next morning we got a taxi to the train station (twice the distance from our hotel as the bus station, taxi used the meter, total cost 11d), and then a train to the airport.

You’re not allowed to export Moroccan money so we spent what we had left on overpriced airport food, except for a few coins I kept for my brother in law (Hi Malcolm!), before jumping on our plane and leaving Morocco for good.

Concluding thoughts?

Amazing and interesting country with some awesome stuff to see, but sometimes very intense, hassly/scammy and very hard to travel around. Definitely not a cheap travel destination and you would be better off with a car in a lot of spots.

Also not an overly friendly or hospitable place either… Everyone here is out to make a buck and we didn’t come across any genuinely friendly or helpful locals other than those we paid for a product or service. We were also at a distinct disadvantage because hardly anyone there speaks English… It’s all Arabic and French.

There is very little variety in food… We basically ate the same 3 dishes the whole time we were here and for everyone who queried or commented on it…. OK, you were right… 4 weeks was too much…. 3 weeks was just right.

Having said all that, it was an awesome experience and we’re glad we came… We saw everything we wanted to see and some of it was truly breathtaking and unique. There really is no place like Morocco and if we had our time again we might do it slightly differently, but we’d still do Morocco.