Morocco Trip Day 4: March 25

We arrived in Marrakech in the mid-afternoon. The train ride was quite long, but it was very scenic. Rabat and Marrakech are on the coast, but Marrakech is inland towards the Atlas Mountains. The train wended its way through scrubby desert that reminded me a bit of the American West--Tahoe and SoCal, perhaps. Re rock, sparsely populated by cactus and thin, wispy trees. We would pass an occasional group of low houses and the small children waved at the train. at one town, the train stopped to let another pass on the same track. Most of the train spilled out to the desert, where we stretched our legs and tried to hit trees with rocks.

Marrakech feels like a very big, cosmopolitan city. There are Moroccan flags, policemen, and soldiers everywhere. This was probably because there were more tourists here than anywhere else we've seen. Smith was very keen on seeing snake charmers, and as soon as we found the medina, we indeed found a group of men playing horns and taunting a clutch of irritated cobras. The men worked the crowd, draping snakes around tourists to take pitures. As they became more aggressive about asking for money, we got ourselves lost in the medina again. Unlike Fes' chaos or Casablanca's selection of knockoffs, Marrakech struck a nice balance. Just when we thought it was too tame, we'd turn a corner and see jars topped with sheep heads or be led to a tannery with the smell of rotting flesh. We found delicious warm bread, fresh peanuts, and remarkable fried bread in the shape of a doughnut, dropped into a pot of roiling oil and fished out with a thick steel hook and so hot that it was threaded onto a piece of grass tied into a loop from which we could eat it piping hot.

We leave very early tomorrow morning for Marrakech's airport.