Er Rachidia and a Shameless Plug

If you like middle of the road, backwater towns, you’d love Er Rachidia. Now I’m not complaining, on the contrary, I did like Er Rachidia. It had all the infrastructure that makes for a decent stopover. It was low key in a rather pleasant and undemanding kind of way, the town was billiard table flat and on a scale small enough to navigate on foot without breaking into the slightest of sweats (all to easy to do in the Moroccan lowlands), there were internet cafes, banks, enough budget guesthouses to engender some healthy competition, eateries and salons de the a plenty, and, best of all, it had a bar. This place really was an oasis in the desert. As I said, I was quite struck on Er Rachidia, and that was even before we met its inhabitants. Read more

Meknes to Er Rachidia – By Bus

After the unbeatable high that was yesterday’s food souk, this morning felt like the right time to pack up and ship out. Today we leave the Imperial City of Meknes (on an extremely positive note) and look toward the bus station billboards for onward inspiration. We’ll have a coffee, a little bread and jam, and consider out next port of call.

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Marvellous Meknes Market

I may have been a little hasty in my initial assessment of Meknes. Since the last post we have discovered plenty of good stuff. In addition to the architectural splendour previously mentioned, it’s been the lack of faux guides and the superabundance of fantastic eats that have encouraged us to stay a little longer.

The most discernable difference between Meknes and our last stop, Fes, has to be Read more

Meknes and the Mad, Mad Moulay (Ismail)

From Fes we took a short 2 hour hop southeast to our second Imperial City, Meknes. To be quite honest, I expected a tad more from a city dubbed the Moroccan Versailles. Quite what I had expected I don’t know, but, from first impressions, it didn’t strike me as a bright, shining star of Moroccan urbanity. Read more

The Tanneries of Fes

The commotion that was last night’s sea of pedestrians soon petered out; the alleyways, only a little wider than those of Chefchaouen, quickly became a more manageable affair once we had moved further from Bab el-Mahrouk, one of the main arteries into and out of Fes el-Bali. The downturn in traffic proved quite fortunate, as today would be a big walking day and would see us doing all the touristy things that fervent, committed tourists like ourselves do. It was distinctly plausible that should the streets have been as packed today as they were for a few hours last night (but for the full day, and in about 100 degrees of baking sunshine) then Lauren may have ended up watching a grown man throw a hissy fit and, in a show of unsurpassed frustration and the final throws of wild delirium, toss his hastily melting ice cream to the ground. And no-one needs to see that. Really. Read more

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