Marrakesh tips and vegetarian food

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Here are some tips we learnt about travel to Marrakesh and surrounding areas. The Jamaa El Fna square is nice to roam around and see daily activities presented for the tourists. The activities change from morning to evening to night. The food there is not great at the square though, at least not the vegetarian ones - couscous and tagine. The night stalls are cheap, typically 30 MAD for a entre, but I found them mostly tasteless. The restaurants that line the square are no better either. We found much better tasting and cheaper food in small lanes. In the evening in the lane next to cafe France there are little shops with women making parathas, hot from tava, yummy. We had one paratha stuffed with tomato and onion chutney, one milk shake of dates and a pastry for 17 dirham, each better tasting than other.

We also made the mistake of booking our 3-day trek into Berber villages from a unnamed agent in Marrakesh, near Earth cafe. We were able to negotiate the price to 2/3rd of quoted, but the agent did not do anything other than find a guide and shared taxi to transport us to Imlil. We had to negotiate our trek with the guide again who happened to be free to make it. Its easy to get a shared / single taxi to Imlil and would be much better to directly talk to a guide there and negotiate trek itinerary and price. The trek and staying with Berber family is definitely worth it. There were also many desert trip options that we did not take.

Vegetarians:

Finding vegetarian food is not that hard in Morocco because most of their cuisine has a lot of vegetables with some meat. Of course the concept of vegetarianism that does not include any type of meat and fish is still remote there, so you have to be very explicit about what you don't want to eat, especially w.r.t fish. Vegetarian tagine is quite common and we had it every day - not so good at the square to ok at a restaurant to really awesome with our Berber family. Couscous with vegetables is also easy to find. Most of their soups are just lentil soups too, make sure you check that there are no chicken pieces in it. We also feasted on layered paratha one day - its basically Indian flat bread with lot of oil, easily accessible at small stalls in Marrakesh or Casablanca. So there are lot of options. Their sweets are quite close to Indian sweets, just have larger quantity of dates and other nuts. So including a dates milkshake and sweets is a must at all meals.

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