Last Port Ever! Morocco

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Blog Entry: Last Port Ever!: Morocco

Sadly, we had 4 days in our last port, Morocco. Our ship docked in Casablanca the morning of the 9th. Myself and 175 other students (about 20% of the student population) signed up for a Semester at Sea trip that lasted the ENTIRE port, all 4 days. I spent a lot of money on this trip, and unfortunately, I regret it. While we did have a lot of fun, the trip itself was extremely deceiving. I booked it right away because of the cool title/description: “Marrakech & Camel Trek through the Sahara.” I mean, c’mon... Camel trekking? In the Sahara?? Sign me up! While we did ride on camels, the rest of the trip was rough. Details:

A couple of my friends, Nicole, Becca, Erika, Anthony, and Scott, were also on this trip which we were really excited about because the overnight trips are “Pre-Sale Only” which means we bought them prior to boarding the ship in June. So the possibility of having your friends on the same trip is slim. This goes for all pre-sale trips. We gathered our stuffed backpacks full of 4 days worth of necessities, and boarded one of the #12 of the 14 mini-busses lined up outside on the pier. I think all of us took the description mini a bit too lightly... Those with long legs were pretty much screwed. Even short people were uncomfortable. There were about 15 people to a bus and the air conditioning wasn’t working the greatest... oh, did I mention? 8+ hour drive back and forth to our destinations? Yea... We probably spent about 24 total hours in those buses throughout the 4 days... in the sweltering heat of the African desert... through the switchback roads of the Atlas Mountains... ha ha Our bus driver, Omar, was experienced and in effect CRAZY fast! And fearless. This made the drive through the Atlas Mnts. interesting which I will explain later. Omar is a Berber from the mountains and has been driving for 30+ years. He speaks French. (The languages in Morocco are Arabic and French, or French with an Arabic dialect. Most people can speak both) We also had a tour guide (although he did very little guiding) named Mustafa who spoke English, Arabic, and French.

Well it was 3 hours to our first destination: Marrakech. Marrakech (mar-a-kesh) is the largest city in Morocco next to the capital of Fez. It’s the hot spot for travelers other than Casablanca. The city is actually really nice, a lot nicer than the cities I visited in Egypt. They have newly paved roads and actually follow some sort of organized traffic system 😊 We got out at the “square” (there’s an arabic/french name for it that I can’t quite remember) for lunch. The square is very touristy with horses lined everywhere, women tattooing henna, snake charmers (literally rattle snakes), men with monkeys ready to take a pictures (of course for money), and bazaars. Morocco is another Muslim country, so you can imagine the dress and “the call to prayer” applies as well. Anyway, we ate a delicious meal in a restaurant right off the square, our first taste (literally and figuratively) of traditional Moroccan food. Just about every meal from here on out consisted of a vegetable with pita bread to start, a meat with potato for the main course, and then fruit for dessert. They are all about the fruit and the citrus. Mint tea is another popular tradition. I had the most delicious tea I’ve ever tasted in Morocco, and also after every meal. The decor and design is very Arabic. Imagine Aladdin and ya got it! We had some free time to stroll around the square after lunch. I was video taping the snake charmers when a man came up to me and attacked me with a snake... One man actually put a snake around Scotts neck! We ran ha ha and found the bazaar. The bazaar, like most, was SO confusing! Becca and Nicole actually got lost later on in the trip. But they carried a lot of nifty things. Lots of leather, silver, ceramic, leather shoes, those kinds of things. The sales people here were pretty intense and actually not as nice as in other countries I encountered. I guess I can’t blame them: the heat must get to them! After the square, we headed to our hotel: Hotel Meriem. It was pretty nice, and I got to pick my roommate, Nicole 😊 We unpacked then headed to the Chez-Ali, a Moroccan sort of Medieval Times. We ate dinner in beautifully colored tents, our tables the same height as our chairs. Same menu as lunch, but just as delicious. As we entered, our picture was taken with people in elaborate, hierarchical dress, and we were welcomed with a plethora of Moroccan bands consisting of singing, clapping, drumming, etc. And as we ate, these bands came around to perform for us in each of our tents. After dinner was the Horse Show. This was pretty cool. Men on horses were doing tricks for a while, then a belly dancer came out, and then traditional Moroccan men on horses with guns were firing their weapons for part of the show. I unfortunately do not know the tradition behind these men, but I’m sure it has some militaristic meaning. We decided to go out when we got back to our hotel. Nicole, Anthony, Mercedes, Tom, and I ended up at a very nice club/bar place. We sat outside, and over shisha, made friends with visitors from France. They were great! The guy, Karim, resides in Paris, but is originally from Morocco. Leilaka, a friend he met that day, is also from France, and she is just visiting. Leilaka was so excited to talk to us. She didn’t speak much English, but Karim spoke some and was our translator. He also spoke a little French, as does Anthony, so that was helpful. Leilaka had a friend there whose name slips my mind. They pointed out that she looks like Celien Dion (sp?) and she does! They also said I look like Cameron Diaz ha ha.... Which is ironic because, Oh wait.... I don’t think I wrote about this earlier, and if I did I’m sorry. For the first month on the boat, my friends called me “Cameron” because Bo couldn’t get over the fact that he thought I looked so much like her. For a while, I was getting used to answering to “Cameron.” Luckily, this nickname his died down 😉 Anyway, that’s why it was so ironic that they said that ha ha we got a kick out of it! We exchanged FB (facebook) info and headed out. They were really great people. I’m going to miss making friends like that from different countries! This is something that I was not expecting, but has just added to this trip.

The next morning we had to pack up our things, and head down to breakfast pretty early for an 8 hour bus ride ahead of us. We spent the ENTIRE day in the mini-busses, stopping here and there for lunch, toilets and such. I only had to pee in a hole in the ground once, all the other times there were toilets 😉 It’s cool at night and in the morning, but Morocco is verrry hot during the day, or at least it was while we were there. Every one of us is always gross and sweaty, but it’s pretty much the norm after being on this trip. We’re disgusting and we all know it. About 4 hours of our drive was through the Atlas Mountains. We were warned before getting on the buses about what are called “switchbacks.” I had never heard the term before, so for those of you unfamiliar with it like me, they are the roads that wind and curve and literally ‘switch back’ and forth up and down the mountains. The switchbacks are notorious for making people sick, so I took some Meclizine as a preventative for my motion sickness. The drive was intense!, but beautiful. As we went further south into the mountains, there became less and less vegetation, looking more desert-like. We were literally on the edge of mountains, flying back and forth through these switchbacks.... Oh, Omar. This is why we had to take minibuses, the regular ones would have never survived. However long, the bus ride was just beautiful. Things started to flatten out and we ended up in the middle of nowhere in the Sahara desert. We were a little disappointed to see that the desert wasn’t what we were picturing, or rather, what they pictured in the description. They pictured camels on sand dunes for miles. Although where we were was definitely the desert, there was a lot of vegetation and even some civilization. The biggest thing for us was the fact that we drove over 8 hours for a destination that was easily accessible only an hour away from Marrakech. We signed up for the trip knowing that we had an 8 hour drive there and back, but under the conditions pictured: a deserted desert. The camels were there upon our arrival which is where another disappointing surprise came to play. We paid for a camel trek (it was even in the title) but not all of us got to ride camels the entire time, some didn’t even get to ride camels at all. Plus, the camel ride was only about an hour, another deception. Aside from all of this, the camel riding was still really cool. After walking half of the time through a sandstorm (no joke), Becca and I got on the camel that Anthony and Erika had. They named him “Fredrick” and he was really cute. The whole day kinda sucked prior to Becca and I sprucing things up. We narrated Fredrick’s thoughts... (Knaacks, you know the voice: it’s my “Hershey” voice). Anyway, we trekked for about an hour into the desert to the supposed “Nomad/Berber Village.” Yet another deception. We were expecting a remote, legitimate village in the sand dunes, but what we got was a fake set up where SASers out numbered the nomads. But, still, it was pretty cool. They had tons of tents set up for us, around the center of the area which was lined with carpets around a fire. There were bigger tents set up for dinner, and off to the left were the makeshift bathroom tents with actual running water. As we entered, they had a Berber men’s choir singing and a band playing with belly dancers. We found a tent (Nicole, Becca, Erika, Anthony, Morgan, and I) and threw our stuff down in time to see the music groups perform for us. The men’s choir came out dressed in long white cloaks with little fez hats and did a traditional show for us with singing, lots of clapping, dancing, and drumming. They were all lined up tightly shoulder to shoulder behind the drums doing synchronized dances. One super smiley man who had been eyeing me came out to dance and sing a little solo then gestured for me to come up to dance with him. Embarrassed, I was, but I wouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to dance with the choir. The eventually brought up more of us until there was a large group dancing up there with them. That was so much fun! After the traditional show, they fed us in the tents the best meal I had yet and the rest of the night was free time. They had women cooking pita bread over the open fire, and some women doing henna. Most of us laid out on the rugs near the fire to watch the stars. The stars were a definite highlight of my time in Morocco. I don’t think I have ever seen as many in my life. The milky way was totally visible making the sky especially vibrant. A few of my friends saw their first shooting stars! We saw about 3 big ones that night. The nomads lit “Semester at Sea” on the hill outside the camp. I got some really cool pictures of that! About half of the 175 went to bed, some slept under the stars outside of the tents, and a hand full of SASers thought it would be a good idea to get drunk. This is where the drama begins. You see, some of the people on this ship, unfortunately, aren’t the most humble people in the world and treat this trip as more of a vacation than an educational, life-changing experience. You know exactly the kind of people I’m talking about: rude, disrespectful, inconsiderate, etc. And unfortunately, we had a good amount of these folks on the 4 day trip. Anyway, as the night went on, things got pretty dramatic. The trip is now the talk of the ship upon our arrival and still to this day, I am hearing about things that happened that infamous night at the Nomad tents. One girl in particular, who was already on alcohol probation through SAS, is no longer receiving academic credit on the ship for her actions that night. Another girl got so drunk that she thought it would be a good idea to climb on top of these very unstable tents with people sleeping in it, collapsed it, then hit the guy who was trying to get her down off the top. I was also awoken at 1 am by someone falling on my tent which caused about an inch of sand to cover me. I am very ashamed of these people and am disgusted that they would disrespect our hosts to this degree. I’ve heard more stories that would take too long to explain, so lets just say, a lot of people are in trouble for their actions that night, and it is probably the most dramatic thing that has happened for the ship. The trip in it’s entirety, both students’ actions and the planning of the trip itself, is still under “investigation”. So official, I know.

We woke up the next morning for breakfast they prepared and had to head out almost right away. A lot of my friends were getting bloody noses.... it was so dry! Nicole and Erika in particular were affected by the dry, sandy, desert. Sand was everywhere too! We hopped back on the camels from the day before and wandered back through the desert. Nicole and I got on a camel together and got to ride the whole way. For some reason, I wasn’t feeling the greatest when I woke up, and the motion of the camel did not help. I seemingly have been 100 times more sensitive to motion since being on the ship... when I got off, I got sick... even an innocent camel makes me vomit... Good thing this isn’t our main form of transportation back at home like it is in the desert! Did you know that camels spitting is a myth? I guess Mythbusters busted it... Fun fact of the day. I think all of us were dreading getting back on those buses...We took them 8+ hours back to the same hotel we were at the first night: Hotel Meriem. We were stopping almost every hour, so I got the general consensus from the bus and talked to our tour guide about minimizing the frequent and unnecessary stops. He agreed and we made it back to Marrakech almost an hour earlier than we would have. Oh, on the way, we turned on some Moroccan music and danced with Omar and Mustafa. They got some moves! Omar, again, was being the crazy driver that he is. Apparently, he was the bus driver for the movie “Babel.” ? I’m not sure if he was IN the movie, or just drove around the actors.... Actually, I think it’s one of the movies looping on our TVs tonight... I will find out! When we arrived in Marrakech, my friends and I skipped out on showers to make it back to the square before the Bazaar closed..... By this point, most of us hadn’t showered in 3 days since being on the ship! What we sacrifice for shopping, I tell ya. Sure enough, we cabbed it over to the square in time for the busiest time of night! People were EVERYWHERE! My friends and I made a meeting place in case we got lost from each other in the square and dove in. This bazaar was a labyrinth! I don’t think I’ve ever been so confused.... After a few purchases, I lost them. All 5 of them... No where to be found. I headed out to see where the were, but got a little intimidated by the crowds. This was actually the first time I have been separated by myself from a group unintentionally and I didn’t like it one bit. Eventually, I gave up and sought out a woman doing henna that I had previously spoken with. I sat down at her chair and she just started going at it on my hands! They are so fast! She did the tops of both hands in about 10 minutes and I paid her 100 Durham. It’s about 8 Durham for every $1 USD so that was about 12 bucks. I had to let the pretty designs dry so I slithered my way out of the crowd and sat down at our meeting place to see who would show up and when. As I waited, an old man named Mustafa (same name as my tour guide) approached me and started talking. He has been a bus driver from 30 years and has been around the square for longer. He talked about how great the opportunity is to meet travelers from all around the world who come to the square. Mustafa said he enjoys meeting Americans the most because of their wonderful personalities and that the rest of the world doesn’t get to see us like he, Moroccans, and other tourist countries do. He basically meant that we get a bad rep when in reality, we are great people. This was very interesting. He also commented on Bush and Obama and that things are better now with Obama. He smiled and did a fist pump when he said “Obama!” 😊 I told him we just came from Egypt and he explained why people, Americans in particular, visit: because “that is where God placed the first human beings, the beginning of mankind.” He went on with some biblical things that I couldn’t follow. Mustafa was yet another great encounter. We had a great conversation until he had to go back to work. He was such a happy Moroccan and I’m glad that he has such a good impression of us. This whole trip has made me realize the impact America has on the rest of the world. And that the perception we have of the people in other countries is proven wrong, much like Mustafa was saying.

I finally found 3 of my friends, they were right on time. We got some ice-cream while we waited for Nicole and Becca, but the never showed up after 30 minutes so we cabbed back to the hotel. We normally wouldn’t leave people behind, but they said if they were late, that they were still interested in shopping. In actuality, they got lost in that maze of a bazaar and couldn’t find their way out! Also at the hotel, we met up with Rachel, Lindsay, Erik, and Lauren who had traveled to Marrakech on their own and wanted to sneak in our rooms. Unlike in Rome, this time, our scheme went successfully! It was going on midnight and most of us hadn’t eaten until 2pm so we found the one, lonely café that was still open this late and sat down. CNN was broadcasted on the TVs above the bar, something about North Korea and a secret civilization?? I’m not sure, but it made me realize that I haven’t watched the news in months. And it got me thinking exactly how much I have to catch up on when I get home: current events, music, etc. We’ve also got word of Obama’s new health care plan which has been the debate at our dinners as of late. We all feel like we have tons to catch up on when we get back.

The 4th day in Morocco, Becca, Nicole and I got up early to go back to the square for some last minute shopping and henna before heading back to port in Casablanca. We made our last minute purchases and I catered to Becca and Nicole after they got their hands and feet wet with henna ink 😊 When we got off the bus in Casablanca, it dawned on us that this would be the last time we would ever get on the ship and swipe in. This was sad! I definitely am not looking forward to the rough seas of the Atlantic. We have 9 days at sea until we reach the states, all of which include 4 days of classes, finals, papers to write, books to read, birthdays to celebrate, and Milk & Cookies Parties to have. I’m going to try to treat the next 9 days as much of a cruise as possible (minus tests and papers). I will try to blog, probably 2 or 3 times until I return home. I can’t believe the trip of a lifetime is coming to an end! While I am looking forward to coming home, but I am definitely not looking forward to saying goodbye to my friends on the ship, or the ship itself for that matter. I am also not looking forward to the fact that I probably won’t see some of these countries again. There are of course a handful that I want to go back to, but in reality, there are some I may never return to. However disappointing my trip was, Morocco was a good ending too our summer at port. The culture is rich, vibrant, and different. If you have an opportunity to travel to Morocco, definitely go to Marrakech. I heard the capital of Fez was pretty cool as well.

So now, our minds are focused on finals and papers on the way home. My classes at ISU start next week so I will miss the first week of classes. I have an online class that starts next week through MCC so I will be finding my way through the lack of internet here to be caught up with that class. I hope you are all enjoying the last few weeks of summer! I will blog later 😊

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