Morocco, day fifteen: Marrakech

This was all a bit last-minute.

I knew I was visiting Marrakech but I didn't really know when, simply because for the last couple of days I've had a relaxing break from travelling around like a madman and had a couple of days chilling.

However, last night it was decided that I would travel to Marrakech this morning, but it was not until I was actually awake and sufficiently caffeinated that it was determined I would take the mid-morning Al Atlas service from Casa Oasis to Marrakech, after a gentle InDrive that got me to the station with plenty of time to spare.

The Gare de l'Oasis is a dinky two-platform station in the Oasis district of Casablanca which reopened after a year of renovation work in January 2005. The district itself is considered quite well to do, and is home to Morocco's two big football clubs, Wydad AC and Raja Club Athletic. The station has a ticket office and a shop, and little else, but it was nice to chill on the platform while waiting for the train to arrive from Casa Voyageurs, having left Fès four hours earlier.

There was much prettiness to be seen from the 10:44 train, so much so that it's quite difficult to express quite how much prettiness. Unfortunately, the first class coach was not like the one on the journey from Tangier to Fès and was of the compartment of six type, and being in a middle seat for most of it I wasn't able to get up and bounce around as much as I'd have liked. I was able to wander around the coach, much to the amusement of my fellow travellers, taking photographs of the pretty until it got too much to bear and I had to have a little sit down.

The journey from Casablanca to Marrakech takes two and a half hours, and the air conditioning was working for all of that. There was also a nice man with a trolley, although I'd had a sensible breakfast and the forethought to bring my own big bottle of water, who passed through the train a couple of times during the journey. It took a few minutes for us to clear the environs of Casablanca but before long we were trundling through an increasingly golden landscape with a horizons on both sides being ever-dominated again by mountains.

By Settat I'd made a friend who'd spoken some French with me before defaulting to English to enquire about the suggestion on my tee-shirt that the birds work for the bourgeoisie. I'd only really started talking to him because he was in a compartment of six by himself, and so it struck me as a good opportunity to do some window-licking for the last hour to Marrakech. I wasn't really sure whether to frame my answer as an actual conspiracy theory or not, and decided to keep it light given that it quite quickly became apparent that he had brought enough tinfoil hats for everyone. He'd grown up in New York, apparently, although it was difficult to determine how much of this was made-up as I tuned out at "main-stream media" and thought it best to nod quiet acquiescence as we veered from the politics of the Middle East to why the BBC is evil until Benguerir, where he got off and left the compartment empty and quiet.

I was not really sure what I was expecting as we approached Marrakech's century-old station, but I quickly noticed that there was something wrong with the clouds. I couldn't put my finger on it for a while until I noticed that one of the clouds was actually not a cloud, but the top of a snow-peaked Atlas Mountain proper poking through the cloud beneath it. The entire horizon on the approach took on a completely different vibe as we got closer to our destination, as the mountains - at 2km above sea level - are imposing and put the distant mountains that had been flanking us for most of the journey in their place.

My accommodation planning was as random as my train planning, and in fact I hadn't booked the riad until sitting on the train at Oasis. I thought that after the success of my last-minute Fès booking experience, everything would be OK, but this was very much not an OK sleeping situation. For a start there'd been a bit of a sketch back and forth on the train via the booking app of choice where I was told there was a problem with the payment (it flagged as having failed in the app which was peculiar) and a request for contact on WhatsApp to "show me where the riad was". I don't have WhatsApp, so that was easy, but it was alarming that the riad was not exactly at the address it was listed at in the app, and it turned out after a little hunting to be in an area slightly more sketchy than I was comfortable with and all combined to get me a cancellation and refund.

Some hasty looking around later in a new booking app of choice and another InDrive later, the incredibly once-grand but now a little tired Riad Marrakech House became my weekend home. It's not really a riad at all, but a massive hotel in which I was given a huge room with multiple beds and a mini balcony overlooking a building site. Still. The hotel boasts a pool (looks nice) and a wellness spa, so it can't be bad. It is quite a long way out of the centre of Marrakech so my first venture out required InDrive again, to an Iranian restaurant not far from the Place de la Liberté that had been recommended to me by Student. I had a fabulous falafel shawarma and some sparkly water served to me by a smiley youth keen to try out his English, then had a gentle stroll down the Avenue Moulay El Hassan to the Koutoubia Mosque and on into the Place Jemaa el Fna where I had a fun wander amid the mayhem.

I'm on a mission to find the Unriwalled Showabove, a roof terrace in a restaurant with a view overlooking the square which is, as the name suggests, above and unrivalled. I can't remember exactly where it is and there are many restaurants with roof terraces overlooking the Place, and if I'm honest my search this evening didn't get far as I stopped on the relatively normal first-floor terrace of the Café de France for a mint tea and a bout of watching of the chaos beneath unfold and didn't move until I'd determined it was time to go back to the hotel. I'd already eaten but had a stroll through the food section of the Place which was full of some very aggressive hawkers trying to get me to eat at their little stand, even though I protested that I had already eaten and that I didn't actually want any food.

This did little to deter them.

As I waited for a taxi back to the hotel, a moped went past with a baby sandwiched between its father (driving) and mother (hanging on).

The taxi door didn't quite shut properly.