Oh dear god, who planned this transit!
Got back to the hotel after the concert at 0130 having walked about two kms away from the stadium to try and get an Uber driver. Not as easy as it should have been and there didn’t seem to be any regular spot or any recognisable system to try and get a taxi other than to be closest to where the taxis might enter the complex which of course kept creeping further and further away! Not great network planning French Transport People.
Anyway – 0130 at the hotel, 0450 alarm set to make sure I’m all packed and downstairs by 0515, which of course meant I was wide awake by 0430 in anticipation of the alarm. Sigh… it’s always the way. Taxi turns up and ‘Out madam, non probleme.’ Off we whisk to the airport, only at some point his Waze tells him that there are blocked roads ahead and he tries twice to get around it before doing a complete 180 and heading back where we came from. I’m overtired and rather cranky, but with it enough to know that I should check my seat belt when he starts barreling along a highway doing 140km to make up the lost time. The fare which should have been 15-17mins, ends up being more like 25 and he wants €59 for getting lost. Twice! I put in on the credit card, and he says ‘No tip?’ And I say, ‘Yeah right, you were lost and speeding and you want a tip?’ First bit of shitty customer service since we got to France. Wanker.
After rushing to get to the airport for the 0530 requested check-in, I find myself in a queue of about 250 people being checked-in by TWO airline staff. By the time I get to the top of the queue, I’m well and truly over being on my feet and my back is reminding me that we sat in Great Seats but seriously shitty chairs for several hours the night, so much so that the guy checking me in asks if I am okay… I tell him I am in great pain and he lets on that the flight is over-booked and he will try and move me to business class and I think my day is looking up because a little more space would be appreciated when I’m in in a lot of pain. I then go rough security and customs and all that rigmarole, down to the boarding gate and it’s literally now 0710 and boarding has commenced. Onto the plane we go, the lady at the gate gives me a new boarding pass for the business class seat and says, ‘No meal.’ I haven’t eaten but I don’t really care so I take my seat. The business breakfast come out and look like carbs on carbs with a carbs motif anyway, so hard pass. The economy section of the plane gets offered a selection of things to purchase (but I didn’t notice this until the connecting flight).
Arrive in Frankfurt – a little late. Urgh… stairs down onto the tarmac and a bus to get to the terminal. My 50 minute layover now whittled down to 30 mins and suddenly it’s hurry up and get to the right gate again. We arrived at Terminal 1, A Gates and I needed to be at B24, which turns out to be in an entirely different building, cleverly hidden by a 1.5-2km underground tunnel that isn’t really on the airport map. I make it to my flight and have a passing through for whether or not my luggage has made it, and settle in for the remaining 2.5hrs to Bucharest. Make a vague attempt to sleep, get handed a bottle of water and for whatever reason – there is no food offerings on this flight. It’s getting a little ridiculous at this point, the last thing I had to eat was at 2pm the previous day before the concert where we got too distracted to find dinner Saturday night and then it was too late to find anything.
So I turn up in Bucharest after an uneventful flight with an uncomfortably hard landing and lo and behold… no Luggage! The little telltale Air Tag tells me it never left Frankfurt. Fuckity, fuckity, fuck fuck! I have a airport transfer booked and he’s getting antsy waiting for me in the arrivals hall and I’m trying to wait in the line of other people’s whose luggage was also lost and get an email saying – ‘We’ve located your luggage in Frankfurt’ like they’re fucking proud of their efforts or something. So I click through a form on the website and lodge a request to have it sent to the hotel in Bucharest when it finally turns up, and go out to meet my cranky driver in a cranky mood myself.
Buckled in once again for another crazy drive with another crazy person at the helm but at the end of it there is Angus and hugs and a few hours of rest. In the meantime, I get some emails from Lufthansa saying my bag had been booked on a later flight and would be arriving in Bucharest at 1800, and I’m thinking I don’t trust these bastards to get that suitcase to me by the morning. So Angus spoke with our guide, Gorgi who said we should head to the airport to pick it up before we went for dinner. Sounded like a good plan at the time. The AirTag was telling me it was located in Bucharest Airport from 1815 as we head out there and you’d think this would be a ‘Here is my luggage tag in exchange for a suitcase’. kinda deal – but you’d be wrong! There is no outside customer service desk for claiming lost luggage, just a courteous phone with a bunch of numbers for different airlines. NONE of which were answering, not even when we tried customer service numbers for the airline in Germany or the offices located in Bucharest. Which meant, we ended up loitering outside the border restricted area and literally jumping on every single employee who was swiping to go into the restricted area to send out some goddamn Lufthansa staff.
There were four of us all waiting on luggage, two of us standing there with our iPhones showing them where out suitcases are on the AirTag apps. EVENTUALLY – after roughly 45 minutes of haranguing staff – someone agreed to sign me in (with my passport) and let me locate my bag and get the fucking hell out of there. Which took all of three minutes once I got someone’s attention. You’d really think there would be some sort of, oh I don’t know, System (TM) in place for reconnecting people with their belongings when this happens, which I understand it does with alarming regularity. :/
It was quite 20:45 by the time we got out of the airport and were trying to find somewhere for dinner. Georgi, bless his cotton socks was suggesting we get out of the bus in the middle of a busy section of town, walk about 1km to a food court in a shopping centre, when I shanghaied the entire group by encouraged them to go to a wee Italian trattoria which was about 100m from where the bus was parked. We had a nice risotto and some truly dreadful house red wine before getting back to the hotel around 23:30 and collapsing in a heap!
And all this because I wanted to go to Rammstein. Such a pain in the arse! And I’d do it all again tomorrow if it meant going to see that concert!
Gone was the soundstage with the makeshift concert venue set up for 40,000 people, gone were most of the snake charmers, monkey handlers, watermen, spruikers, and the heaving tide of humanity that we pushed through when we were here last. The place was just eeriely quiet. This is 10am on a Tuesday in Marrakech’s main square!
Literally, shop after shop, empty.
After our rather quiet (and I have to admit, pleasant) trip into the medina, we went to pick up some laundry and do a few errands before it was back to the hotel to play Tetris with the luggage – that’s always my job. Making it all fit in. We normally make sure we don’t buy things that need to be declared when coming back into Australia – it always just reeks of too much effort when you’re shattered from the long haul, but the handicrafts here have defeated us and we have several things that need to be declared, so I have carefully packed those for easy access at customs.
Spent the afternoon getting some work underway and packing. After that, though, we were too stuffed to go out to hunt and gather for food. So this is what we ordered from room service at our hotel – a Scillian pizza (with way too much capsicum and missing the requested anchovies), a kefta tagine (which was very tasty) and some Moroccan goats cheese and herb briouats (little filo pastry pies). It was extremely tasty.
After this, we managed to find a movie on the TV, (‘Man on a Ledge’, in English) and aimed for an early night. So much for that! Woke up at 04:17 and haven’t been able to get back to sleep which seriously sucks when I am facing a 24hr+ transit starting around 11:00. :/
We also made a stop at an orange orchard so we could buy a few fresh oranges for our picnic. The oranges here are lovely, you can get large, cheap glasses of fresh orange juice in restaurants everywhere and the juice tastes slightly more like mandarins than the oranges at home. 
Everytime we get into the countryside, I can’t believe how green everything is…. the grass is lush and green, the trees are green, the stock looks fat and healthy… the drought at home is quickly brought into stark contrast.
Another stop we made was at an olive press co-op. Some of the smaller local farmers don’t have the expensive machinery required to press olives, so they bring their harvest here and their bags are numbered. They then wait their turn and put their olives through the press. The air felt thick and kinda slimy… the ground is literally dripping in olive oil.
I actually disllike olives, which is weird for me as I usually love savoury and salty foods. The smell here was getting to me quite a bit. Bags of olives belonging to different farmers.
A couple of the men who worked here – their clothes are soaked through with olive oil, their hands and faces black with oily gunk. 
This must be one of the few largely automated processes we have seen in Morocco so far… until now, it seemed like nearly everything is done by hand.
The first press olive oil is thick and green.
Everyone was offered a bit of bread to try it, along side other oils that had been processed for the second time and third time. I quite like my extra virgin olive oil, but not being a fan of things that actually taste like olives, I gave it a miss (good thing that turned out to be – at least two in our group said they paid for it as it went right through them and they were running for the bathroom a few hours later).
Anyway, back on the bus and a few kilometers down the road we stopped for a picnic lunch. Before leaving Fez, we went to an enormous supermarket and all picked up some tidbits for lunch. We had some very tasty sandwiches and wraps with meats, cheeses, nuts, dates, figs etc. We even managed to buy some drinks so many had picked up some beers to have with lunch. 
Hay stacks for the winter. 
Everywhere, you could see enormous rows of prickly pear. They use it for a few different purposes – hedgerows are grown to make fencing to keep their animals in. The plant itself is eaten in some dishes, and the flowers are used for a natural dye. At home it’s a noxious weed. 
About another hour or so down the road and we arrived at Chefchaouen. Chefchaouen is nestled between two mountain peaks – the word itself actually means ‘two mountian horns’ – and is located at 560m above sealevel, about 70kms from the Mediterranean to the north and 130kms from the Atlantic to the west. From this lookout we could see some glimpses of the blue walls this city is so famous for.
We arrived at our hotel Darechaouen and were greeted with cups of Moroccan mint tea and date cookies while they sorted the rooms out. 
After the winter snow melts, this spring will have twice as much water pouring from it.
Directly to the left of these four ladies was a bench with four men, presumably their husbands… “What you talking about?” – “Shopping” … “What you talking about?” – “Football”
Want to see my scoot?!
The surrounding countryside is well known as a prolific source of ‘kief’ – marijuana, and as we walked the town you would semiregularly get a strong whiff of pot as you rounded a corner or walked past a shop.
There are public fountains dotting the town that are gravity fed directly from the mountain spring – hundreds of years old, they have seen a lot of use.
There are quaint little alleyways in every direction, most of them steep and because of the fountains located around the place, most of the walkways were slightly wet and rather slippery.
Chefchaouen is also knowns for it’s remarkably varied and popular blue doors… so many gates and doors everywhere – some simple, some elaborately painted, some enormous and some so small I have to duck to go in.
This (below) is one of the most famous photo spots in the city… Samirr warned us that if there were Chinese tourists here, we would ‘have to come back next year’ rather than wait for them to finish taking their photos. The locals are completely over the habit of Chinese tourists to stand in front of any famous object and take fifty photos of themselves in a myriad of very posed positions (tbh, so am I – Iceland last year was a real test of patience on that front).
Samirr was impressed at my crowd management skills, our small tour group was pleased to have their chance at photos sans Chinese tourists, and I was simply stunned at the amazing beautiful blue colours of the steps on this tiny little street that attracts people from all over the world.
I know it looks like the town is nearly empty in most of these photos – but this is just my judicious sense of timing. Pick a spot and wait for the person to move right out of frame and *click* before someone moves into the left of frame. But trust me, there were plenty of people around and the medina only became busier as the sun went down and the locals came to town for the restaurants and clubs.
The town’s main square, which is pretty much at the bottom of the steep medina. 
Still.. there were further little alleyways winding further down the mountain and we were diving back into them to find a Berber carpet shop. 
As tradition dictates, one must go carpet/rug shopping when in Turkey or Pakistan or India or Morocco and well, nearly everywhere from North Africa to the Subcontinent!
Abdullah, our host offered us all sweet Moroccan mint tea… very sweet this time and quite refreshing. This is also part of the tradition, coming right before the selling! In Turkey, I think they have much more success with the selling part, as they often ply customers with beer and raki instead. Here, have a buzz, buy a rug! 
The group waiting for the rugs to start falling.
And so they did… Abdullah*, threw down about fifty rugs in total, all of them locally made by Berber tribes, and in a wide variety of colours and sizes. These rugs are unlike any I’ve seen before, predominantly kilim style and most of them asymmetrical in design – which makes me twitch like all giddyup. So I was pretty safe from any unplanned rug purchases.
Anyway after our rug shopping experience, where no one found anything they liked, we went to a restaurnt called, Restaurant Bab Ssour, for a lovely rooftop dining and some delicious local tagine dishes. 
The view across the medina from the rooftop terrace.
Goat cheese is a speciality local dish, served with balsamic. It was really good and had a smooth creamy texture.
Goat tagine with plums! The meat was just falling off the bone and absolutely delicious.
After our long day of driving followed by what was supposed to be a short orientation walk (6kms), we head back to the hotel for a vodka tonic and crashed in our big luxurious bed.