We had a lovely relaxed morning in Essaouira yesterday before making our way back to Marrakech by public bus. I knew that this trip had some public transport in it – and initially, I was thinking, ‘Well, that could really suck’. But turns out I was concerned for no reason… this is not Turkey c.2007 apparently – the bus driver is not allowed to smoke, use his phone and drive in the middle of the road here – so me and Moroccoan ONCF bus services can remain friends. The transit was the best type of transit. Uneventful.
Our group checked into our various hotels – most of us at the Moroccan House Hotel in Marrakech, and we checked into the Trois Palmieres, some four doors up from the rest of the group. There was something about the very noisy electrical box in Room 45 that made us feel like the hotel might burst into flames or electrocute one of us when plugging in a phone that made us not want to stay there again. We had informed Intrepid, but they didn’t seem to share our safety concern, so we just ended up repaying for the booking. It was a good move; worrying about spontaneous combustion is rarely conducive to sleep (all that watching the bushfires unfold on the news back home was probably not helping).
Tonight was the last night of our tour and a farewell dinner with the group. Across the two back to back groups, we have been fortunate to be travelling with simply wonderful groups of people, from London, New Zealand, Brisbane, California, Melbourne, South Africa, Quebec, Ukraine, Greece and Victoria, BC. And of course, our Intrepid leader, Samirr who is originally from the High Atlas Mountains, but now lives in Marrakech. We don’t usually do group tours like this, so were pleasantly surprised to have met such a lovely bunch of people – we have been duly warned by others who have travelled with Intrepid, G-Adventures and Peregrine a lot, that this is not always the case! Most of them were seriously happy to have been with such a harmonious group too. We had a lovely dinner, shared contact details and there were hugs all around. It’s weird how you can get to know people so quickly – I’m going to miss my morning hug from Chris.
Anyway, we had some work today do while in Marrakech, and then it was one last foray into the medina for some last-minute shopping. I have to admit that after our madhouse experience here just before New Years, I wasn’t really looking forward to it. I mean, we were told that town is busy on the weekends, and it would be much quieter when we came back on a Tuesday… but even I hadn’t anticipated this quiet:
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!
Even once we dove into the medina, it was predominantly empty! Which was both great – no crowds of locals and tourist to push through, and also not great – we were the lone target for the few pushy shopkeeps we did encounter.
Literally, shop after shop, empty.
Guess what Dr Nick? I have made it through three weeks in Morocco surrounded by gorgeous pashmina and haven’t bought a single one! Not even under the pretence that it’s a gift for someone else… who would have thought such a thing could ever happen! 🙂
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.
Saw this sign and remembered that I have failed to mention that Morocco still has barber-surgeons… you go to the barber for your haircuts, shaves and basic dentistry etc. Yeah… you first.
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.
I’ve found a nice looking recipe for a kefta tagine that I’m going to have to try out when I get home. https://tasteofmaroc.com/moroccan-meatball-tagine-tomato-sauce/
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.
Some cute churches, and everything all sweet and fabulous… 
Until we encountered kilometres and kilometres of trucks all lined up in a dead stand still. For a while we thought it might be some sort of rolling blockade protest – people around here seem to be constantly protesting something. Or perhaps they were all lined up waiting for a weighbridge station, given how politely they were all lined up on the right and letting the cars pass them. We then came across this – the lane we had been travelling also at a dead stop of cars. Bugger, we thought – it was obviously the queue for the Polish/Lithuania border. So we pulled up behind the blue car in the photo below… 
At this point, one of the truck drivers (most of whom were not in their vehicles) came over and told us to drive around. He pointed to the licence plate of the blue car, Belarussian, and he gestured for us to go around (our vehicle obviously had Polish plates on it). So we dutifully went around and ended up at the top of the queue:
Whereupon it became obvious that we were in the middle of the military checkpoint to enter Belarus! Which meant we were miles from where we were supposed to be, and well and truly inside the borders of Belarus! Fark!
Now we knew when we set out that there were two routes to get us to Vilnius, one of which was slightly shorter and chopped through the corner of what is effectively the dictatorial presidential state of Belarus and the other which went only through the border between Poland and Lituania. Now, guess which route yale somehow programmed into Wayz…?
The countryside was simply stunning though – there is a beautiful quality to the light here (once you get out of the cities).
Honestly, I grabbed these shots out the car window as we sped past and they have not been altered or had filters added or anything.
Stopped at a servo for a fortifying something something after our little run in with the Belarus Border Force guys.
WWII memorial in a little town on the way.
Oddly, the Polish/Lithuanian border was far more like what we had been expecting – almost non-existent. Being both part of the Schengen Agreement, there is pretty much borderless exchange between the two countries. We did see some guards in a jeep on the side of the road, but they weren’t doing anything at all.
The delay set up back a little arriving into Vilnius, but we arrived found our B&B and got settled pretty quickly.
The B&B is in an old building with massive oak beams, exposed brick and stuccoed walls and old chunky furniture, right in the middle of the city. 
After our adventure just driving here today, we decided to try and find some local food for dinner. yale scoped out this place on Trip Advisor and it had the two most desireable elements we could have asked for, 1) great reviews and 2) mega close proximity. Because it had been a long day already.
We walked in and there was a wait for a table. The restaurant didn’t appear to be very big so we were a bit disheartened and I was considering looking for other options, when it became apparent that there must be more space off to the side of the entrance and perhaps downstairs as well. We didn’t have to wait too long for a table and were led downstairs through a veritable rabbit warren on cosy dining spaces.
First things first – a drink! This place does paddles of brandy tasting so we thought we’d give that a go.
From the left, very drinkable with cherry flavours, quite sweet with honey overtones, something akin to metho, disgustingly strong liquorice shit, and slightly less strong but equally disgusting liquorice shit! Still, most of it went down just fine.
For entrees, everything looked really good on what is an extensive menu. We ordered a few plates to try – fried cheese with bell peppers (effectively jalapeno poppers – which seemed odd for Lithuanian cuisine, but my knowledge there is quite limited).
Next we tried the ‘thick and creamy wild mushroom soup’… which I tried and exclaimed “I hate this place! Best mushroom soup I have ever had, and it’s in bloody Lithuania!”
yale also ordered a second entree of meat dumplings served with sour cream and some sort of nutty soupy broth stuff. It was very tasty – somehow just the right amount of salty.
We had finished the brandy tasting paddle and the beers etc, so yale ordered a couple of meads and a homemade vodka. On the left honey mead, the vodka (average, but we may have been spoiled of late) and some god awful herbal mead shit that was 75% alcohol! Man that stuff is strong.
Dinner consisted of venison meatballs served with spinach mashed potato, loads of beetroot and a cranberry/blueberry sauce. Delicious.
And yale had some enormous dumpling things filled with mean and drowning in a thick mushroom sauce.
After dinner (and all those strong drinks) we barely managed to find our way out of the hidden tunnels of amazing foody goodness.
We want to get a full day to check out Vilnius tomorrow and both of us have laundry that needed attending to so we head back to the B&B for what was supposed to be an early night but it is already getting close to midnight. Again.
Breakfast from Mozart’s Cafe which is the Grand Hotel’s restaurant… of course with clock outside the breakfast room.
After breakfast, we had arranged a private transfer to the train station having discovered it was pretty much the same exorbitant rate that the rip off artist taxi drivers and Uber drivers were charging from the train station anyway… only this way we would have a fancy car and a nice man helping us with our luggage. Worked well and we got picked up right in the pedestrian square in front of the hotel.
RMB: That column on the right shows how late the trains are. Photo was taken 20 minutes ago.
At one point a well dressed lady on her phone sat down on the piano stool with no intention to play the piano and was patently ignoring the dirty looks people were giving her for using the stool for a seat and not playing (station’s fault really for not providing enough seating and many were sitting on the floor), until some kids came along and started mashing the keys incoherently which eventually forced her to relinquish her position so she could stay on her call. Gotta love kids – they don’t care.
We get up to the platform and see the signage is telling us that yes, this is the train to Krakow. Our previously posted 90 minute delay was now showing a 110 minute delay, so we found ourselves standing around on the platform with a bunch of Czech people who looked confused. I spoke with them and they said they didn’t think this was actually the train to Krakow. FFS. They seemed to have a slightly better knowledge of what was happening than we did – so I thought we’d stick with them until we were sure this was our train… last thing we needed after over two hours of waiting was to get on a train going somewhere else!
We settled into our compartment and were hoping for the best. Two people came along to talk to us, neither of whom spoke English so we were still a bit ‘Errr…?’ until about 20 mins into the journey a conductor came along asking for tickets. We handed over our ticket and she didn’t express any alarm about us being on the wrong train so we took that for a good sign. 
The next six hours passed in a blur of forrest and small towns with the occasional stop to not pick up anyone and seemingly not really to let anyone off. The train was more than half empty so I have no idea how this is at all profitable to run.
So, we know we are going to arrive into Krakow station a full two hours late. Yay! Which means that we had been on the phone from the train trying to make sure that our hire car would still be able to be picked up. We were concerned that their office may have been closed. Turns out that was an impossibility, they don’t have an office, they have a guy who meets people at a pickup point in the main carpark to hand over keys and sign paperwork so we had the hire car main office people trying to track him down to make sure he could meet us in the carpark still.