Exploring Marrakech

October 23, 2024October 18, 2024 / Maria / Leave a comment

I paused my posts about my trip to Portugal and Morocco to post about some summer backpacking trips, but it’s time to get back to the Morocco part of my holiday in June! After a week in the Azores, we kicked off the second part of our trip, a week in Marrakech. This was my pick for the trip. I’ve wanted to go to Morocco for a while because it seems quite different than anywhere else I’ve ever been, so we decided to spend a few days in Marrakech and the nearby attractions. Morocco could easily have been a whole trip on its own, but we just did a little taster.

Unfortunately, it was a long day getting there. We left the Azores in the morning and then had a long time at the Lisbon airport before our flight left for Marrakech. We flew with Easyjet and they only run a few flights a week, so it was cheap, but it didn’t leave until evening and ended up being delayed several hours.

I’ll admit I started to feel a little bit weary waiting for our flight. I realized that it was my first time travelling to an Islamic country and we had not packed the appropriate clothing. While waiting for our flight, we read that it’s polite for women to cover their shoulders and avoid short skirts and shorts. It ended up being a bit of a moot point because most of the tourists walked around dressed however they pleased (which is honestly fine), but we didn’t want to attract attention as two women. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect and we seemed to be the only group of women on the plane.

It all ended up being totally fine. For the most part, we felt safe in Marrakech. I was expecting to witness some petty street crime, such as purse or phone snatching, but we didn’t see any. We did keep our shoulders covered and tried to wear dresses that went to at least our knees, but we didn’t get many comments aside from the odd marriage proposal (which I experience when I lived in Malawi as well). The only thing I didn’t like was the location of our riad.

We arrived in Marrakech pretty late. Our riad sent a car for us, but it was after midnight when we arrived. We stayed in the medina, which is the central part of the old city of Marrakech. The old city is walled and dates back to the 11th century, while the new city is a lot like any other city you’ve been to. The medina is quite chaotic in the daytime, with lots of vendors and tourists, but at night it’s pretty quiet. The medina is filled with riads, which are small hotels with a series of rooms centered around a small garden courtyard. Our riad was central, but it was down a side street and required walking through a few narrow alleys. We didn’t have any incidents, but as two solo females, I would definitely be more cognizant to book directly on a main road in the future.

We immediately went to bed and slept in on our first day in the city. The breakfast from the riad was excellent and we ate it around the small pool in the courtyard. The riad has lots of outdoor space and a little rooftop lounge, so it was a nice place to hang out after dark.

One of the things that immediately surprised us about Morocco was the language. Moroccans speak a lot of languages. I knew that Arabic was the official language and most people speak Moroccan Arabic, also known as Darija. What I didn’t know is that a lot of Moroccans also speak French due to the period of French colonial rule between 1912 and 1956. On top of that, a lot of people also speak English, as well as some form of Moroccan Berber. We were able to get by mostly with English, but it was really nice to have our French to fall back on for a change.

Our main plan for our first day was to go on a walking tour and to find some cash. Our walking tour met at Koutoubia Mosque, which is one of the most central places in the city. By law, none of the buildings in the city can be taller than the mosque, so you can see it from pretty much everywhere. Like the city, the mosque is over almost 1000 years old, though it has been rebuilt several times and sustained damage in Morocco’s most recent earthquake in the Fall of 2023. It only recently re-opened, but we couldn’t enter as it’s used strictly for prayer.

Our guide took us around to many of the central attractions, including some of the many souks. A souk is basically a market and there are all kinds of them all over the city. There’s meat markets, spice markets, and textile markets. We walked through the Kasbah and the Jewish Quarter, and past the Bahia Palace, which we later re-visited. One of the most well known attractions is the Jemaa el-Fnaa market, which is basically a huge square in the medina for commerce, and is recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site. In the day, it seemed to be mostly fruit drink vendors, but it expands a lot in the evening with small restaurants and performers.

I seem to have had bad luck with money this year, because after a very challenging time finding cash in Argentina, we had similar bad luck in Morocco. Similar to Argentina, it’s not possible to get Moroccan currency (the dirham) in advance of your trip. But unlike Argentina, this is because it’s a closed currency, rather than a volatile one. There’s not the same problems with conversion rates, but some of the banks do charge hefty transaction fees. We read that the only bank that doesn’t is Al-Farid Bank, so we were keen to find an ATM.

We did exchange a little bit of money in the airport to tide us over. There is an al-farid bank right in Jemaa el-Fnaa, but we were dismayed to discover that one of the ATMs was out of cash (it was a Sunday), and the other was rejecting transactions. I was even more pissed to discover when I got home that the bank charged me for 2 cash withdrawal transactions, even though the ATM never dispensed any money. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around through the market, but not purchasing anything, until we finally found another ATM and were able to put our money woes to rest.

Shopping in the medina is definitely an experience. If you’re going to shop there, you have to haggle, and it can be a bit of an overwhelming process. I used to haggle in Malawi all the time, but I was a poor student back then. I’ve gotten more and more uncomfortable with it the older I’ve gotten and the more financially secure I’ve become. It seems stupid to haggle with someone over $1 or $2, when it will really make no difference to me in the long run, and potentially make their lives easier.

But you can’t be a pushover in Morocco. The gulf between an item’s starting price and its worth is quite large. We read that whatever someone starts with, you should aim to pay half, and therefore you need to go down to a third of the price with your first counteroffer. This seemed somewhat accurate to our experiences, although we weren’t great at negotiating the price in half and generally ended up somewhere closer to 60-70%. It just feels so insulting to try and negotiate the price down so low, and the vendors always act insulted too. It’s all part of the dance, but it’s exhausting. Definitely don’t ask someone the price of something unless you’re ready to barter, because once you express interest in purchasing, the vendors are relentless.

Our very first experience was probably the worst, the seller was extremely pushy, and we worried the whole experience would be that way, but fortunately most vendors would back off after some light negotiation if you want to walk away. The most useful advice I read is to never buy something if it doesn’t feel right. It’s easy to get pressured into a sale once you start to engage, but it’s still your choice and you can always choose to walk away. You don’t owe anyone anything.

While Jemaa el-Fnaa is a central location, the entire medina and beyond seem to be one big market, broken into smaller souks. We spent a lot of time in Souk Semmarine, which is the textile market, but also explored down towards the Bahia Palace. We didn’t buy much on our first day, but we scoped out what we were interested in. Later in the trip, we ended up each buying a purse, I got some pants, and we both got a lot of knick knacks, like painted dishware. Some things were weirdly expensive (likely we got the white person rate), while other things were really cheap.

We picked a nice rooftop restaurant for lunch and had probably the best meal of the trip. The food in Morocco is delicious and extremely flavourful, although it does get a bit repetitive after a while. The most common dish is Tajine, which is basically different types of meat, and sometimes vegetable or egg, cooked in stoneware. Meat kebabs were also popular and it was pretty easy to eat vegetarian if you wanted, but the meals seemed to be either very meat heavy, or have no meat at all. At this restaurant, I had a chicken tajine where the chicken was cooked with caramelized onion, fig, pear, walnuts, cinnamon, and it was sooo yummy.

The timing of our trip, during the first week of June, was definitely not ideal from a weather perspective. Morocco is in the desert, so it receives little rain, but it gets really hot in the summer. It wasn’t as hot as it would get, but it was still mid 30’s most days, so I would definitely recommend going a bit earlier in the Spring. Most days, we returned to the riad in the late afternoon for a dip in the pool to cool down before dinner.

I think I’ll end the post here for now as I’ve covered a lot of information about the city. After the first day, we did a few day trips outside the city, so check back for that!

Relaxing in Santiago

June 19, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / Leave a comment

This is my last post about my Patagonia trip! It was a great trip, but I this point, I feel like I’ve been writing about it forever, so I just wanted to do a quick wrap up about Santiago before I move on to some more BC related activities.

To be honest, before the trip, I didn’t really care about Santiago. It was a convenient place to leave from, but I would have preferred to have more time in Buenos Aires rather than Santiago. I ran out of steam planning the trip, so I didn’t plan anything for Santiago and left everything to Seth for our last 3 days.

But I ended up loving Santiago! I’m hesitant to say I liked it more than Buenos Aires, because I only saw a small portion of Buenos Aires, but I enjoyed Santiago so much more than I expected. This is partially due to the fact that we had no strict schedule, so we slept in and ate lots of good food and drank lots of wine and pisco sour. There is definitely some petty street crime in Santiago and we were advised to keep our phones physically attached to us by a cord because phone theft is super common. But overall, Santiago is a very vibrant city. It has a lot artwork all over the city and it was surprisingly gay (which is a compliment!). We saw a lot of pride all over the city and many openly gay couples, which I just didn’t expect to see in South America, so it was a really nice surprise.

As usual, we started with a walking tour of the city to get our bearings and we learned a lot of really useful history. Apparently Chileans have a pretty “jaded” attitude in general, and have a history of being agnostic about religion and bitter about politics. They were under a dictatorship for 20 years in the 70’s/80’s, and as a result, Chileans are frequent protestors. They have a strong sense of justice and will march in the streets for whatever they believe in, which we definitely witnessed.

Our tour guide gave us a detailed history of Santiago, which I won’t share for fear of mis-remembering some of the finer points. But what was striking was Santiago’s economic situation. Chile’s currency is super stable compared to Argentina, and for a long time Chile was doing really well, but Santiago has hit a rough patch since the pandemic. 3.5 million people have migrated to Chile during the pandemic, but there’s been limited economic growth. All the shops in the downtown had been shuttered and in their place, a lot of street vendors have popped up with desperate people looking to make money.

It’s not really related, but our guide also highlighted how Santiago is somewhat lacking in a culture of its own. Santiago was conquered by the Incas and the Spaniards; followed by an obsession with the French (which is really obvious in the architecture), so a lot of their culture is just borrowed from elsewhere, which contributes to the sense of bitterness and indifference from the locals. At least, this was my tour guide’s POV, it could be that he is just the one who’s jaded! Feel free to counter this argument!

Over our 3 days in Santiago, we visited a lot of attractions. We took the funicular up to the top of San Cristobal Hill and we visited both the National History Museum (wouldn’t recommend), and the Pre-Columbian Art Museum (would recommend). Museums are a bit tricky because a lot of them are only in Spanish, so plan accordingly.

Our favourite part of the city was St. Lucia Hill, which was conveniently located right next to our hotel. Our tour guide referred to it as the “gem of Santiago”, and we would definitely agree! It’s just a hill/park in the middle of the city, but it has all kinds of fascinated infrastructure scattered around it. The most obvious thing is to hike up to the top of the hill, where there is a tower lookout and a great view, but if you have the time, just let yourself get lost in the space, because there’s all kinds of different pathways and structures. It’s a fun place to explore and we ended up going there twice.

Another small attraction that I really liked was Alice’s Room, which is a small Wonderland themed cafe. It’s super popular, so we were lucky to get in without a reservation one morning. You really go to this place for the decor, the food is great too, but they’ve completely committed to the theme and it’s just fun to look at all the little details. Highly recommend if you have the time!

Otherwise, our last visit was to the Concho y Torro winery. It’s a very popular winery and even I have seen some of their wine in liquor stores in Canada, most notably, Casillero del Diablo. The tour was fantastic and quite different that other wine tours I’ve been on. The most memorable part is that the winery has a tasting vineyard where they have planted all 24 different varieties of grapes that they use to make wine. Now obviously, it’s not ideal to plant all 24 varieties of grapes in one place, but they don’t make wine with these grapes, they just allow guests to wonder the vineyard and taste any of the grapes that they want. I’ve never actually done this and was surprised that a lot of the grapes actually tasted pretty good. It was cool to wander around and try chardonnay and merlot and pinot grapes.

But the coolest wine fact I learned in Chile was about the carmenere grape. Carmenere is a grape that the world thought to be extinct for a long time, but was randomly found growing in Chile in 1994. So the wine was revived and you can now get it only in Chile. We sampled a few different Carmenere’s in Chile, and bought some from Concho y Torro to take home with us.

So overall, it was a great end to the trip! Seth planned most of our activities, which was a nice break for me and I enjoyed the relaxing aspect of this part of the trip. We were on the go early and often for our hiking adventures, so it was nice to have a proper rest in Santiago before returning home. Patagonia was definitely a memorable experience for me and I feel certain I will be back to explore more mountains and maybe one day (hopefully), we might make it to Antarctica.

That’s all for now, thanks for following along on our journey!

Torres del Paine Backpacking Trip Part IV

June 12, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

Continued from Part I, II, and III. The O-trek can only be hiked in the counterclockwise direction. I thought this was the case for the W-trek as well, but I learned that lots of people hike it clockwise, meaning they start their trip with the towers. I’m really glad we started from Paine Grande, because it meant that we reached the towers on our last day, which is a high note on which to end the trip!

Hiking to the Towers for sunrise requires a very early rise. I wanted to be hiking by 4am, so we got up at 3:30am and the campsite was already bustling with other campers and day hikers. I know a lot of hikers weren’t able to get a reservation for Chileno, so it’s not uncommon for people to hike all the way from the Campsite at Centrale to see the sunrise. Many of the day hikers were taking a break at the picnic table before continuing up to the towers.

Seth is definitely not a sunrise hiker, but I was pretty much buzzing with excitement all night about how fortunate we were to experience the towers on a cloudless day. It was pitch dark when we set out; I carried our shared pack and thanks to our early start, we were able to move at a leisurely place. It’s not the most fun to hike in the dark, but I honestly have some really fond memories from this hike. The night sky was incredible and it felt really special and romantic to hike up a mountain by starlight.

The first two kilometres are mostly in the trees and aren’t too steep. Eventually you reach a junction where the ranger station and outhouse are located, and from there, it’s all uphill. It was steep, but honestly, I found it easier than at Lago de los Tres. The main downside is that the trail is incredibly busy. It kind of felt like we were on a pilgrimage with hundreds of other hikers all following the same route (like the many hikers who had come before us).

The trail gets a little confusing just before the towers. You reach a certain point where you can start to see the peaks rising out of the darkness (it’s magical!), and I think people get overexcited and start climbing the rocks directly towards them. It’s a big boulder field, but you’re supposed to follow the trail, as some sections are roped off for safety reasons. I had to focus on following the trail markers rather than the people and we made it to the top with lots of time to spare.

It was very busy at the lake, but there is a lot of room to spread out. Unfortunately, a lot of people were ignoring the roped sections, but we stuck to the sanctioned area. We found a nice place near the water and sat in the dark to wait for sunrise.

Similar to Lago de los Tres, once you start hiking, it’s freezing! I took off my sweaty clothes and put on every other layer I’d brought with me. You’re not allowed to cook in the park, so we couldn’t bring our pot to make breakfast and ate some protein bars instead. I was so cold I decided to finally test out my emergency bivvy, which I’ve never used. It definitely helped trap a lot of heat, but it has its limitations, so it was a good reminder that it would be a long cold night if I ever have to survive outside with only a bivvy.

Finally, the sun started rising on the other horizon. At first, the daylight only illuminates the towers, but once the sun comes up, they turn a very vibrant orange. It lasts for around 30 minutes and it was every bit as magical as I hoped it would be! I felt so content sitting there watching it. I feel like there’s always one thing you miss on a big hike – either you skip a summit, or the weather is bad – but I felt like I got to experience everything that I wanted in Torres del Paine, and I left the park feeling very content.

Once the sun fully came up, most people left the lake and it was pretty empty. We hung around for a while longer, taking more photos and warming up. The sun makes a huge difference in the temperature and we layered down before starting our hike back. I didn’t want to feel rushed at the towers on our last day, so I had booked the last bus on the day, which didn’t leave until 8pm. This was definitely a mistake as we ended up spending 4 hours at the visitor centre, but it made for a more leisurely day.

We hiked back down to Chileno, past a steady stream of hikers still coming up, and had our breakfast at the campsite. We hung out for a bit, chatting with some other hikers, before starting our hike out of the park around noon. From Chileno, you do have to hike back up the canyon to Windy Pass, but it’s only ~1km and then it’s all downhill for the rest of the day. At this point, most people who were doing the towers were already beyond Windy Pass, so it was a pretty empty trail down to the base.

It was the hottest day on the trek and we switched out to shorts and t-shirts for the first time! The hike to Centrale is gorgeous as you continue back down the valley. The trail is completely exposed, so you have views the entire way. From Chileno to the towers and back to the base is ~15km, but we were fast on the last section.

There’s a huge hotel at the trailhead and then you walk another kilometer parallel to the road to get to Centrale Campground and the Visitor Centre. From there, you take a shuttle bus to the Park Entrance, where you can catch your bus back to Puerto Natales. We debated trying to get an earlier bus, but apparently they only leave at like 3pm and 8pm. We just missed the 3pm shuttle, so we decided to stick around the Visitor Centre and got beer and empanadas to pass the time.

It was a long time to hang around, but we befriended some other hikers who were also killing time before starting their hike the following morning. They were quite young and I found it very entertaining listening to stories about their adventures and missteps. The one thing I didn’t love about Torres del Paine, or Sendero al Fitz Roy, is that I felt we didn’t really befriend that many people.

I love meeting people hiking and I’m pretty good at making friends. When I hiked the Milford Track in New Zealand, and Mount Assiniboine and Lake O’Hara in Canada, I felt like I met so many interesting people on the trail. It’s definitely possible at Torres del Paine, but I think our combination of staying in refugios and cooking our own meals (plus the fact that Seth was quite sick for the first 2-3 days), didn’t lend itself that well to connecting with people. This was exacerbated by the fact that you can pay for wifi, so a lot of people were just hanging around on their phones in the refugio. I’m sure many people have a different experience, but this was my particular experience. It may have just been a timing thing.

But overall, it was an incredible experience. Like I said, I felt very content when I left the park. I feel that we made lots of good decisions in how we structured our trip and we got incredibly lucky with the weather. I’m sure I’ll be back to Patagonia again someday, but at this time, I feel more of a draw to return to Los Glaciares over Torres del Paine. I think I need to return for the Huemel Circuit, and one day, Antarctica!