First Time in Africa – Marrakech, Morocco

We booked our flights to Marrakech a month back and applied for the visa 3 weeks back. We won’t bore you with the visa process in this post, but will do a separate post on it later if you guys are keen for information. Let us know in the comments if you would like to know the visa process for Morocco.

This is our first time in Africa and we could not be more excited.

Our flight was on a Friday evening straight after work. To cut down on costs, we booked a flight with a 7 hour overnight transit in Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. It was one of the last flights to arrive in the airport so there was hardly anyone when we touched down.

We didn’t book any lounges in the airport. There were plenty of comfy reclined seats for a good snooze. We didn’t get much sleep that night though. Or the next for that matter. You can read about why here…

We arrived around 10am Saturday in Marrakech. We both had a moment as soon as the flight landed. ‘We’re in Africa!’

The immigration queue at the airport was extremely long. We probably spent 1.5-2 hours to clear the border control. So keep that in mind if you want to plan activities for the day you arrive. We then got our sim cards from the airport before we got into the pre-booked taxi (around €15) to get to our riad which was situated in the heart of the medina. The SIM card was for free but then we had to top it up with what we wanted from the local shops. We chose 5gb of data each for 50 MAD per person.

Day 1 – Chilling in the Riad

We’ve posted a thousand pictures of our riad on instagram, but we’ll just post a bit more here as well because we may or may not have taken a million pictures.

There’s plenty of riads to choose from and it can get overwhelming. Our advise is to decide on a price range and search. The riad we chose is Riad Chorfa, which is on the more budget friendly side of the price spectrum at just £35 per night. I’m sure a lot of you would have seen pictures of Riad Yasmine (mid-range) and La Mamounia (very $$$ – although you could get day passes to their spa which will be ‘cheaper’); there’s just a whole range to choose from.

More about Riad Chorfa though, which is where we spent two lovely days. They only have a handful of rooms and each room has its own quirky charms. Our room had an open shower right next to the bed.

What we loved most about the riad was the atrium and the rooftop. We hogged a little corner in the atrium and just chilled there for the first day. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to leave the riad. The intricate details of every inch of the riad left us in awe. And then there was the rooftop. It was more of a maze really. There were plenty of places to relax and we just kept finding more and more places the more we explored this beautiful maze.

Day 2 – Exploring Marrakech

On our second day, we finally decided to do explore Marrakech. The medina is not so huge, so you could easily do all the sights in under 6-8 hours. We went to the Bahia place and the Koutubia Mosque which has one of the biggest minarets in the whole of Morocco. We then walked around the souks (bazaars) and did some people-watching; something we’ve come to love doing in the new places we go to. Isn’t it just fascinating how people go on about with their lives? Was Mrs. Fatima in the souk buying some mint to make mint tea for her husband Mr. Hasan? Maybe. We make up stories as we go along and that keeps us quite entertained.

One of the places that we really wanted to visit but couldn’t was Medersa Ben Youssef. Unfortunately for us, the Medersa was closed for renovation. We also considered visiting Casablanca to see the Hassan II mosque, but time constraints plus the cost (between £140-180) of getting there for a day trip meant it was not to be.

Thanks for reading and let us know if you have any questions in the comments below!

Happy Travels!

Amana & Bobbé

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