Coming back to Marrakesh after six weeks on the road was like coming back to an entirely different city. Instead of staying in the medina we booked a place in the “suburbs” of Marrakesh, the palmeraie. Legend has it that 1000+ years ago the soldiers of a fancy sultan spent a few nights munching on palm dates here and neglected to clean up their campsite, inadvertently creating an oasis of palm trees. It’s now home to more than a hundred thousand palms, infinity pool clad resorts and even an outpost of that old Miami standby, Nikki Beach. (We never made it. Sorry, Nikki, we tried.)
After Nakota’s neck fiasco, the endless Airbnb searches for wherever we were going to lay our heads next and over a month without Q-tips (it’s the little things we forgot to pack that we missed the most,) we needed a place to chill and clean our ears. I mean - there was sand from the desert still in there.
So we stayed for six days in this place and barely saw another human being aside from the security guards trolling the property. We did manage to make it out to the hip and happening Marrakesh neighborhood of Gueliz for an afternoon. Bizarre to see Zara and H&M and Body Shop and all the creature-capitalistic-comforts of home.
We splurged and stormed Le Grand Café de la Poste for a lovely lunch. Or was it lovely? Maybe it was just stressful with a soft Instagram filter, trying to stop Wilder and Nakota from knocking over the wine and gouging out their eyes with the varied utensils of the elaborate place settings. But it felt good to be around the hustle and bustle of a drinking lunchtime crowd and play along with the flamboyantly rattled maître d’ as he worked the room. It felt like being back in New York.
It made me think that the Morocco I’ve been writing about this whole time was just a dusty fairytale I’ve been telling myself with the camera pointed at whatever would best match the words.
I’ve always been attracted to doomsday stories. I don’t like gore or zombies, but I’ll watch The Walking Dead just to see the empty streets and desolate buildings and envision what I would do. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I feel like I could really find my footing if society completely broke down, simply because I’m so bad at navigating the rules that society has built up. Of course that’s bullshit, I’d be the girl whistling whilst making a Spam sandwich that gets her head ripped off in the cold open, but it’s a story I tell myself. And I think it’s one of the reasons why I so love traveling to places where the rules are so different than where I'm from. So after we scraped all the Laughing Cow cheese off the cushions of the rental car, and the suitcases were packed and our ears were clean, I immediately wanted to dive back into the great unknown. Into the foreign everything.
But we had a plane to catch. To Spain. The reason why we came on this trip in the first place...
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