Day 138: Floating Vibes

Marrakesh, Morocco

I’m not sure if it’s the heat or we’re simply having enough of Morocco in general. It might have been the latter. There were plenty of excursions we could have done instead of staying in Marrakesh, but somehow we couldn’t bring ourselves to even bother. The thing is, we had seen quite a lot of different faces of Morocco. We saw the mountain (Chefchaouen), the waterfall (Akchour) the sea (Asilah), the medieval city (Fes), the Roman ruin (Volubilis), the desert (Mezourga), the gorge (Tinghir), the film set (Ouarzazate) and the Souk market (Marrakesh).

It was a good trip, come to think of it… considering we hadn’t any clue of what to expect when we took the ferry over from Spain. We had been winging it all along.

Walking down the main street near Djemaa El Fna, we noticed that the movie “Machete” was playing. We thought it would be interesting to go to the theatre here in Morocco. Besides, the ticket only cost $3. In we went, not realising that the movie was dubbed in French. Good thing it was Machete we were watching. It’s jam-packed with over-the-top action scenes and probably unimportant cheesy conversation, so language barrier wasn’t much of a problem. Imagine if it had been “King’s Speech”! We might have had to bail.

I wish I had been able to capture the mood of Djemaa El Fna. It was wild at night: the constant banging of the drum, the ruckus of the vendors, the light and smoke that covered the entire area making it all hazy and dream-like. The atmosphere would have easily droned one out, had it not been the ceaseless hassle from the vendors that would bring one back to reality.

I wanted so much to take pictures of the snake charmers and the monkey handlers. But they’d undoubtedly rip me off, charging ridiculous amount for the photo-ops. So here’s some random photos instead: