Changing Continents

After only having 5 days to recover from my little Soviet adventure, I boarded a plane and headed to Marrakech, Morocco for a 4 day work retreat (they certainly know how to do work retreats here) and my first trip to Africa. Yes yes, a very difficult life.

The problem with a work trip such as this is that while you get to stay at 5 star hotels and eat at 5 star restaurants:

(mmmm, couscous)

And for some reason have these crazy guys everywhere:

you don’t get a good feel for a city and the people.

But luckily on our fist day I did get out to the market for a few hours:

While I am guessing these massive and cramped markets appear in many cities around the world, what was really fun was the constant ‘moving’ traffic of small motorcycles, bikes, and even donkeys through what were lanes that at times could not fit more than 3 people across.

This of course brings up maybe the most remarkable thing about Marrakech, and that is the traffic. All manners of it is going in any direction. Small scooters, motorcycles, human pulled carts, donkey pulled carts, crappy old cars, anything and everything. Now most of the times you see this you always wonder how there are not more accidents. Well during my brief stay I witnessed 3 separate scooter crashes (one caused by our shuttle buses cutting off a scooter into a metal barricade), narrowly avoided one in a cab, and was actually in one during our ‘4x4 Tour’ of the Marrakesh mountains.

Now despite the crash, this tour was a treat. Our group headed out in about 30 identical SUV’s and drove 2 hours out into the mountains to see the surroundings and finally get a feel for the countryside (and feel it we did, good golly those are not paved roads):

We stopped for lunch at an amazing, ahhh, eating spot and took in gorgeous and striking scenery while dining on the finest meats and cheeses from all the land.

and afterwards we continued on our trek. During our tour we went through a few small villages that were clearly in extreme poverty and I do not know if I have ever felt so guilty as the several times we drove by kids like these in our SUV's:

The kids always waved and most of the time had smiles, and it made my heart break. I tossed them whatever money I did have (which was not much), and thought about how lucky I was to be born where I was.

The next day we packed up and headed out, but not before enjoying a few of these local brews to get our final taste of Morocco, which was a good way to end the trip.

Cheers.