Welcome to story time. Please, have a seat.
Years ago, the exact number of which is irrelevant to the story, I took a trip with my husband. I was, at the time, a fairly inexperienced traveler. It took months to decide and plan the exact destination and route. We had a specific budget and set of dates. The rest was just a matter of making things fit. Ultimately we planned to fly to Paris via New York and see the sights for a few days. Then we would fly from Paris to Marrakesh (that’s in Morocco, which is in northwest Africa) on some shitty European airline because the flight was direct and fairly cheap. We’d stay in Marrakesh a few days, then fly back to Paris, where we would catch a flight back to the United States. Sounds like a plan, yes? Okay here we go.
The flight to Paris was terrible. It was a red-eye flight in the middle seat in the center set of seats in an airplane full of farts and my seat did not recline. This is not a story about the times I got lost in Paris, so we can fast forward through the next three or four days to when we returned to Charles de Gaulle airport to take an Easy Jet flight to Morocco. So it’s time to board, we hand over our tickets in the terminal, we go down a long corridor and then reach … a door and a set of stairs that lead down to the tarmac. Okay, so we are walking on the tarmac now and there is no plane in sight. This seemed unusual but, like I said, I wasn’t much of a traveler, so I just stuck with the herd. Everyone else seemed nonplussed. The string of passengers — who must have been following someone although I don’t know who — eventually got to a bus. The kind of bus cities use for public transit. We all piled inside, the driver climbed in, started up the bus and away we went.
About five minutes later, we stopped. The bus driver turned off the bus, got out and closed the doors, trapping us all inside. There were mumblings and grumblings in a variety of languages. Five and then ten and then fifteen minutes passed with a plane’s worth of men women and children all stuck on the tarmac in a bus without air conditioning. I don’t know how long it took for the driver to come back, but he did eventually return and we continued our journey to the airplane, which apparently was parked in some sort of airport annex. We boarded the plane which was, let’s just say “economical,” and we were off. Just kidding! We sat on the plane for another half hour or so before we were cleared for takeoff.
Due to the myriad delays in this flight, our plane landed in Marrakesh significantly later than expected, well past dinner time. Starving, tired, frustrated, and not exactly smelling our freshest, we stumbled out into the night to find a taxi to our hotel. Being ever-prepared, we had the name and address written on a piece of paper to give to the driver. After a haggle over price, we loaded our suitcase into a taxi. The driver briefly consulted with another driver in Arabic. I don’t speak Arabic but there were a lot of gestures that seemed as though our driver was receiving directions. Then he climbed aboard and away we went, down the highways that line the outskirts of the city, compressing into darker and narrower streets of the old town which lies at the heart of Marrakesh. Motorcycles whizzing past, leaving trails of exhaust that snaked into the open windows of the taxi. The smells, gasoline and rotting meat, thick and sickly sweet and pungent, gave me a headache as we bounced around on the faux leather seats. Then we stopped. In an ally outside what appeared to be a house, although it could have been almost anything, where some men were sitting outside. The driver said nothing, got out, and closed the door. We sat in the car and I tried to silently convince myself that surely we were not going to be robbed or murdered, don’t be so alarmist, Jessica. Once again our driver engaged in a lively conversation in Arabic, once again with a lot of pointing and arm waving. Then he got back into the car and away we went.
My heart and head both pounded as we continued on our journey. Finally, we pulled up outside our hotel, a small riad run by a very nice man who spoke Arabic and Italian, but not English, though we found common ground in poorly speaking French. We spent the next few days exploring the city, getting lost every time we left our hotel. I felt like a rat in a maze as we turned left and then right and then left again, up and down each narrow street. At one point we found the street for our hotel based on a familiar pile of trash. We got lost when we went to the Jemaa el-Fnaa, we got lost in the souks, we got lost trying to find an ATM. I learned that I don’t know how to translate ATM into any other language. I’ve been lost in a lot of places. But to this day I have never been more lost than the time I went to Marrakesh.
