Blinded by the lights

Well, not the lights so much as the souks. Oops. Bindi and I each spent more money today than we’ve spent in the entire time in Granada. And Morocco is supposed to be one of the cheapest places on earth! We fell in love with Marrakech and it broke our hearts.

And we broke some pretty sacred backpacking rules along the way. I am ashamed to relate them here.

Backpacking rule no. 1: Thou shall not buy from first store you see
But the leather was so nice! And Marrakech was so exciting! And I needed a sachtel to carry my laptop in. And we bargained him down by 200Dh - from 1200 to 1000!

Rule no. 2: Thou shall not accept anything more than half of the original price asked for in a Marrakech souk
Yeah, we learnt that lesson pretty fast.

Rule no. 3: Thou shall never, under any circumstances, catch a hop-on, hop-off City Sightseeing tour bus
If anyone with any standing in the backpacking community reads this, we will surely be excommunicated. We're embarrassed, we were embarrassed at the time, but we spent all morning looking for a map of Marrakech with no luck and we didn't know where to start or how to get to the places we wanted to see. OK, we went into two shops, but neither of them had one, and we were so overwhelmed! If you could see Jemaa el Fna - the main market, which is right where we were staying - you would understand. It's filled with cars, bikes (even though it doesn't appear to actually be a road), snake charmers, story tellers, people selling anything or just trying to get in your photos so that you will have to pay them, and hundreds of men in carts selling freshly squeezed orange juice all yelling at you, yelling something in Arabic or French, who can tell? It's so loud, so obnoxious, so exciting! But a little OTT after a whole night on a train. We needed to just get our bearings, and the bus seemed to be a good way.

Rule no. 4: Thou shall never stay on a bus when every other person gets off
When I asked Bindi why she thought everyone else was getting off the bus, she said it was because they were all sheep. Not wanting to be a sheep, I shut up and stayed put.... for the next two hours while we repeated the tour we'd just been on, which, incidentally, did not pass our stop. (However, should anyone wish to go on a tour of Marrakech I give a pretty good one. Or, should you wish to know about the palm tree forest and how Marrakech gets its water, just ask. Or for that matter, should you wish to know the significance of the palm tree to all the monotheistic religions, I'd be happy to oblige. Did you know that the medina wall in Marrakech is 10m high and 9km wide? It's made of the red clay common in the region and limestone. Should you go, you will notice the holes in the wall that are common in that kind of architecture.

How embarrassing.

Rule no. 5: Thou shall not go to the ATM more than three times in one day
I don't think this is necessarily a sacred rule of backpacking. I think it's more a sacred rule of living. Going to the ATM to get more cash four times in one day should be a pretty good indication that you're spending too much money.

Rule no. 6: Though shall not go to a private hammam
Anyone who has heard my story of the hammam in Turkey will understand that this needs to be told in private. Needless to say, we got ripped off.

Rule no. 7: Thou shall not wear a sign on one's forehead reading: "Shysters apply here"
At least that's how we felt by the end of day, so we went to bed at 8pm and slept. We were pretty sure we couldn't spend any money doing that.