Rabat and a bit of Casablanca
I wasn’t sure what to expect of Rabat. The nouvelle ville of Fes was just horrible and lacked any character and I was worried that Rabat, which I had heard was fairly modern, would be soulless too.
Despite our kamikaze departure of Fes medina, we bought our train tickets to Rabat with great ease. 76 dhirams for a 3 hour journey one way, which is about £5. The trains looked clean enough and we had been advised to just get 2nd class tickets as 1st class was not hugely better despite being almost double the price. We sat in carriages not unlike the old British Rail trains where you have compartments sitting up to 8 people. The train was really busy and several people joined and left including a mother and her very cute children, a mathematical genius (we know because we watched him trying to work out some crazy algebraic formulas) and some teenage boys. Train stations along the way were not marked or announced really so we asked our fellow travellers when we felt we might be near Rabat and they were quite happy to advise us.
I was pleasantly surprised to get to Rabat Ville station and walk out to see not only a modern city but a pretty one. The main thoroughfare has a huge fountain in the middle of the palm tree-lined road. There was a lot of hustle-bustle but instantly we could see that the traffic was more ordered than in Fes. The Medina in Rabat is quite small so we thought we’d just opt for a regular hotel in the middle of town and Hotel Le Pietri was very close to the station and very easy to find.
Once we had checked in and dumped our bags in our new, clean home, we set about finding a place to have some drinks – it was New year’s Eve! We walked around town which was full of people carrying big boxes of cake to celebrate the holidays – January 1st is a national holiday although as we found out, ringing in the new year at midnight is not really the done thing. We did stop for coffee and cake at the Cappuccino Cafe and then we went to the Medina which was not at all exciting after the buzz of Fes. It’s a bit more like Surrey Street Market!!! It was getting dark by this point but we thought we’d wander over to the Kasbah anyway which is the old fort overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It’s not so welcoming in the dark when the gardens are shut and so on so we had a quick snoop and left to have dinner back in the medina at Restaurant de la Liberation.
Restaurant de la Liberation was full of backpackers and locals and the food was cheap in price but not in quality. Massive bowls of couscous and tagine cost us under £1.50 each and mint tea was only 15p!!!! We did ask the only other Brit in the cafe what she planned to do for New Year but she said she had only just got to Rabat and was so exhausted she was going to get some sleep! Undeterred, we headed back to our hotel and asked them where was good to go. There were celebrations in the hotel but it was reservations only and we a) didnt have one and b) didnt want to spend the evening with a bunch of middle aged diplomats who would no doubt be there.
With the help of our Lonely Planet (which honestly we tried so hard not to use!) and hotel staff we chanced on the French-owned and alcohol-serving Purple Bar. The doorman was friendly but the clientele, sadly, were not unlike the in-crowd in any happening London bar. I was actually a bit shocked to see young Moroccan women wearing short skirts and knee high boots and… SMOKING!!! They lacked the humility of their Fassi counterparts but obviously had I been in London seeing this I wouldnt have looked twice would I?? Ben wanted a beer but I was sticking to the no alcohol regime of Morocco but even then a Coke and Heineken came to almost £6.50, bah!! Actually what was really weird was being in a smoky bar!! At midnight the barman got up and started chucking confetti at everyone and a woman came round giving us party hats to the beat of some Arabic disco classic! It was a great little celebration.
2008 started with a sunny, if fresh day. Being on the ocean we were feeling the cold a bit more than in Fes. We walked to the Mausoleum of Mohammed V and Le Tour Hassan. It was here that we started to discover a nastier side to the Moroccans. A girl came out of nowhere and grabbed my hand and started to paint henna on it. Always keen to experience something new, I let her get on with it. She started speaking to me in English and I let her decorate my hand. Ben was already wary and stood a few paces away. I did think she might expect some small change for her favour so I told her I had no change but she said it didnt matter. When she was finished I turned to Ben and asked him to slip her 5 dirham or so. Bear in mind here that she spent less than a minute scrawling on my hand and true works of henna art take HOURS. She took the money (actually it may have been 10 dh) and said “This is nothing! Dont you have 50 dirham??” I looked at her, gob wide open, annoyed by lack of gratitude really and also what? Do I look like a moneybags or something?? I told to get lost or Id get the police and quickly she shuffled off with Ben’s money in her hand. I was so angry I scraped the henna off my hand with a rock on the ground but the orange dye had already stained my hand by then.
The mosque at the Mausoleum like virtually every mosque in Morocco is open only to Muslims. Ben wandered over to just poke his head in and have a look but he was fiercely challenged by a man sat by the steps who told him not to go in. I replied in French that he wasnt going in, he was just having a look but Ben walked away anyway and it was becoming apparent that Ben was pretty fed up with what looked to him like a ‘them and us’ situation. I had to explain that Islam was not an exclusive religion and even I felt like a bit of an outsider in this Muslim land. Everwhere we went I was asked if I was Moroccan. My negative answer brought disregard but the funny thing was by not being Moroccan, the locals seemed to think that I must be someone far removed from their cultures and traditions.
Rabat is twinned with the city of Sale which sits on the other side of the River Bou Regreg. After hanging around a grand taxi stand for about 20 minutes wondering how we could buy a seat we decided to just go up to drivers and ask them how much it was. We could have walked it but the bridge across didnt look like a nice walk; too much traffic. We paid 4 dhiram each to sit in the front of a big mercedes (grand taxis take 7 people including the driver!) and drive across the water. We read in the Lonely Planet that Sale was really backwards and not as liberal or women-friendly as Rabat. We got dropped off in the Medina and we were pretty much left alone. We walked around the medina wall and looked at the ocean on the other side of a huge cemetery. We decided to go and look at some really big old mosques and a local man, probably in his 20s stopped us and started talking to us. We decided to go with it and not let the earlier experience with the henna girl stop us from talking to locals. It became apparent that he was going to show us around so we just went with it and let him guide us around the medina and show us where the locals bake bread, where they shop and where they go to study the Quran. It was getting to sunset time and both Ben and I felt that we should get away from this guy before it got dark. At short periods where he was out of earshot we would signal to each other, lets give him like 30 dhirams for showing us around. We told him we wanted to go home and he said he would take us to the grand taxi stand. He took us to a quiet part of the medina wall and said taxis would come past and we could get in one. Unknown to him, we had already walked past this part of the wall and we knew the actual and much busier area where the rank was was about 3 minutes walk away. We felt something was going to happen here. He turned to leave us and both Ben and I said we should give him something for taking 45 minutes to show us around… I reached into my purse and as I did so, the guy leaned to me and whsipered “I normally charge 500 dhirams but Ill just take 200 from you”. Thank your lucky stars you were not there to see me erupt! 200 dhiram!!! Over £10 for someone to show us the medina of a lacklustre town for less than an hour!! I THINK NOT! At this point me and Ben ganged up on him and I started screaming at him that he was being outrageous. Ben laughed in his face and told him that an official guide in Fes would get 150 dhiram for HALF a DAY! OK, OK, he says, just 100 then. I told him what he was doing was illegal and we had never agreed to have him as a guide nor had we agreed we would pay him. Ben said we’d give him 50 dhirams and that he should pretty much get lost. he then asked for 50 dhiram EACH! A taxi came by and he hailed him down. He told us to give him 100 dhiram and to get into the taxi. I was ready to mash the boys face to a pulp. He kept asking me to lower my voice as the few people that were walking past were looking. I told him I was going to the police. To add insult to injury the taxi said it was 60 dhiram back to Rabat! I told them both to shove it, Ben gave the greedy guide 50 and even then he asked for more!! He jumped in the cab himself and they sped off. Worried they might go round the wall and to the rank and tell the other taxis not to take us anywhere we legged it down to the taxi rank where we found it would cost us 40 dhiram to have the whole of the grand taxis for ourselves back to Rabat. (seats are sold per person not by cab so by taking the whole thing we pay for 6 persons seats which at 40 dh is still about 10dh more than we should have paid) We could have just walked it back across the bridge but we just wanted to get out of Sale.
So people, if a local starts talking to you and you find that you start following them somewhere… DONT! Dont let your British politeness get the better of you. Tell whoever that you are fine by yoursleves and if anything, get a map out and tell them you have a map and dont need a guide!! Dont end up like we did. We chucked under £3 at him but we’re pretty sure some unsuspecting and less-experienced tourists and travellers would have coughed up the extortionate £35 he claims he normally gets for a tour of his town. Also bear in mind that between what is written in guide books and what (friendly and genuinely helpful) Moroccans have told us, the average Moroccan earns less than 100 dhiram a day so never feel pressured if someone turns up their nose at the 5 dhirams you have thoughtfully given. Especially when it costs the locals only 20dh to eat out!
We never reported our faux guide to the police. Hopefully his experience with crazy screaming British girl might deter him from doing it again, I dont know, but whatever, had the police caught up with him, he might have experienced something far worse than if a tourist was to part with £15…
Rabat is the place to eat cake and drink coffee and Moroccan coffee is amazing. I would usually have a cafe creme – a coffee with frothy milk. Ben fell in love with mille feuille slices which I adored as a child and we spent a lot of time drinking mint tea. We did venture back to the Kasbah in the daylight and we stopped for pastries at Cafe Maure with views across the sea and to Sale. The ‘ensemble artisanale’ in the medina is a good place to pick up jewellery and good stuff to decorate the home with but being backpackers we’ll make another trip one day with empty suitcases! I was impressed at the lack of hassle too 🙂
Our experiences with greedy Moroccans closed us up to talking to anyone else well into our adventure. We took a day trip to Casablanca from Rabat as we had heard it could be quite a difficult city to get around and we just didnt want any further hassles, plus many reviewers have said its not worth overnighting. We got a return ticket for just over £4 return to Casa port – trains from Rabat are every 1/2 hour and take just an hour. The train is full of commuters and we passed mainly hills and valleys but before Casablanca you can see the shanty towns where very poor people live and wonder what is wrong with this country. We went to Casablanca really just to see the Hassan II mosque. Amazing, opulent (and in view of local rundown housing) and built over the Atlantic Ocean (God’s throne is built on water), at least this was a mosque Ben could have a look at! Google it for some awe-inspiring pictures! After the mosque we did the proper tourist thing and had lunch at Rick’s Cafe, as inspired by the movie, Casablanca! I had a most welcome cheeseburger ( I was getting a bit tired of tagine) and a salad!!! I thought I would be living off fruit and veg here but the main staples unfortunately are not green or full of vitamin C unfortunately! In all, Casablanca was OK for a quick visit. I dont feel I missed out by not staying there, its very industrial and like a not so nice Port Louis.
I enjoyed our stay at Le Pietri except nobody told us the room rate went up by 100 dirhams in the new year so we were paying the bill only to find it was a lot more than we thought. That wasnt clever of them and we told them so. But they do a nice French breakfast with good coffee!
And so onwards with our journey. We were now going to head down the coast. I just hoped that the short spells of rain we experienced in Rabat didnt follow us to Oualidia…
Tags: modern, Morocco, Rabat, Sale, Travel
PixieDoux
I don’t think you will have trouble finding a room that time of year. I don’t think I would worry about reservations, I would check the tourist office, look for the V V V in a red and white traingle sign at Centraal Station. They will find you a room by checking on thier computers or call the hotel for you, they will even give you a free map and show you how to get to your hotel. If you are in average shape it should be no problem for you to walk to whatever hotel you get, the red light district, where many coffeeshops are, the Lediseplein with night clubs and more coffeeshops and the museum district, really not far apart. The star ratings for hotel are different in europe, not sure how exactly, but hotels in Amsterdam are expensive. I think for 150 us dollars you would be lucky to get one with a bathroom in your room, 3 years ago in may all I could find was a 2 star for 160 a night and had to share bathroom facilities with the a few other rooms. If you want something comparable to maybe a holiday inn I’d say over 200 a night easily. Check out hostels if you want to stay cheaper. I hope this helps. KT