No trip goes according to plan

by Alexandra Cristian (Romania)

I didn't expect to find Morocco

In the last few days, I've been thinking about what was my favorite trip so far, and even though it should be a hard choice, I keep getting the same answer in my mind: Morocco. Well...that surprises me, because it was such an troublesome trip. So, why do I have such fond memories of it. Maybe you can clear that up for me. I'll just tell you the short version. A couple of years ago, me and some friends decided to try travelling outside Europe for once. After checking our funds and doing a little bit of research, Morocco seemed the obvious choice. We had 8 days of vacation time and in that period we wanted to see as much of the country as we could. To that end, we bought the outbound flight to Fez and the return from Marrakesh. So we had 2 cities to visit and we agreed to add a desert trip to the mix. We found a guy online that offered a cheap 2 day camel tour in the highest dunes in Sahara. After some negotiations, the guy reduced the price and included food and accommodation to the agreement. Regarding the sleeping arrangements in the cities, we decided to book in hostels, because you can easily make friends. Bags made, plans complete, we were ready for this new adventure. We landed in a rainy Fez quite late in the evening. I don't know about you, but we associated Africa with unbearable heat, so we packed for warm weather. Moving on, with difficulty we found a taxi that would take us to our hostel. A guy greeted us at the drop off and proceeded to guide us through some shady streets. We weren't even sure if our guide was actually from the hostel, but after a while we reached our destination, only to find out that they were overbooked. Quite a conversation to have at 12 at night. In the end, they found us another accommodation, and after a good night's sleep, and some sock shopping, we managed to enjoy the city. The narrow streets, we had walked the night before, transformed in the vibrant city center, during the day. The second part of the trip was our tour in the desert. The problem was that our future guide had been quite talkative up until the night before the pick-up, when he became quite silent. We had traveled through the night to reach the specified location and when we got down from the bus a person approached us, but it wasn't our guide. It was a man from another agency trying to sell his tour. We weren't sure if we should trust him, but after some negotiations, we agreed to buy his tour. It was the best decision we had ever made: we got good food, interesting conversation, amazing views; and funny thing was, that our initial guide did actually call some time later. He had slept in and had been late to the meeting point. Our last stop, Marrakesh, had It's own set of events. We had discussed with a local bus company to take us from the desert to the city, at a negotiated price. However, at the drop off, the driver, that only spoke Arabic, asked a higher price than what we agreed, with his boss. We argued, us trying to find a common language, him in Arabic, with no resolution. In the end, we agreed to give him what he wanted and we went on to find our hostel. The rest of the trip continued without any further issues. We even got to meet with a contact we had made online, that showed us around the city and taught us about the local culture. So, after travelling 1500 km, encountering problems at each point (the above are just a few) and being totally unprepared for the weather, what do you think we learned from our experience? It's easy: things don't always go as planned; everything can be negotiated; always bring some warm clothes,no matter the destination; everything looks better after some Moroccan tea; and just enjoy the ride, because any obstacle you encounter can be crossed, if you have the right attitude.