WEATHER: Super-Hot and 36C
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Catching an air-conditioned train from Casablanca to Rabat
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Catching a non-air-conditioned train from Rabat to Meknes
BUYS OF THE DAY: Dinner – restaurant specialty of half a chicken with rice and fries and a coke and water $4.50
WORD OF THE DAY: Man how hot is it?
Good morning Casablanca.
Today our final destination is Meknes later tonight. But we had a lot to see and do before our eventual arrival at 8pm. We had some free time this morning before heading to the train station in Casablanca, so we decided to make the most of our time and visited the 3rd largest mosque in the world the Hassan II Mosque.
This building was amazing and a sign of the modern times but still keeping with tradition when getting built. The building is made of 100% Morocco materials, except 4 large chandeliers that were imported from Italy. It stands on a promontory looking out to the Atlantic, and has room for 25,000 worshippers. A further 80,000 can be accommodated in the mosque's adjoining grounds for a total of 105,000 worshippers present at any given time. Its minaret is the world's tallest at 210 m. It only took 6 years to complete the building, with 2,500 construction workers and 10,000 artists and craftsman to build the mosque; they worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on shifts. It has a retractable roof, (that is 4 meters in depth) so during Ramadan and other busy holy days, the roof can open to help ventilate the mosque if required. It takes 200 cleaners to keep the mosque clean each DAY, and there are 350 speakers concealed on pillars inside the mosque for prayer call. It is so modern, yet keeps with the tradition in which it was made for.
I can’t believe how cheap things are here. The petite taxis are 10 MAD (which 1 AUD is about 8.5 to their dollar) so I am just rounding up and using 10 to the 1. So if something is 20 MAD it is $2AUD! So the taxis are 1AUD to get around anywhere in the cities. They officially fit 3 people and generally are 4 door Fiats. In Casablanca they are red, in Rabat they were a dark blue and Meknes they are a light blue. An easier way to get around town, and If there is just you, the driver will stop and pick-up other people if you are all going the same way. They also have Grand taxi’s which are the old 1980 styled Mercedes Benz cars and officially they can fit 6 people in. We gave it a shot going with the 6 of us to the Mosque, but it was a tight squeeze and settled for 2 x petite taxi’s coming back. As there were 7 of us returning back to the hotel, our petite driver let us squeeze a 4th person in his car, but if he got caught, he would be fined 400MAD. There was only once that Tom had to crouch down as we passed some police, so we made it back okay without getting fined.
11am out train departed Casablanca. It was an air-conditioned train that looked very similar to the Italian trains that ChelC and I caught to the port and airport when in Rome. It was a little struggle to get on with all my bags, but I did it. It also reminded me of my Trans Mongolian experience, negotiating exiting and entering people and getting to seats once the bags were stacked. The journey was only an hour and had us arriving into Rabat just after lunch.
We get to have nearly 5 hours in this city that is also the capital of Morocco. This city has a better feel than Casablanca and I guess being a capital city it felt a bit more cosmopolitan and cleaner. We stored our bags at a restaurant just a short walk from the train station. We ate lunch there, which I have seem to have taken a liking to the Tangine Kefte, which is basically meatballs in a vegetable sauce and the tangine name comes from the pot it is actually cooked in. It is delicious and for 3AUD, it is a bargain.
After lunch Imman then gave us an orientation tour of the city. He is officially not allowed to guide in the city, so he would just point out a few things on our walk and give us our bearings for when we were given our free time. We walked for about an hour and a half, and I cannot begin to tell you how HOT this place is. I rekon the temperature would have been in the 35C. Not a cloud in the sky, and besides walking through the Medina for about 25 minutes, we were in full sun all day. It reminded me of my Central America trip, when it got to 41C in Leon, Nicaragua and it was just too hot to put on sunscreen, as it just sweats off. I knew it would be hot in Morocco, but I don’t think I expected the temperature to be this BLOODY HOT!!!
Our free time took in some of the sights including the Hassan Tower which is the minaret of an incomplete mosque. It begun in 1195 AD, the tower was intended to be the largest minaret in the world along with the mosque, also intended to be the world's largest. In 1199, Sultan Yacoub al-Mansour died and construction on the mosque stopped. The tower only reached 44 m, about half of its intended 86 m height. The rest of the mosque was also left incomplete, with only the beginnings of several walls and 200 columns being constructed. It was quite cool to see and a little eerie at the same time.
The Mausoleum of Mohammed V is a historical building located on the opposite side of the Hassan Tower. It contains tombs of the Moroccan king and his two sons, late King Hassan II and Prince Abdallah. Its construction was completed in 1971. Hassan II was buried there following his death in 1999. You were allowed to take pictures inside no problems. The building had 4 doors and each one was guarded by a National Guard in full regalia, and inside the building, there were another 4 guards in each corner. A little bit of overkill? This doesn’t include the 2 National Guards on horseback standing at both entrances and 2 guards at the front stair entrance to the building! It was quite funny, the guard let you take pictures of them, and then they would start talking to you! I guess we are just used to the British National Guards where they don’t really even make eye contact to these guys who were chatter boxes compared to them!
We then had to make our way back to the restaurant, which on foot, back in the blazing sun took us 30 minutes. We got a chance to have a quick drink in the cool of the shop, before reloading our bags and heading back to the train station. It has been a massive day so far, and we still had another train to catch at 5.15pm. My Aussie mobile number doesn’t work in Morocco and my UK sim is out of money, so Imman and I went to a phone shop and I am now running on a Moroccan sim card for the next 2 weeks.
Our train was 30 minutes late arriving, but when we go on, it was like a European train, compartment style, no reserved seating, so a shit fight to find 11 seats, which we ended up spreading out over 2 carriages. This was okay, I was happy for a little Bernie time, so once I got seated, after the bung fight of storing bags, it hit me that the train WAS NOT AIR-CONDITIONED!!!! Imann did warn us that we may get an older train, which I was happy to accept thinking that the train would have open windows. WRONG. No air, no window, no breeze, no nothing for 2.5 HOURS!!! I kid you not; it was 35C outside it would have been over 40C in the train. It was sooooooo HOT. The Moroccan lady sitting across from me looked like she was about to pass out, so it wasn’t just us ‘Westerners’ being soft. So it really wasn’t the best journey and by the time we got into Meknes, we were all hot and bothered and needed a good shower after the day and especially the train ride from HELL we were on. My train cabin was full of young groovy Moroccans, all dressed in their fancy shirts and fancy jeans, talking on their mobiles and each other even though they hadn’t met before. I seriously at one point had 6 guys in my cabin and another 5 sitting and standing just outside my door all chatting and laughing with each other. They seemed really nice and not creepy at all – new generation coming through I suppose. For the record none of them spoke English – I did ask at one point.
Our hotel was just a short walk from the train station again, which was great, as I am now sunburned, hot and carrying a billion (well 4) bags and feeling very tired. I do believe the heat really saps your energy and we need to make sure that we keep drinking plenty of water. Once we got to our rooms we realized that there was no air-conditioning at all. The room had 2 large windows and that was it. It was like we had moved from the sauna of the train to the sauna of a hotel room. It was so HOT in there. No time to think about that, as we had to meet back downstairs for dinner.
Imman took us to a local restaurant, where the food is cheap, the service is lousy and the food is served pronto! He was right on all fronts and especially about the food being SUPER cheap. I ordered a local potato cake, the local specialty of BBQ chicken for main, with fries and rice, a bottle of coke, a bottle of water (large) and the whole thing cost me 4.50AUD!! I kid you not; the meals were MASSIVE and wait till you see the photos.
10.30pm and it was time for us to head back to the hotel – we were all pooped. When we left for the hotel the temperature was 35C at 8.45pm and when we got back to the hotel at 10.30pm it had dropped to 32C, at 10.30pm AT NIGHT!!! I told you it was hot. I knew I would never sleep in that weather without air-con or a fan, so I wet my bath towel and went to sleep with that across my stomach and I didn’t have too much trouble sleeping through the night. I just hoped leaving the windows wide open, with no screens, that no unwanted bugs would turn up un-expected.
What a massive day – 3 cities, 2 trains and 40C heat – Morocco, I think we need to talk about some cooler weather – but I am liking getting back into some culture and it will be HIGHLY unlikely I will be having a BIG night on this trip. Can you imagine walking around in oppressive heat hungover? Yeah not going to happen to this black duck.
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