Hello Everyone,
We didn’t have any trouble in Fes with people trying to cheat us, until the day we left. We waved down a taxi at the main square for a ride to the train station, only 1.5 miles away and he said he would use the meter. After the taxi driver found out we were Americans, he spent the whole 5 minute drive to the station telling us, in his broken English, how much he liked and admired Donald Trump. Then he tried to charge us out of $25 for a $2.50 fare. It figures….. We refused to pay him more than $2.50 and he eventually released our luggage to us and left. Good thing we always leave a large time buffer for our transportation events. On to the next Moroccan adventure. The last two cities in Morocco we visited were Rabat, the Capital and Tangier, perhaps the most popular tourist city, since it gets a lot of one time visitors coming over for the day from Spain. The Rabat train station is very old and under construction. That’s surprising, being the capital city. We had to carry our luggage up and down long staircases.
Rabat does not attract much international tourism, but it holds one of the most well preserved Kasbahs in Morocco. A Kasbah is a smaller “neighborhood”, often within the larger Medina’s walls (as in Tangier), that houses the Palace and other wealthier houses. It has its own wall within the Medina. Rabat’s Kasbah is a UNESCO world heritage site and has been completely restored and preserved, and there is a beautiful garden park inside. The Rabat Kasbah is positioned “outside” the Rabat Medina and has its own walled fortress right at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Also in Rabat is the Chellah, a medieval fortified Muslim necropolis and ancient archeological site, with an ancient Roman colony that has been unearthed and partially restored. It’s one of the more interesting things in Rabat to see, that just opened last year, and has a beautiful garden park inside, as well.
There are two unusual buildings in Rabat. One is the Mohammed VI Tower tower [built in 2017 – 820 ft], that looks like a rocket ship. When it was built it was the tallest building in Africa. Now it is the third tallest. It stands high and out of place in Rabat, around most other buildings that are only a few stories tall. The other building, The Grand Theatre of Rabat, looks like the of aftermath of a desert sand storm. There are pix of both in the photo gallery.
Rabat sits along the Atlantic Ocean and is a popular place for surfing. Our Free Walking Tour guide, Sufian, was a competitive surfer in his younger incarnation. He’s still young and still searching for career opportunities. He led us through and around the Medina, pointing out interesting things like…. If the door knocker hand on a door has a ring on its finger, it indicates that there are no “eligible” females in the household for marriage. However, if there is no ring on the finger and you are looking for a bride, then you can knock on the door and ask to meet the unmarried women. Sufian said that his father was Berber and his mother was from Rabat. His father spoke a particular dialect that he did not learn, growing up. So, when his father wanted to communicate with him, his mother had to interpret. It created an awkward relationship with his father. He walked us by a man at a little shop on the street making Sfinge (not a typo), a Moroccan doughnut. He appears every afternoon to make them fresh. So, of course we had to try one… or two.
It would be almost impossible to navigate through a Medina without a GPS map. The local paper maps aren’t accurate enough and it’s hard to know where you are. It gets a little tricky, though, when you have to navigate through a building or tunnel. The GPS doesn’t work too well then, but you can usually guess where you are at the other end.
We haven’t met anyone who expressed any negative feelings toward Americans yet, on this trip. On one of our road-trip excursions, we toured with a couple from northern Italy and another couple from Iran. They were all well educated professionals and we had lunch together. They were curious about what was going on with Donald Trump, but not critical of American people. They are always curious to understand our election system that has the “electoral college” which doesn’t make any sense to them (or me either, for that matter). They empathize with Americans, because they don’t like their own leaders either (Italy and Iran, yea right). We get more sympathy from them than negative feelings. They said that in all their travels they haven’t found even one American who voted for Donald Trump and don’t understand how he got elected. Yea, me neither.
Half way through this trip I had to get some laundry done. It’s usually no big deal. However, this time the laundry came back with the strong scent of laundry soap. Oh, well, I guess the scent of laundry soap is a better alternative than wearing dirty laundry. I can live with it.
One morning in Rabat, we were having some morning mint tea at a favorite little tea cafe near our hotel, when the young waitress, we had seen there before, approached me with a message translated from Arabic into English on her mobile phone. It read “you remind me of my grandfather, bless his soul. Could I take my photo with you?” Of course I agreed. It’s precious moments like this that make all the hassles of International traveling worthwhile. The people in Rabat are a lot more friendly and relaxed about getting their photo taken, too.
Tangier, at about 2 million population, is much bigger than Rabat. It’s full of tourists, many of them come on the day-trip ferry from Spain. Cruise ships call here, as well, and can dump a lot of tourists into the city at one time. We came here from Rabat on the new Atlas train. It was traveling at 196 MPH. It’s pretty slick. I wish we had trains like these running around our country.
Carol booked our “best hotel in Morocco”, here in the Tangier Kasbah, called La Tangerina. It’s one of those Riad house conversions and is really nice. Every hotel room, lobby space or dinner location, in La Tangerina, had an antique radio box that played delightful soothing music, from classical in the morning to modern Jazz in the evening. The area inside the Kasbah is all fixed up. It has its own wall around it and restricts motor vehicles inside the walls. We had dinner at this Riad our first night and they put rose petals all over the table. The next day we took a circular walk around the Medina. It went down and back up 250 ft in elevation, over a 2 mile walk, but most of it came at the beginning and end.
In Tangier we booked a day-trip to Chefchaouen, the “Blue City.” It’s all painted light cobalt blue, but, after getting a lot of recommendations to “not miss” this attraction, it turned out to be one huge tourist trap, done in 2008, to help a struggling city improve its tourism income. It definitely worked. The tourists pour in. It is actually kind of interesting, though, but not any kind of historical treasure.
The hotel breakfasts are all the same around Morocco. They consist of lots of cooked wheat products like pancakes and breads, along with fresh squeezed orange juice and coffee or tea. If you want they will fix you an omelet and there are misc nuts, dates and honey available. It’s a lot of carbs, but we usually use them up walking in these cities. Our highest day was 19 floors, 17K+ steps and 7.5 miles.
On our last day of this travel adventure, something very unusual happened. You may have heard about the huge power outage that hit most of Spain and Portugal, on the morning of May 29th. Well, our trip home started with a flight to Madrid, the very next morning, where we would stay over night and fly out the following morning early, on the way to Seattle. Many flights in Spain were canceled when the power went out. The airport was described as a “disaster.” We weren’t sure if the airport would be open or if we would be able to leave the next morning. It was a stressful night wondering what our options would be if the airport didn’t come back to order by the time of our flight. However, things went “as smooth as slugs snot”, as we say in Seattle, and we made all our flights and transfers to Seattle. Bullet dodged.
That’s it for our Morocco adventure. Do check out the photo gallery linked from this page. There is more info there than I mentioned in this text.
Carol has finished and published her blog on Fes. You’ll find it here:
https://carolapucci-tips.blogspot.com/2025/05/s-moroccos-oldest-city-where-tourism.html
She is also working on a blog on Rabat that should be up on her blog in a little while.
Morocco turned out to be a nice surprise, after a disappointing visit to Merakesh 15 years ago. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in stretching yourself just a little beyond Europe.
Later……………… your favorite travelers, Tom and Carol
PS: If you travel in foreign lands, watch out for a current “legal” scam that is going around. When you use a charge card to charge something, sometimes part of the approval process includes and additional question if you would like your charge converted “instantly” into US dollars….. “Yes” or “No” ALWAYS choose “NO” or you might be charged and additional 4% spread in the currency conversion. Once, I caught the merchant actually tapping the “YES” button without asking me. Buyer beware…..
Rabat & Tangier Photos
Click to Enlarge and Read Caption
