agroove . I knew that groove was in your heart

  1. May 8, 2012

    Morocco episode 2: the desert, yalla yalla!

    After 3 nights in Marrakech, we set off to the Atlas mountain / desert tour. The tour was 2 days drive to the Sahara desert with bunch of stops, ride a camel out for a couple of hours, then spent a night in a camp, and then back to town on the last day. We were the last group to get picked up so we ended up sitting all separately, which is not a big deal because we all made new friends! There were all sorts of people on the tour – koreans, greeks, spanish, french, americans, italia, austria; some people were on vacation, some people had been backpacking for 8 months already (2 crazy korean girls!), and I sat beside the Korean dude who’s beem travelling for 2-3 months along the Europe coast then down to Morocco.

    gladiator!

    We drove through some of the craziest mountain pass I’ve seen from Marrakech to Sahara desert, totally initial D, and our driver was super speedy and rude. We made bunch of stops on the way for scenery pics, he always said “Take phoootooo!”, and then when we had to be on our way he honked the van and yelled “Yalla yalla!” (lets go lets go!) There were always people selling souvenirs at these photo stops, and they were literally middle of nowhere, I still wonder how long it took them to bring all the goods out to the highway. We saw all sorts of cool oasis like villages where there’s a forest and a small clay village, and absolutely nothing around it, and that’s where these “berber” people lived. Main stop for the first day was this village I can’t remember what it was called, but it was where they filmed part of the Gladiator movie – the first time Maximus had to fight in some outskirt town. To give you some sense of their culture, when we went to see this village, we had to cross this small river, where bunch of sand bags had been placed for people to step on. There were these kids just hanging around, when they saw us coming they all came up and held our hands (or tried to) without us asking and helped us cross the water. When we finished crossing the kids would stick out their hand and asked for money. Some people just gave them 1-5 DH, while I refused to give any, then the kid just kept harassing me, asking me for candy, whatever he saw on my backpack, even asked me for my flip flops. Some kids just left if they couldn’t get anything, while others said nasty things. It was pretty sad in some sense.

    Anyway it was an awesome sight to see still, and we ended the night in some funky small hotel right next to a river and mountain, the type of place I thought would be pretty sweet for camping. Next day we visited a local berber village, saw the local’s way of life – donkeys transporting insane amount of goods, people carrying stuff on their head, villagers trying to sell us hand made carpet and get as much out of our pockets before we leave, the usual stuff. We also stopped at this super pretty gorge where apparently it’s like rock climbers heaven, but I saw no rock climbing, the river water was definitely refreshing though. The driver got pretty annoying cause it seemed that we were going to be late for the camel ride, so he started to constantly rush people. We finally got to the desert entrance around 5pm I think, which was a place I thought it was kind of funny because it was like the gate to the desert, one side flat land, other side desert, in between a line of hotels.

    stars!

    Riding a camel was a lot more uncomfortable than I expected, I felt like I was going to fall off to all the time, but it was still pretty sweet, with everyone and their sand turban on. I was joking with my korean buddy on the bus that seeing a sand storm would be an awesome crazy experience, and just after 30 minute on the camel trek, we saw some massive gray clouds building up behind us. Another 20 min we heard thunder, then crazy wind that blew sand in our face, then crazy rain thunder wind sand that felt like Storm’s hail super on my face, arms, and legs. It got so bad we had to stop and everyone put on these massive heavy blanket to cover, meanwhile I was trying to capture a video of how crazy the weather was, and take picture of the sunset in the storm. When we finally arrived at the camp site it was almost dark, everyone was cold, soaking wet and tko’ed, we went inside our tent only to find no light (or candle), wet mattresses and blankets, couldn’t get any worse. Good thing for modern technology, my cellphone turned into my flashlight for the night, and we ate dinner in this central tent. The desert guide cooked us this beef stew with rice, and it was probably one of the best meal we had on the whole Morocco trip oddly. After dinner prerty much everyone went back to their tent and crashed, and I think I was the only person who was still up and about in the pitch black. I ended up hanging out with the guides for some time; drank some mint tea and spoke some broken English, then I sat outside for another 30 min or so just looking and taking pictures of stars by myself… So I thought. When I got up to go to bed, I saw a shadow in the dark and I just stood there and stared really hard into the blackness thinking, wha, I didn’t hear anyone come out… But someone was sitting at the next table! Turned out it was the Italian girl in my tent and she came out to look at the stars too lol, had a good chat with her before I went to bed. And I just have to say, it was one of the worst sleep ever as well. Our door didn’t close properly so when there’s strong wind, I felt sand built up on my eyes and lips, so I ate some sand while I slept… And then there were holes on our tent so I also got raindrops on my face occasionally. GG.

    desert trek!

    Next morning we woke up early and I caught a glimpse of the sunrise. Someone found a snowboard woth broken binding so we were trying to do ghetto sand boarding, while the Austria girl actually brought her skis and geared up, but because of the rain the sand was super slushy (or whatever the equivalent term for that sand condition as snow), she skied about 5 seconds and stopped, she did get some cool pics though. The camel ride back was 100x better cause it was nice and sunny, and my seat was 100x more comfortable. We got back to the hotel rendezvous point, and ate breakfast for about 15 min and then we got yalla yalla’ed by our driver. Except no one listened lol, we were supposed ti get time to relax ,eat, and shower, but pretty much only the eating part happened. Hence ended the epic desert journey and a long long ride back to Marrakech.

    Overall, despite all the ridiculous crap we went through, I still think it was one of the best part of the trip, I just wished we had a camp fire around the desert camp, and our driver wasn’t such a random jerkface – he randomly put on loud music, talked super loud on his cellphone, and on the way back he even made a random stop and bought some meat for himself! Besides, part of the desert will always be with me because there are sand stuck in my lens :-( don’t worry still usable, but my poor Canon definitely went through some hard time.

    Almost done, last episode, Fez – Andy defeated!?

  2. May 1, 2012

    Morocco episode 1: Marrakech – Japan? Korea? Arigatou!

    (Awesome flickr pics here!)

    I forgot what it was that I saw a while back, but when I saw it, it left me with a distinct memory that, I have to visit Morocco, it looked super duper awesome. So when I found out Ling and Germaine were planning a 1 week trip in Morocco, I had to tag along no matter what.

    This was the first time flying Ryanair for me, and they did not disappoint. For some reason, even after you checked in online, you had to go to the counter just to get a stupid stamp, or else you couldn’t get on the flight. They were uber strict on your luggages – one meant one, not small sling bag, no empty bags, no plastic bag, you had to shove everything into your carry on. At the boarding gate, they had people waiting to weigh your bag, and if it was over the limit, then pay £50 to check it in last minute (my was 9.6 or something, just under, whew). After all that, we found out that our flight was hit by lightning so it was delayed for 4 hours.

    We arrived around 12am at the airport, and things got intense right away. Wikitravel told me a taxi ride from airport should be about 70 dirham (which is about £5.5 / $8.5), so we talked to one taxi guy, he said 120, we said 100, and he just turned around, ignored our offer, and started talking to some other drivers. The next guy came up tried to make some money, same deal, and same result. Third guy, same. Basically we were forced to take 120, and just before we gave into their deal, this Korean girl came up to us asking if she can come along cause she was by herself. We didn’t mind at all but the drivers did, the price went up to 160 right away because an extra person, and another driver came over started arguing because the Korean girl was her customer, and he was actually trying to pull her away. Anyway, we hopped on this ghetto taxi while drivers were still going at it, and off to our stay.

    So I thought. Turned out that our taxi driver didn’t know where our hotel is, so he dropped us off at some weird back street with bunch of random people standing around. We got our stuff, and when we tried to pay he demanded 200 DH instead. Obviously we weren’t going to get ripped off right away so we had to argue with the guy for about 10 min, ended up paying him 160 cause we didn’t have exact change and he didn’t look like he was going to give us any anyway. Now we were standing in this back street no idea where to go, we were basically the perfect prey – helpless tourists in the middle of the night. Some kid came up to us, started asking us where we going, and offered to take us there. Of couse we said no and walked the opposite way he pointed, he started to follow us and kept saying it’s the wrong way and he will take us – quite persistent and annoying people sometimes. We then asked some local people and they offered to take us to the hotel (finally some nice people), then the the kid from before got super pissed, kept yelling something at the locals and didn’t sound like very nice things. I assumed it’s something like, “You bastards I was so close to scam these Asians!”

    Our hotel, or “riad” – which is like a Moroccan guest house, with a centre open court yard, quite lovely, was in the old town/medina, and actually right next to the Djemma El Fna square, and it was really nice. The style and setting were quite simple and comfy, showers and bathrooms were outside unless you’re on the ground floor, but they had wifi and the basics. At this point, we never had dinner yet, so we basically dropped off our stuff, rest for a few min, and went out to hunt for some amazing food in the square. The famous big square is called Djemaa El Fna, it was like… night market with ONLY food. Super lively all around the square area, people everywhere still after 12am though they were mostly locals. On the side there were people playing music, dancing, watching something, selling crap etc. We stood out like fat wallets walking around the square, so food stall people swarmed us everywhere we walked. For some odd reason, they ALL called us Japan or Korea, they loved asking us where we were from, what’s our name, and, they won’t leave us alone! In the end, we went to some random stall, and ordered a few small things to fill our tummy for the night. One good thing about the square was that, prices were fixed so there was no overcharge, but they did try to bring all sorts of food to you without you ordering it, so they could charge you after. Sneaky bastards.

    (omg I’ve written this much and I only got to an hour after I landed in Marrakech…)

    Next day we went out to explore the souqs, which are the markets. The market was a huge area, with long streets and many many intersections / forks. There were some main parts like Dyers and Glass souqs, but really it was the place you go and just become lost for a while, and surprise yourself with wherever you end up. And that was pretty much what we did. I had no idea where we went really, we did see most of the main stuff, we walked for a couple of hours, took tons of pictures, and got out on the other end somehow. Which was good because some nice tourist spots were located on the other side, so after a quick lunch we went to Ali Ben Youssef Medersa and the Moroccan Museum. If I remembered correctly, medersa meant school, and Ali Ben Youssef was one of the most beautiful school built. It had some amazing wood/stone works on the wall, and the best thing was that, it was so quite and peaceful compared to the souqs. We wandered for a good hour in there.

    After the museum it took a hour or 2 again trying to make our way back. We had dinner again in the square. It felt like, whenever you go into the square (or the market too), you were prepping for a battle, which was quite stressful for dinner. So I changed up my tactics, instead of being on defence and tried to push everyone away, I decided to give in and embrace. It made a huge difference, in fact, it made my market experience quite fun for rest of the trip. All these people came up trying to get you, and I just tried to be “buddy buddy” with them back – I greeted them, shook hands, made introduction, had some Japanese conversation, it was almost like playing a game ha.

    As much as I want to keep writing about everyday, this is getting too long and well, we didn’t do as much on the 2nd day anyway. So I’m going to try to skim day 2′s … day. We set out towards a different direction to find few other tourist spots.  Took a while to find Dar Si Said because people keep telling us it was closed (seriously, what do they get out of it, I don’t understand), and hit up Bahia Palace after. Then we took a taxi into New City, where it’s all more modern and have actual shops. We shopped at a super market for some local goods, and of course, I had to make a stop at McDs.

    Anyway, that’s the Marrakech part, sorry I cheap out on 2nd day but I’ve been at this for hours actually. We set off to our desert tour next day morning, which I will write about soon hopefully.

    • Things we were called in the square and the souqs – japan, yakuza, karate, kung fu, jackie chan, jet li, yamaha, honda, kawasaki, momotaro, and a few more I didn’t remember
    • Common greetings from the locals
      • Japan? konichiwa, arigatou
      • Where you from? Japan? korea? china? ni how
      • Where you going? I take you there
      • it’s closed, [insert tourist destination] is that way
    • Number of times called Japan and Korea – I don’t know, like 524878 times
    • Most popular dish ordered at the square – aubergine / calamari (it’s a tie!)
    • Best drink deal (IMO) – spice tea for 2DH
    • Worst food deal – “Spicy” sauce for 10DH
    • Food I wish I ordered – minced meat sandwich (which you cannot order from menu, the locals order it somehow)

    About the food – I had this high expectation from all the readings that there would be a food fest in Morocco. Everything sounded awesome – market food, traditional food, crazy street stall food, home/hotel cooked feast. But, even just after 2-3 days, it felt like I’ve tried almost everything, and gawd, so much bread all the time!

    About shopping – bargaining is the way of life. Be strong, bargain hard. My rule of thumb is, whatever they offer you in the market, you offer 20% of their price, and you try to settle around 30 – 40% (with exception of course). Best trump card move is just walk away, offer your “final price”, which they will ask you like 10 times, and if they don’t take it, just leave.

    To be continued – part 2, the desert!

  3. April 30, 2012

    Where should I go next? read #10

    Too many cities to see.

    Yay regular poop.

    #uklife #haikustyle

    That almost sounds completely random, but it will be explained on my posts for Morocco, I think it will be an epic post trilogy. Meanwhile, here’s a huge backlog of the readings.

    18 Beautiful Examples of Parallax Scrolling in Web Design

    A systematic approach to logo design

    The New Google+ Is More Beautiful Than Facebook (But It Doesn’t Matter)

    What NYC and Beijing Would Look Like, Without All The People

    UI Patterns For Mobile Apps: Search, Sort And Filter

    Using Origami To Mock Up Ingenious Gestural Interfaces