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August 19, 2006
Meknes
The People of Meknes ...
are super nice. We arrived quite late in Meknes and the HI Hostel is not the easiest to find. Located a bit out of the way, and the map in Lonely Planet is shit, we stumbled through many junctions and roundabout. If not because of the numerous people, official looking security guard, kids and passer by we wouldn't have reached the hostel.
I couldn't believe the amount of assistance that we received. While they don't speak English and my French is only slightly better than my Latin, they never stopped talking, in different languages (Arabic, French, Sign and English) to direct us to the hostel. I was really impressed by this.
The hostel unfortunately does not live to HI standard. The beds, rooms, staff, other travellers and the courtyard are nice, but the toilet obviously failed weeks ago, while I could tolerate the state of the toilet my two other travel companion couldn't.
Meknes
Overcast and a bit cool, this what Meknes gave us on our first day. This was a welcome change from the 40+ Marrakech. This city is much smaller than Marrakech and we pretty much did all the sights that we wanted to see in a single day. We could not visit the royal palace, which I can only assume the one that Mulay Ismail built by plundering Marrakech's royal palace.
We went to the busy Mulay Ismail's Mausoleum, the fine art museum and the crypt where Mulay Ismail used to keep his christian slaves for his mega construction work. The museum's building, like the one in Marrakech, is more interesting than its collection.
Lunch was really nice but expensive at Restaurant Riad. This restaurant is set in a beautiful riad with an amazing patio, swimming pool and decoration. It was very expensive, but worth every cent if not only for the toilet. Dinner was a lot more cheaper affair at Restaurant Gambrino, friendly little restaurant with a strange fresco depicting scenes no where to be found in Morocco.
Volubilis
The next morning we rented a grand taxi from Meknes to take us all the way to Volubilis (Roman Ruin) and back. Originally we only asked the taxi driver to take us to Volubilis, this cost us 100 Dirham. At the petrol station he tried to sell his taxi for half day outing for 300 Dirham. This means go to Volubilis, wait for us for 2 hours, then go to Moulay Idris then back to Meknes. Lonely Planet says that this should be around 300 Dirham, great we didn't even need to haggle.
This is the biggest Roman Ruin that I've ever seen. Mark enjoys this kind of stuff immensly, as for myself I don't get it. I'm looking at foundations of building, it doesn't interest me. It was good that I had Mark there to explain all kind of stuff to me, otherwise I would have finished the entire city in half and hour. So this outing is not totally wasted.
We drove back to Moulay Idris for lunch. We were lucky as this is the souq day for Moulay Idris and the city totally in chaos. Our taxi driver had an argument with a stupid driver who blocked an entire road. He almost threw a tea glass at him. Later we saw that the stupid driver was being pulled over by a police officer. The last thing we saw of him was he trying to get to our taxi and being restrained by a police officer. That was a bit exiting I thought.
Didn't bother to Moulay Idris' tomb since we as non-Muslim won't be permitted to enter, in fact we are not allowed to spend the night here. That's pretty much it for Meknes. Although we like the city, we were glad to get out from the hostel :)
Posted by vhadiant at August 19, 2006 09:32 PM
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