October 31, 2025 - Marrakech, Morocco

 We landed in Marrakech at 6:30 am local time this morning, 1:30 am Gainesville time.  We arrived 1 hour early, which was a surprise.  The flights were both good; Gainesville to Atlanta and Atlanta to Marrakech - non-eventful, which is  the way we like them.  Reda Jabri, with our tour company MotoQuest, met us after we collected our bags and helped load us into the van to drive us to our hotel 2Ciels.  

First impressions. Everyone we have met has been friendly, helpful and patient, even when we had to use hand gestures to communicate.  Arabic and French are the main languages in Morocco, but we have found English spoken a lot.  There are a lot of scooters in the streets and they go where ever they want, however they want and whenever they want.  Traffic lanes, lights and signs don't apply to them.  Pretty wild to experience at first.  We never saw a fender bender.

It was 7:30 am local when we checked into the hotel and our room was not available, no surprise.  We walked next door and had a very nice, affordable breakfast including my first Moroccan mint tea.  Everything was very good. I really liked the mint tea.

We waited until our room was available and then slept for a couple of hours, got up and found a nice little coffee shop 100 feet from our hotel, MARH Coffee.  The staff were extremely friendly and spoke good English.  The coffee was good also.  We walked around and got caught up in the extremely loud and happy futbol (soccer) fans going to the Marrakech City Team game across from our hotel.  We tested out a nice gelato shop where we people watched for a couple of hours.  Next we walked back to our hotel, had a light dinner on the roof of the hotel and then came back to our room to settle in for the night.

We were able to watch and hear the soccer match from the roof of our hotel.  Watch HERE

Exiting the Marrakech Airport

Sooz getting ready to enjoy our first breakfast in Morocco.  In the bottom, center of the picture you can see the mint tea pot.

Our bill for 2 cappuccinos came to about $5.00 US

The great staff at MARH Coffee!

Busy roundabout intersection we are getting ready to cross.  To keep it safe, we just crossed with the locals.

Very nice gelato shop we spent a couple of hours at

There were a surprising number of horse drawn carriages roaming around

Sooz watching the soccer match from our hotel's roof

Our dinner at the hotel's rooftop restaurant.  Chicken sandwich, fries and salad for me on the right, and a fresh salmon salad for Sooz on the left.  They were both really tasty.