Short text with some photos. It's 10pm so I'll make it quick. We rode along the North Atlantic Ocean for much of today before heading inland to Taroudant. We are staying at the Dar-Zitoune resort in a beautiful cottage. We went swimming and had a great dinner. Now we are crashing.
Last night we met our touring guide and group for dinner in the medina. We all rode in horse drawn carriages from the hotel to the medina that we visited the previous 2 days. Our guide, Reda Jabri, is a native Moroccan born in Casablanca, worked for Anderson Consulting for 20 and decided to change course and start his own motorcycle touring company. He teamed up with Phil Freeman from MotoQuest 2 years ago to provide this 14-day tour of Morocco. This is just the 2nd year he has provided this tour through MotoQuest but he has been guiding tours in Morocco for around 10 years, so he's well seasoned and very competent.
Today we took a bus from the hotel to Reda's business compound 15 miles out of Marrakech where we were matched up with our motorcycles. All of the group members are well traveled and have done a lot of motorcycle touring. There are a total of 10 people in the group, all from the US, plus Reda, a mechanic, a driver and a a nice van as a support vehicle. I think we lucked out with our group and Reda. All the group members are personable, good riders and interesting people. A fun group.
We took off this morning around 10am from Reda's compound heading towards Essaouira, only 114 miles due west to the northern Atlantic coast. It started our pleasant and warmed to 93 degrees with full sun, but low humidity. It was hot. We stopped mid-way for lunch, once for a panoramic view of Essaouira and then to our hotel, the Atlas Essaouira & Spa.
It was a late night last night and an early morning this morning. So by the time we arrived, Sooz and I were tired and took a short nap. I then crossed the street and swam in the very chilly North Atlantic and met Sooz at the hotel pool. All of that felt really good after a hot day.
I'm catching up from last night's food tour. Our group included the guide Basam, a couple from England, a single woman from Greece who has lived in LA for 15 years and a single woman from Argentina who has lived in Manhattan for 12 years. It was a really fun and interesting group. I think we visited 7 or 8 different restaurants, some big, some small family owned. We spent the entire time back at Jemaa el-Fnaa, the large market in the medina.
We got back to our room around 10pm absolutely stuffed. You can see some of the food we ate in the pictures below. Most of the places we went were off the beaten path in parts of the souk that are local oriented and not touristy. That was great. It was a lot different than most of the area we explored yesterday. Last night it was much less busy, quieter and more personal.
Last night was also game 7 of the World Series between the LA Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays. I listened until the 11th inning when the Dodgers ultimately won by 1 run. Local time here was 5:30 am when I turned it off. I'm paying the price today, and moving very slowly, again. Sooz got a massage at our hotel while I rested.
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After a fairly decent night's sleep, we went down for breakfast in our hotel. It was a good meal during which we had a great conversation with a couple and their teenage son from England. We shared traveling and some politics keeping it in a very pleasant tone. They were amazed with knew about the British TV show, The Detectorists. It was the husband's favorite. His wife was born in Russia and hasn't been back in 15 years.
We then took the long walk of 100 feet to our now favorite coffee shop where we got a really friendly welcome. Apparently, they had seen my blog post with their picture and read my glowing review of their shop on Google Maps. They gave us some good advice on getting a taxi for the souk, or market place, called Jemaa el-Fnaa. It's huge with hundreds of small stores, restaurants, hotels and vendors of all kind located in the medina (old town) of Marrakech.
This is a pretty funny video of Susie getting a little frustrated with me taking a video of the souk HERE And, another short video of the snake charmers HERE
We walked around the souk for quite awhile, even bargaining for a few things. We were told several times before we went, not to accept the first price they give. Reply with half of their first price and then go from there. We did okay. We also saw the famous snake charmers and gave them a contribution for the entertainment.
We grabbed a small local pizza and big bottle of water at a very small cafe on one of the side alleys where we met Ekatarina. She is originally from Macedonia in the Balkans. So that naturally turned into a great conversation about her home country and many places she has traveled as a single, young woman, and our stories about visiting the Balkans a couple of times. She was wonderful to speak with and very inspiring.
We walked around some more, got tired and took a cab back to our hotel where we crashed. We shared the cab with another young woman traveling solo. She just finished getting a masters degree and was taking a few months to travel the world looking for places she might like to work. Very cool.
We have reservations for a food tour this evening. We are meeting the guide at 6pm very close to where we were today and should get back around 10pm. So don't expect any blog about that experience until tomorrow.
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
On Thursday, October 30, 2025 Susie and I are flying from Gainesville, Florida to Marrakech, Morocco. We'll return on Sunday, November 23, 2025. Most of our time in Morocco will spent touring the Country on a motorcycle. The motorcycle tour is organized by MotoQuest. You can get a good overview of the tour HERE. The tour covers most of Morocco including the Atlantic Coast and the Atlas Mountains. We will be on our own a couple of days before the tour begins and about a week after the tour ends.
I'm going to try to add to this blog most days of the trip so check in regularly to see how we're doing.
