Writing What I Know - Day 5

Today’s prompt of describing a day in my life I will never forget, stirs up SO MANY memories. 

Do I write about a trip to Marrakech, Morroco, where I fainted from dehydration on the plane ride there (due to a few too many late nights at the pubs in Madrid, Spain immediately beforehand)?  When they took our passports and assisted me off the plane to a small medical area, giving me oxygen, sugar water, and attempted to reassure me that they just needed to stamp our passports for customs while my friends weren’t able to stay by my side? 

It was a nerve-wracking experience, to say the least.  We had chosen Morocco for the adventure, for the unknown, but those unknowns made this precarious arrival even more risky feeling.  Once I was feeling better, the medic had taken my blood pressure, and confirmed that I was okay, I was reunited with my friends, and my passport, and our taxi driver.  I’m so thankful we were staying in a Riad (hotel) where they sent a specific driver for us.  We weren’t thrust into this new world needing to navigate public transport on our own.

Although I felt weak from the fainting spell, we were driven as close to the Riad that a car could get.  The driver then asked me if I’d be able to walk the rest of the way.  I honestly wasn’t sure.  We’d be walking through some narrow dirt alleys, close to a quarter of a mile.  “Will there be places to sit down and rest if I need to along the way?”  Not really.

So our friendly taxi driver spoke with a ‘for hire’ man with a wooden wheelbarrow cart.  He paid him to carry our luggage, and then confirmed that the man would allow me to ride in the cart on top of our luggage.  It made for some great pictures, some of my favorites of the whole trip.

We rode / walked the route to our Riad.  It felt like a winding path down an alleyway that I otherwise would have wanted to avoid out of unsuredness about what scary creatures or people might be lurking in the dark corners.  Every door to a home looked the same.  You couldn’t tell what was behind those walls.  Was this a poor neighborhood or not?  What were we getting ourselves in to?  There were some children playing on one home’s front stoop.  What were they playing?  Jacks, maybe.

As we approached the dead end of the alleyway, our taxi driver & escort stopped at a doorway and let us know we had arrived.  This door looked identical to me from all the other doors, and I was thankful, once again, that we weren’t nagivating this maze on our own.

We stepped into the Riad and were greeted by the jovial owner and an absolutely BEAUTIFUL interior.  A fountain in a courtyard was surrounded by three stories of sleeping rooms and hallways.  Our luggage was taken up to our room, and we said Goodbye for Now to our taxi driver, who we would see several times later during our short time in Marrakech. 

We were served some Moroccan hot tea to help recharge us from the surprising start to our journey.  As the delicious, warm, sweet, minty tea filled my body, I felt a new energy.  The Riad owner described various experiences that we could start with in Marrakech, from delicious food and restaurants we would only know by the sheep’s heads out front, to public bathhouses called hammams, and excursions we could take outside of the city walls.  I felt a new energy to start exploring, and we were all excited to start on our journey in what felt like a whole new world!