Well, this day sucked. Our train was an hour and a half late getting into Marrakech, and then we had to get tickets to Agadir. As it turned out, ONCF, the train company of Morocco, which lists train schedules online and includes an 11pm train to Agadir, does not run trains to Agadir. In fact, no one does, so our rail pass was useless and we needed to find a bus. Fine. We went to the neighboring Supratours, the bus company affiliated with ONCF which does have an 11 pm bus to Agadir. The office was pretty much hell on Earth. No line, no order, just a cluster of moroccans pushing and shoving and yelling in Arabic. Lovely. This is at 4. At 4:30 we got noticed and the man told us to come back in an hour to get tickets. We ask if the bus is full, and he says no no, come back in an hour or so.
At this point, I'm frustrated -- this is the city about which I was most excited, the sun will set by 7 pm, and I'm told to sit another hour at or near the bus station, when I had expected to have been exploring the city since 2:30. So we start walking towards the main square, but have to stop a few times because Jay was feeling the results of a lack of food and sleep, combined with an access of heat. At 6 pm we were almost to the center, but decided it would be best to go back and buy the tickets in case they sold out. So we went to find an ATM (coincidentally within distant view of the main square I'd wanted to see), then turned around and found a taxi back to the station.
Upon my requesting that he turn on the meter, the taxi driver refused, so we paid twice what the ride was worth. I resolved to refuse to pay over 5 Dh in the future if there was no meter to prove a higher price. We go into the (now sane) bus station, and are told that there is no space in a bus to Agadir until the next evening. Aware that 7 busloads of reservations had not been made in the last 30 minutes, I inquired as to why we had been told to come back if the bus was sold out. Apparently because the man hadn't felt like looking at the computer screen before answering that the bus was not full - although it was.
Ready to either scream or cry (I couldn't decide which), I explained that we had a 1-o-clock flight from Agadir and that waiting for a bus the next day was simply not an option. He told us to try C.T.M. or the city bus station.
We left the station and were immediately descended upon by taxi drivers. Told our destination, they told us the charge would be 20-25 Dh. We refused and caught a taxi that we saw had a working meter. He also quoted 20 Dh, but we ignored that and then insisted upon the meter once he pulled away from the curb. We arrived, paid the 7 Dh that the meter indicated, and went into the C.T.M. station. Their busses were also full, so we repeated this process to get to the main bus station, where we were swept off by one of the touts for the Agadir bus.
Our attempts at explaining that we didn't want to leave yet, but just wanted tickets for a later bus, went ignored and we were ushered onto a very full, very hot buss. We got the last seats - the very back row, behind a chair for which the back was unhinged from the seat, so I spent most of the four-hour ride with the man in front of me lying his weight (and that of his useless chair back) on top of me. The rest of my attention was occupied by the mosquito that I couldn't see (but which feasted happily on my arm), the heated floor burning my feet, the lack of ventilation, and the overhead light that wouldn't turn off above us (no one else seemed to have this difficulty, and Jay fixed it by covering it with duct tape before returning to his don't-throw-up-or-faint position.
So it was that at 7 pm we left Marrakech largely unseen and unappreciated due to an unfortunate series of circumstances.
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