Morocco, day fifteen: Marrakech

This was all a bit last-minute.

I knew I was going to Marrakech, but I didn't really know when, simply because for the last couple of days I've had a relaxing break from travelling around like a madman, and had a couple of days chilling.

However, last night it was decided that I would travel to Marrakech this morning, but it was not until I was actually awake and sufficiently caffeinated that it was determined how or when. I would take the mid-morning Al Atlas service from Casa Oasis to Marrakech, after a gentle InDrive that got me to the station with plenty of time to spare.

The Gare de l'Oasis is a dinky two-platform station in the Oasis district of Casablanca, which reopened after a year of renovation work in January 2005. The district itself is considered quite well to do, and is home to Morocco's two big football clubs: Wydad AC and Raja Club Athletic. The station has a ticket office and a shop and little else, but it was nice to chill on the platform while waiting for the train to arrive from Casa Voyageurs, which had left Fès four hours earlier.

There was much prettiness to be seen from the 10:44 train, so much so that it's quite difficult to express just how much pretty there was. Unfortunately, the first class coach was not like the one on the journey from Tangier to Fès but a compartment of six, and being in a middle seat for most of it I wasn't able to get up and bounce around as much as I'd have liked. I was able to wander around the coach, much to the amusement of my fellow travellers, taking photographs of the pretty, until it got too much for all of us to bear and I had to have a little sit down.

The journey from Casablanca to Marrakech takes two and a half hours, and the air conditioning was working for all of that. It took only a few minutes for us to clear the environs of Casablanca, and before long we were trundling through an increasingly golden landscape with horizons on both sides ever-dominated by mountains. There was a nice man with a trolley who passed through the train a couple of times during the journey, although I'd had a sensible breakfast and the forethought to bring my own big bottle of water.

By Settat I'd made a friend who'd spoken some French with me, before defaulting to English to enquire about the suggestion on my tee-shirt that the birds work for the bourgeoisie. I'd only really started talking to him because he was in a compartment of six by himself, and this struck me as a good place to do some window-licking for the last hour to Marrakech.

I wasn't really sure whether to frame my answer as an actual conspiracy theory or not, and decided to keep it light as it quickly became evident that he’d brought enough tinfoil hats for everyone. He had grown up in New York, apparently, although it was difficult to determine how much of this was made-up as I tuned out at the first mention of "main-stream media", and thought it best to nod in quiet acquiescence between photos. We veered between the politics of the Middle East to why the BBC is evil until Benguerir, where he got off and left the compartment empty and quiet.

I was not really sure what I was expecting as we approached Marrakech's century-old station, but I quickly noticed that there was something wrong with the clouds. I couldn't put my finger on it for a while, until I noticed that one of the clouds was not a cloud, but actually the top of a snow-peaked Atlas Mountain proper poking through the cloud beneath it. The entire horizon on the approach took on a completely different vibe as we got closer to our destination, as the mountains – at 2km above sea level – were imposing. They put the distant mountains that had flanked us for most of the journey firmly in their place.

My accommodation planning was as random as my train planning, and in fact I hadn't booked the riad until I was sitting on the train at Oasis. I thought that after the success of my previous last-minute Fès booking experience, everything would be OK. But this was very much not an OK sleeping situation.

For a start there'd been a bit of a sketch back and forth on the train via the booking app of choice, where I was told there was a problem with the payment which had flagged as having failed in the app, and a request for contact on WhatsApp to "show me where the riad was". I don't have WhatsApp, so that was easy, but it was alarming that the riad was not exactly at the address it was listed at in the app, and it turned out after a little hunting to be in an area slightly more sketchy than I was comfortable with. This resulted in a cancellation and refund.

Some hasty looking around later in a new booking app of choice and another InDrive later, the incredibly once-grand but now a little tired Riad Marrakech House became my weekend home. It's not really a riad at all, but a massive hotel in which I was given a huge room with multiple beds and a mini balcony overlooking a building site. Still. The hotel boasts a pool and a wellness spa, so it can't be bad.

The hotel is quite a long way from the centre of Marrakech, so my first venture out required InDrive to an Iranian restaurant not far from the Place de la Liberté that had been recommended to me by Student. I had a fabulous falafel shawarma and some sparkly water, served to me by a smiley youth keen to try out his English, then took a gentle stroll down the Avenue Moulay El Hassan to the Koutoubia Mosque and into the Place Jemaa el Fna, where I had a fun wander amid the mayhem.

I'm on a mission to find the Unriwalled Showabove, a roof terrace in a restaurant with a view overlooking the square which is, as the name suggests, above and unrivalled. I can't remember exactly where it is and there are many restaurants with roof terraces overlooking the Place. If I'm honest, my search this evening didn't get far as I stopped on the relatively normal first-floor terrace of the Café de France for a mint tea and over which I watched the gentle chaos beneath unfold.

I didn't move until I'd determined it was time to go back to the hotel. I'd already eaten but had a stroll through the food section of the Place which was full of some very aggressive hawkers trying to get me to eat at their little stand, even though I protested that I had already eaten and that I didn't actually want any food.

This did little to deter them.

As I waited for a taxi back to the hotel, a moped went past with a baby sandwiched between its father (driving) and mother (hanging on).

The taxi door didn't quite shut properly.