I've been curious about Morocco since before I left Australia, and recently visited for a week at the end of January with my partner. We stayed in a small village called Taghazout which is popular with surfers which I chose because we didn't want to stay in a big city where we figured we'd be hassled a lot.
I read a lot online before we went and expected to get some unwanted attention from men, however I was always with my partner except for a couple of times I walked around the village alone and I only noticed that strange men would speak to me as I passed which was only slightly annoying. I didn't wear a headscarf once, though I carried one sometimes. Our airbnb host told us that we could get away with a lot more as tourists than the locals, such as drinking beer on the beach.
Taghazout has no ATM's and you can't buy alcohol there except for at WOW bar terrace.
Me on a camel
A few things were expected, such as:
Haggling
Getting scammed (twice for 50 Euros total)
Lower levels of cleanliness in the airbnb
Getting a dodgy gut
..and some surprises like:
Drivers are quite scary, it's not the kind of place I'd like to be driving without fully comprehensive insurance, and not at all in an expensive, hard to fix campervan. They often drive on the wrong side of the road around blind corners. Seatbelts don't always work.
The temperature was colder than we expected, there was no heating in our apartment
The cutlery in cafe's was really dirty, black stuff between the fork prongs - I'd recommend carrying your own cutlery
The souk was a really nasty experience, I didn't buy the lamp I really wanted because the people were so rude
We flew over the Swiss alps
The 'pavements' were pretty bouldery
Our airbnb was pretty traditional, but the sofa was very dusty and the bed blankets we piled on to keep warm hadn't been washed in a good while...
Sunset from our roof terrace
Breakfast on our roof terrace. He had just got the sides shaved at a local barber who was pretty fast. We made a lot of mint tea in the silver Tpot just like you get in the cafe's.
View from our roof
A cafe in Taghazout where they serve Tagines which were always pretty good in every place we had them, although the treatment of the live chicken deliveries wasn't so nice apparently
Moo moo's on sale, in January you need them!
I bought a sofa cover (28 Euros) 2 pillow cases (about 7 Euros each) for my campervan, and 3 purses (12 Euros all together) for presents and also a leather poof that doubles as a cat basket which was pretty decorative (22 Euros, not shown)
The typical jumpers you can buy there, this one cost us 10 Euros and we paid 30 Euros for another one of higher quality. In the background you can see what many of the locals wear and what I wanted to get my BF to try on!
We went on a Paradise Valley day trip, but we didn't think it was much like Paradise. There were some cute puppies and a lot of plastic chairs and cafe's. There's small river but I don't have a photo of that.
My BF was amused by this cat with a moustache.. there's a lot of cats & kittens around and we also saw a lot of Campervans and some camper parks which looked pretty boring.
The rip-off camel guy - they get you to take a photo with the camel, then a photo sitting on the camel and then they make the camel stand up, at which point you're going to end up paying 35 Euros for 2 x 2 minute camel rides that you never wanted!
My accidental camel ride. They're surprisingly comfortable and not smelly as I had thought!
