Off to the Moroccan Desert

We left our riad in Marrakech with the aid of a porter Thom found in the Medina – an old man pushing a large cart we filled with our luggage. Despite traveling light this trip, we still managed to bring a mountain of bags, partly because we bought so many gifts and souvenirs, including a large dining room light. We’re not exactly sure how we’re going to get that on the plane home. We loaded up the car and plunged into Marrakech’s all-day traffic jam, and immediately got lost.

In Morocco, street names are unimportant, meaning that signs telling you where you are and how to get certain places don’t mention the name of the street – they just say, for example, to turn right to get to Fez. There is no way to determine if turning right will put you on the toll road, a major highway, or a donkey track, at least as far as we could tell. We found the same problem in rural Italy, so if we got lost, determining where we were on the map required triangulating from signs indicating where we could go to, rather than signs indicating where we were. “So, if we can turn right to get to Agdz and left to get to Agadir, we could be here or here or here, but not here.” Perhaps it’s purely cultural, but we prefer to know that we’re at the corner of Muhammed V and Muhammed VI, and then figure out which way to go from our map. Perhaps the system is the way that it is because a significant portion of the population is illiterate, or at least that no one has maps and everyone is a local. Anyway, after much confusion (a theme in our Moroccan driving experience) we found the route to Ouarzazate (pronounced war-za-zat) and were on our way.

Pictured below is an example: two sets of road signs, one almost completely blocking the other.