First Stop Fes

After living in Ireland for 2 and a half months we felt we needed to escape to somewhere warm from Christmas. If you have followed our travels since our first overseas trip you will know we jumped in the deep end and travelled to Morocco straight from Australia as our first destination. I wont go into any great detail but in short we didn't totally enjoy our first visit. But after getting quite a bit of travel experience we thought we should give it another go.

Leaving it a little late to book the only flights we could get went through Barcelona each way, so we had to stay in Barcelona for two nights each way, its a hard life!

We did manage to do some mullet spotting in our time in Barcelona;

We flew into Casablanca but we got the train straight from the Airport to Fes, we arrived in Fes at about 7pm and we had arranged for a taxi pickup. It turned out to be a good idea because the train station is crazy. They have big metal fences around the entry to keep out the touts and taxi drivers. We felt glad to see a driver right at the gate with our name on it (I didnt dare get out my camera with so many people around) The car was some sort of huge Mercedes probably only a 5 years old and was kitted out with disco lights inside and out. Apparently this meant he didn't have to worry about other traffic because he would just drive straight through intersections without slowing down

This time round in Morocco we decided to live a little more luxuriously, and we stayed in Riads (small palace hotels)

Rishi approved of our first pad, we went traditional for our first stay in Fes

This is the fantastic courtyard, we could order Moroccan mint tea and traditional sweets anytime of the day and lounge in the courtyard

The medina in Fes is amazing and it really is just a maze of narraw streets, the best way to get a good idea of the layout is to get a view from somewhere up high. We got a great view from up on the roof terrace of a museum

Fes Medina View

This is now the second year in a row we have been in a country for Christmas that doesn't celebrate Christmas, maybe we need to go somewhere really christmassy next year (London?)
We went to a palace restaurant for lunch

The food was pretty good, the salads in the photo were the entree and they were delicious. We had the Pigeon Pastilla for one of the mains and that was delicious as well. Just hoping the pigeon isn't just caught off the street! A pasitlla is basically a baked savoury pastry which they use a lot of sugar and cinnamon to flavour. Its a really amazing flavour combo.

Then we went Babooshka shopping, lucky Rishi drives a hard bargain! And the pay one third of the original price worked well

We saw the scenic but extremely smelly tanneries

The dye is basically made of urine and crap (and probably countless other chemicals) It really smells!

As a day trip from Fes we hired a grand taxi with two other travellers to goto Volubilis and Meknes for the day.

Volubilis is amazing, one of the best preserved Roman towns in the world

Other than that we basically spent the day drinking mint tea and eating

Rishi was looking for a good Cous Cous

Next stop was Marrakech