Casablanca, Morocco: Buses, Beaches, Mosques, and all those Muhammeds

We almost didn’t make it to Morocco.

A few hours before our Casablanca flight I stood up on a fast-asleep foot, which twisted as I sprawled to the floor in agony. First thought? We must cancel the trip, since I wrenched it something awful. Ouch. Padre’s deteriorated left knee was set to be replaced in July, so he limped already. 

Two gimpy old persons, on tours with hours of walking involved? 

Nope. Not going to happen.

I was wrong about my soon-to-be-purple foot* and about the trip, as I’ve been wrong about so many other things. 

(*I could walk/limp on it, so I pushed on. Not the smartest thing to do, but, but…. but….. Morocco!)

Here’s a short list of just a few other things I was wrong about, when it came to our Morocco trip:

• I was wrong about Casablanca

• I was wrong about my fellow group travelers

• I was wrong about how difficult walking would be for Padre. When you’re a tough old goat? Well then. You push on. (I knew about the goat thing, but whoa he’s grittier than I even knew.)

When our brains take shortcuts to help us navigate the world, we often rush to judgment lickety-split. I mean, how often have you made an instant judgment about someone you’ve just met, an opinion that later turned out to be wrong? The nicest person in the room might end up stabbing you in the back later, and the surly guy in the corner? He leaves his estate to the orphan’s fund. 

You just don’t know about people, or countries, until you have some time to see the complete picture. We’ve all been there, and if we remembered how often our first impressions turned out to be incorrect we’d all be more patient with each other for sure.

RICK’S CAFÉ ISN’T RICK’S CAFÉ!

Take Casablanca, for instance. Like so many other Americans, my highly romanticized understanding of the city came from the film Casablanca, filmed on a Warner Brothers studio lot in California, not Morocco. The film doesn’t even have the line Play It Again, Sam anywhere in it, and the oft-quoted, incorrect line is considered one of the greatest misquotes in cinematic history.

I can’t tell you how many cruises I considered, solely because they listed ‘Casablanca’ on the itinerary. Boy would I have been disappointed. That doesn’t mean we didn’t enjoy Casablanca, because we very much did, but not because we sidled up to the piano player at Rick’s Café and said, “Play it again, Sam.” We could have done just that if we wanted to do so, at the pricy ersatz Rick’s Café. Not worth a stop, not really. In the real Casablanca we visited other fascinating landscapes, much more intriguing than that fake café.

So what’s the deal with Casablanca, then? Once ensconced in our mid-city hotel, my first impression was still (mostly) wrong. Here’s the view outside our hotel room window:

Oh dear. Turns out Casablanca serves as anchor to Morocco’s commerce and industry, and like any modern city displays a gritty cosmopolitan energy with pockets of poverty and grim rows of dark buildings. Nary a veil in site, no camels, and little romance. Just business.

Our hotel room was perfectly fine despite the off-putting view, but I almost made another mistake once we reached the conference room for our first tour meeting.

We had traveled all day on our aching appendages and scooted straight to the half-over orientation meeting, with no time to rest in our rooms. I flashed back to all those conference rooms from my working gal days: washed-out fluorescent lights, tired participants, and a leader (me) doing her best to cheer everyone up. Our fellow tour participants displayed weary faces for the same reason we did: too many hours traversing airports. Yet of course I didn’t remember this as we took our places. I just stared back at all the exhausted faces. Uh oh.

When I look back at this photo now, with all I know about everyone, I just laugh! What a joyful, fun group of people. And what if we had decided not to participate in this tour, due to that first impression? Now that would be silly.

We would never do that, of course, because this was our fifth Gate 1 trip and all our tours start out pretty much the same way. At that first orientation dinner, everyone’s tired and we don’t know a thing about each other yet. The tour leaders do their best – and Abdou did crack a few jokes.* (*we adored Abdou’s ‘morning’ jokes by the end of the tour. I miss Abdou’s jokes!). 

Turns out we just needed to be patient since the real fun started the next day, on the bus.

WE PILE ON THE BUS TO THE MOSQUE

I’ve adored bus tours ever since I sat in the back on one of my first European bus tours, a ‘Europe in 15 Minutes’ blur which was all I could afford as a pauper schoolteacher. As my travel companions snoozed, I marveled as we zoomed through Southern France’s astonishing sunflower fields, spread out to infinity on both sides of the bus. A woman smiled and waved at our bus as she swept her small cottage porch, and that image of her greeting us has lived on in my memory for years. It truly is a grand vast world, isn’t it? There are friendly people everywhere, if we just look for them.

I still sit in the back of the bus, and my seat in the back turned out to be a perfect way to appreciate Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. Well, sure, other than hiking them, of course, but Limpy and Gimpy wouldn’t be scrambling up any mountaintops anytime soon. So what better way to be gob-smacked by the astonishing majesty of Morocco’s dramatic landscapes than from my backseat perch on a Gate 1 bus?

As we made our way to our seats for the first group bus tour, Abdou proceeded to introduce us to Casablanca, to our bus driver Hassan, and to our helper and bus driver-in-training, Muhammed. We stopped first at Muhammed V Square, where we found splashing fountains, flocking pigeons, and grand buildings in Casablanca’s central gathering space. 

Seems that every other man we met in Morocco was named Muhammed. So many Muhammeds everywhere we went! And this is not by accident, because it’s customary to name a first-born son after the Prophet Muhammed as a sign of respect. Girls get the name Fatima for similar reasons, since Fatima was the wife of the Prophet. 

Our helper Muhammed called me Fatima a few times, and we greeted each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ when I clambered down the big bus steps to go out the back door. Muhammed hopes to drive a bus in Canada someday, so at the end of the trip, I gave him a Washington State pin decorated with evergreen trees, and told him, “here’s what it looks like there – so many really tall trees!” He quickly started google-translating the words on the pin, and explained that he was working hard to improve his English. (His English was soooo much better than my Arabic, of course…..)

Sure enough, we met another Muhammed when we alighted at our next stop: The Hassan II Mosque. We donned our whispers so we could listen to the new Muhammed, who was our private guide to one of the largest mosques in the world. New Muhammed did an amazing job of convincing this group of Americans that some of our preconceived ideas about Islam might be incorrect (yep. Wrong again. Geez.)

At the end of our trip, in fact, people were still talking about Muhammed’s explanation  of the commonalities among the world’s three great religions – Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. As we stood under the gorgeous chandeliers and vast ceiling of this architectural masterpiece, he concisely articulated how the world’s three great religions worship the same God, identify the same prophets, and share similar basic values as well as many common beliefs. Even Padre the clergy guy thought it was an excellent explanation; what a refreshing concept for a world that has been plagued by religious conflicts down through the centuries. Seems it doesn’t have to be that way, if our new Muhammed (and Padre) have anything to say about it.

The Hassan II Mosque is THE site to see in Casablanca, for good reason, but Abdou showed us one more Casablanca area that we didn’t know about: The beaches. We took a pleasant stroll along Casablanca’s seaside promenade, with swanky glass-fronted beach homes and enticing swimming resorts lined up along the ocean’s edge. No wonder so many Europeans vacation here; Morocco’s ocean beaches, from Casablanca on south, are spectacular. So one more thing I was wrong about, about Morocco? I pictured it as barren desert. But oh wow – the beaches!

Then, off for a spectacular drive down Morocco’s coastline, to our seaside destination for the end of the day: relaxed Essouiora, Morocco. Once we finally collapsed in our peaceful hotel room at this lovely seaside hotel, we were done. The foot had morphed into an eggplant, and luckily the restaurant finally gave us a bag of ice once we promised not to put it in our drinks. (Don’t drink the water/travel rule #1, of course!)

Coming up next: 

The winding narrow alleyways of Essouiora’s medina, a UNESCO World Heritage site, where we probably did NOT get the best price from the friendly vendors, but had a blast.  Also a visit to ancient citadel fortifications used as movie sites by Orson Welles and the creators of Game of Thrones, as well as those beautiful blue boats that are featured so often in Morocco travel spreads. 

We found ‘em.