Our time in Tangier had drawn to a close and we were off to the second-to-last city on this trip: Fez! To get there we again took the train, though this one was not high-speed. The title is “slow speed” but that’s just to contrast with my other blog post, it was really a regular-speed train, I don’t want to demean the trains in Morocco. They also have high speed trains! But we didn’t take those ones.

To take the train we of course had to first get to the train station. The hotel was nice enough to arrange for us a taxi. I asked the front desk lady how much we should pay and she told me 60-70 (this is in Moroccan dirhams). When we arrived at the station he asked for 100, which I gave him because I didn’t feel like arguing and also he tried to give us a little tour of Tangier on the way (he didn’t go out of the way) and also also I was feeling guilty about if I had been tipping properly in Tangier so I was fine with giving him 100. In my notes I wrote that the train station was “beautiful,” though really I just meant like, it resembled a modern shopping mall. Still, nice!

Safely at the station we settled into our train. Since I’m American and my best frame of reference for trains is Harry Potter, it was a Harry Potter-style train. In that, there were different compartments with six seats each and no place to put our luggage. We had big ole’ suitcases for all the souvenirs so this put us in a bind and we spent the train journey with our suitcases between our news. The other people in the compartment didn’t seem to mind, I guess this is pretty standard. Later on a Harry Potter-style snack cart also came wheeling by, though I didn’t get anything.

I spent the train ride admiring the view. Most of the land between Tangier and Fez (we took a dog-legged route) was farmland. I was surprised by that. I know I had this same revelation when we were arriving in Tangier, but I guess I was still expecting desert. Though in Fez you look out over the landscape, and like, yeah, that’s what I expected. Maybe it’s just the particular face of the hills you see from the rooftops in Fez but they are brown and gorgeous and resemble the American southwest (especially the sky at sunset, the blue and pinks and oranges running together in bands across the sky as the sun goes down on the opposite horizon, just peering over the medina roofs and the hills and, man, this is why all those painters came to Morocco) and like that was what I was expecting.

But on the way to Fez it was farmland. There were a couple of men fishing in the little river that went under the train tracks, and lots of sheep and cows and sheep mixed in with cows. I saw people herding sheep over the rolling green hills and we drove by mudflats I didn’t understand, like maybe they were fish ponds or salt ponds or rice paddies? Seeing them I realized we were still near the ocean on the other side of the train and I could see if I looked over, but just barely in the distance. We also saw a lot of donkeys and multiple people actually riding along on donkeys which was fun to see. As we got farther south the land started to remind me of Florida with orange groves and palms and pine trees and the roads cutting through it. Also a good chunk of the land I think they were growing sugarcane but I couldn’t really be sure.

Eventually the land flattened out (though with hills in the distance) and I saw “ACAB” graffiti, which, solidarity, exciting. There were olive trees as well here and I looked it up on the map so I know south of Sidi Kacem we started to get back into hills. The houses seemed nice and we passed through clusters of towns with little train stations with tiled exteriors and one house I saw had a big solar setup on top despite being wired into power lines.

Eventually we arrived at the train station and a man gave us advice on how to avoid getting scammed on taxis and when buying things in the market. We thought he was going to scam us but he was in fact just nice. We exited the train station and found the guy the hotel sent to pick us up. He drove us to the nearest door of the medina and then handed us off to a luggage cart guy. Since there are no cars in the medina there are men with carts who haul stuff around, and besides not having to carry our own bags hiring the guy came with two advantages. One, we had no idea how to get to our hotel and two, and this is the real nice one, no one bothered us. Like everyone knew we already had a guy so we were just on our way.

The walk from medina entrance to our hotel, the Riad Laaroussa, was surprisingly long. We turned into a kinda grimy looking passageway off the main thoroughfare and through the door which opened up into a stunning courtyard. There wee tall orange trees and so many tiles and lovely fountains. Later we discovered they had not one but two tortoises. The front desk was expecting us and sent us up for mint tea on the roof as they shuttled our luggage up into the room. Tea finished, we were shown the room, which had a lot of character because the house itself is 300 years old but recently renovated. Unpacked, we could finally relax from the journey, and spent some more time one the roof reading and enjoying a fantastic dinner. While my super amazing wife took a call I ducked out to find an ATM. As I was exiting the Riad a guy with a small stand outside the door found out my name and tried to convince me to buy something. When we were there he posted up right outside the Riad (“we are neighbors,” he said), and so was our constant greeter during our entire time in Fez. Eventually I had almost decided to buy something from him but when I had reached that conclusion he was for once not sitting there. And so that was our introduction to Fez!