Don’t You Know We’re Riding on the Marrakech Express?

I love a good train ride, and the ones I went on in Morocco certainly didn’t disappoint. It’s lovely to just sit in a seat and watch the world go by. Speeding through villages and over mountains and past farmland and cities, I get what Crosby, Stills, and Nash were singing about. 

Train travel is pretty reliable here. All of the main train stations have free WiFi and the trains are mostly fast and clean (all things considered). I rode from Casablanca to Fez on a train with a 1st Class ticket. It was around 170 Dirham ($17) and it took me up over the brown mountains in a comfortable seat in a six-person cabin. I also took a train from Fez to Tangier, where I forgot to buy a 1st Class ticket and found myself stuffed in a loud cabin with seven other Moroccans making the journey. It was a long trip, only made longer by the uncomfortable seat and the broken air conditioning, but I was still able to make some new friends despite my lack of ability to speak French or Arabic.

And while I become immersed in the lives of the passengers around me, I am also detached from the world outside. I only catch glimpses of the lives being led outside the protected window.

And so I zoom past other worlds, where men and women are hard at work in the fields and donkeys carry heavy loads. And I can’t begin to imagine how different my life would be if I was on the other side of the glass. And I sit and think and wonder and watch.

And they sing: “Had to get away to see what we could find.”