It’s a 500 km trip to from Zagora to our next destination, so we’re here on a stopover at the Akabar Hotel in Marrakech; we’ve pretty much exhausted our list of things to see and do, so we’re winging it now from this point on.

We decided that we would make a beeline to the coast, and Marrakech seemed like a good place to stop and lay our heads before completing our journey. On paper, the journey seemed quite practical - unfortunately, we forgot how much longer everything would take due to the mountain roads and being stuck behind one smog-spewing truck after another didn’t help matters.

We did however get to see our entire drive out east in reverse, and managed to catch much better views of the Atlas mountains due to better weather than our journey out. There seemed to be fewer faux-geode salesman on the side of the roads this time (perhaps because today is a holy day and they’ve got better things to do than scam tourists?).

We arrived in Marrakech at around 5:30pm, and instead of re-inventing the wheel, we thought we’d go straight back to the Ibis. After all, it’s a huge hotel and the likelihood of them being fully booked was pretty slim. We were both pretty tired by that point so neither of us was up to trekking around the city looking for somewhere else. Unfortunately, the downside of not pre-booking accommodation came back to bite us - they were fully booked. Going beyond the call of duty, the receptionist made out a list of alternate hotels for us, and after changing out some more Euros we left into the rapidly fading city twilight.

It seemed like a deluge of tourists had descended on Marrakech, as we tried about four hotels - all fully booked. It was getting quite desperate, and it felt like we were feeling our way around in the dark of rush our until we happened upon the Akabar Hotel in the Hivernage district, about a kilometre from the Djemma el-Fna. By the time we had found the place, it was only about 6:30 but was completely pitch black outside.

Thankful for finally finding somewhere to put out heads down, we thought we would take advantage of being back in the city briefly and head out to recce the attractions and restaurants around town so we knew where to come back on our three day visit before returning home.