We visited Marrakech for a Christmas getaway and decided that for part of the trip we would hire a car. I decided to give a local car hire agency a try since it would help save money and reviews in Marrakech for all agencies seemed to be less than stellar.
The first day we were driving was going pretty well, we made it to some waterfalls and were enjoying the varied scenery in the areas around Marrakech when we encountered our first issue. We had noticed that there were several speed checks on the roads with many drivers getting pulled over. Suddenly it was our turn, we had entered a village and had clearly missed a speed sign. This was frustrating but since I was in the wrong there was nothing to be done but deal with the on the spot fine.
At another traffic check stop a police officer noticed that Shleah had her camera out and threatened to fine us if we had been filming them, which luckily we had not.
Following this we continued to explore. We had noticed by this time that the road conditions around Marrakech seemed to be pretty awful. For no apparent reason there would quite often be large piles of bricks or rocks by the side of the road. I decided to end our day by visiting Oukaimeden, a ski resort in the Atlas mountains. (Disproving the lyrics to “Do They No It’s Christmas” once and for all). On the approach to the resort, I managed to miss one of the piles of bricks due to the glare off of the snow. Suddenly I had a broken wheel.
As you could imagine this was quite a distressing thing to have happened at the top of a mountain in a country you have never visited before. We did have a spare in the car and I was able to change the wheel, have a quick walk on the snow before limping back to Marrakech.
The next morning, I went to the car hire office, where I had to wait for over an hour for someone to turn up. I showed him what had happened with the wheel and requested that he replace the wheel so we could go to Essaouira. The employee instructed us that there would be no problem since the road to Essaouira was in much better conditions than the rest of the roads around Marrakech. For some reason I decided to listen to him so off to Essaouira we went.
The trip on the way there was quite uneventful though we did notice that there was a few areas where there was essentially a ditch running across the road. We had a nice day out and were on our way back to home when lo and behold we went through one of the ditches we had noticed earlier and instantly felt a tire deflating. At this point we had no spare and a flat tire.
We called the car hire office emergency number and the man we had been in contact with indicated he would send a motorbike with a spare tire. We waited by the side of the road and half an hour later called back only to find out that the motorcyclist was delayed and the car hire man recommended we attempt to drive on the flat to a tire repair shop.
We did eventually find one and the person there was able to take the tire off the broken wheel to get us on the way back to Marrakech.
After all of this stress we returned the car the next morning after some negotiations around what we were and weren’t liable for. Luckily I had booked car hire excess insurance so was able to recoup the charges via this insurance.
This did not spoil our holiday but definitely put a damper on this part of it. If I was to do this over again I would definitely go with a more established international car hire firm due to the condition of roads in Morocco.
The area around Marrakech was very beautiful but the road conditions are bad and there does seem to be an attempt by the police to try and get money from motorists. Keeping these things in mind you may want to consider not driving in Morocco or if you do, ensuring you have things in place to make this experience as stress free as possible.
