At 2.50 am the clock starts to ring and we just hit snooze. The same script is repeated at 3.00 am, when Klemen wakes me up that I have to get up. During my crawling out of bed, Klemen reminds me that next time I dont’t have to book a flight so early.
So at 4 am in the morning we start our drive to Venice and after three hours of driving we left our car in the parking lot, which I booked a month ago through the Parkviva website. Parking is 1.5 km away from Marco Polo Airport, and a shuttle bus takes you to the airport. For a 12-day parking at a secured parking lot, we paid 52 euros, and we had to left the keys of the car to the parking manager, which is quite common practice.
When we arrived at the terminal, we went to the check-in counter. When we received our tickets we walk a bit through a dutty free store and it’s already time to look for the right gate, from where we fly to Rome. We have two hours of stopover in Rome, which we used it for a good coffee, because we both really needed it.
Our flight to Morocco started with a one-hour delay. After landing, we get the immigration forms that each person has to fill in so that we can enter the country. Slovenian citizens don’t need to apply for visa if our stay is shorter than 90 days. We recommend that you fill in the forms as quickly as possible because there is a large possibility that it will be very crowded at the immigrations. We hesitated and we had to wait for 1 hour in a line for the immigrations counter, because the employees are very easy going and slow.
When we arrange everything together, we move on to pick up our luggage. From the distance I’ve seen Klemen’s backpack, but not mine. I had a strange feeling that they accidentally lost my luggage, Well, that’s exactly what happened, my luggage did not reach the airport. Immediately we went to search for the counter for lost luggage. There was no counter, only one storage room with old computer where the employee fill out the form. Please be prepared that you won’t be finished in a few minutes but it takes about 30 – 60 minutes. You receive the paper, where are all the data with the tracking number of the reported lost luggage. You can track the progress on the website world tracer.
Although we have always traveled by public transport in our previous trips, this time we decided to rent a car, because we have only 12 days to explore Morocco. It is very convenient to travel by car, because you can see a lot more of this beautiful country than traveling by public transport in a short time.
Because we were renting a car for the first time, we were a little careful, because if you have no experience with renting, the agency can charge you for insurances, which can costs you a lot of extra money. So we decided to rent a car from one of the well-known agencies and after reviewing these, we decided to book the car through the Economybookings website (LocationAuto Morocco) because they had the most favorable lease and the price of full insurance was by far the cheapest. When booking a car in Morocco, pay attention to the “small print”, that you do not have a mileage limit and that a car has air conditioning (if you want it). For a 12-day lease, we paid 260 euros with full insurance. We also need navigation in Morocco, which can be rented for about 50 euros at the time of the car’s takeover, but since we have our own, we would prefer to load the appropriate card at home and this saved us money.
When we took over our Hyundai i10, we went into Moroccan traffic chaos. We decided to visit Casablanca for the last day and that we went to Rabat immediately. For our first night in Rabat we made a reservation on AirBnB. It was our first reservation over AirBnb.
After a long search with navigation, to find the right address where we have a reserved room, we finally find a room outside the city center. The cleanliness of the room, especially the bathrooms, could be discussed, but the day was exceptionally long and, above all, stressful, so we don’t care about that a lot and we just go to sleep, because it was a really long day.
Cost:
- airline ticket = 150 €
- toll to the airport = 10.80 €
- 2x late machiato = 3.80 €
- toll to Rabat = 33 DH
- room = 13 €
- rent a car = 260 €
- petrol = 270 DH
- water = 6 DH
- parking guard = 10 DH
