A painless flight, enlivened by having Simon Faraday from Ghosts sitting right next to us and having Giovanni Georgio (but everyone calls him Giorgio) flying the plane, was followed by a thorough experience in security and almost seamless collection by our driver. We couldn’t see much in the dark on the journey to the hotel, but enough to see where the palace walls ended and the shanty town started. The road to Fawakay villas is not well maintained and the surrounding village is filthy with rubbish, which seems quite normal for Morocco (confirmed by our driver the next day).
The hotel itself is different to anywhere else we have stayed and our room literally a large mud and straw hut (eco-lodge!) with a bed, bathroom, some cushions and a roaring log fire. The greeting was warm and the snacks left for us very welcome after a long gap since lunch! Tom (who is running the hotel this week, whilst the British owners (friends of his) are away in South Africa) checked we had everything we needed and explained how to get breakfast and meet the driver in the morning. He warned us to keep the door shut so the donkey didn’t go in and eat everything and introduced us to Eddie, Patsy & Brian (dogs) and the cat whose name I didn’t bother to remember.
After snacks we prowled around the room examining everything, brushed our teeth in bottled well water (avoiding the tap water) and tried to sleep. Tom did warn us about the wild (I would argue feral is a better description) dogs barking, but he didn’t mention how noisy the cicadas/frogs were. I have yet to clarify which it was. It felt weirdly irresponsible to go to sleep with the fire still burning and I keep waking up panicking that the room was full of smoke and we had used all the available oxygen. The mattress added to the challenge as it felt like rock.