Flight Log of Ryanair Flight 7752 from Madrid to Marrakech on February 4th, 2017

Originally, when I was planning this trip to Europe, I was fascinated by photos showing majesty of imposing Sahara sand dunes and intricacy of century-old ancient city streets, that the North Africa country of Morocco presented to the world, which also recently exempted visas for Chinese visitors. But with Morocco being in North Africa, which was a totally different fare zone in the airline charts than Europe, I hadn’t been able to find a satisfying price. Luckily, when I was searching connection opportunities through Europe, I bumped into the poorly-rated budget carrier Ryanair, which offered quite competitive rates for flights to/from the Moroccan cities of Marrakech and Fez.

So with Qatar Airways’ offer of cheap flights to Spain, my friend and I decided to spend three days each in the two major Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona as “transitions” between home and Morocco.

And now that we had visited the city of Madrid and its neighboring towns of Toledo and Segovia, we headed for the airport for our flight to Africa.

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Ryanair operated on some pretty tight baggage-drop timelines, as their counter opens 2 hours before flight and closes 40 minutes. (Yes, we have two large trolley bags so the added baggage fees were catching up to the ticket itself. But since the flights are cheap, who cares?) (Maybe with some late-bag-drop fee they would let you do the bag-drop, another way for them to hike up revenues.)
Unfortunately we encountered some problems on our way to the airport, as the Madrid Metro Line 8 that went all the way to airport T1/2/3 was closed for maintenance, and we weren’t aware of this until we reached Nuevos Ministerios Station, 2 hours before our flight. Luckily, there was still the suburb Renfe trains running to airport T4, after which an airport terminal shuttle bus resolved that issue as we reached the counters like 75 minutes before flight.

At the same time there was a China Eastern Airlines flight to Shanghai, and there were quite a lot of Chinese faces around us, all of which seemed to be doing tax refund, including the crew members.

As predicted by flightradar24, our flight was delayed as the previous flight never departed on time from Marrakech, and the 3 gate agents were running all over the place checking everyone’s hand baggage.

When it’s finally boarding time, the lines only inched forward, which was quite foreseeable as everyone seemed to be walking around the cabin fighting over spaces to put their bags, with the background music of loud bickering and cursing as the three gate agents mercilessly found their prey of “slightly oversized” baggage with only their bare eyes.

Nothing much to talk about the aircraft, 6-year-old Boeing 738 without sky-interior, the only merit of which was more overhead baggage space (let there be fight). No, that poor victim of Ryanair’s gate agents never made it to the plane.

There were thick clouds not long into the flight, so there weren’t much pictures to offer of the views within Spain.
The whole cabin service sale included food and drinks, perfume (multiple rounds) and lottery scratch card. There were so many to offer that the crew turned off the safety-belt sign at, I recall, 2800 meters? (It must be below 3000 meters, and I don’t know whether this is fine with international regulations.)

Just before descent, our chatty capitan invited those who sat on the right side to look out for the famous city of Casablanca, and those on the left like me, some nameless Moroccan hamlet.

Before landing, we caught some glimpse of the city of Marrakech, the heartland of Moroccan Kingdom until the movie Casablanca.

With some tricks of Ryanair’s random seat allocation algorithm, I managed to secure a front-row seat on the flight, which made my friend and I one of the first to leave the aircraft.

Hoping to avoid queues at the immigration (which many people complained about), and hoping to catch the last bus out of the airport at 11pm (which was severely dashed by the flight delay), we were rushing our way through the apron to immigration.

Then there was the worst part of the day, as Marrakech Airport offered us arrival cards to be filled but no pens to fill them. It took my friend quite some time to find a pen in his backpack (while he wasn’t aware he brought a pen all the way), as everyone else was filling their cards and borrowing pens from each other.
By the time we were done with our boarding cards, there was already quite a sizeable queue at the immigration. To vent my anger, I used the airport’s free WiFi (the only thing good) and crafted some terrible remarks towards the Airport’s twitter account, only to find out they hadn’t got one.
Well, I know why they rated AirAsia as the world’s best budget carrier, at least they got boarding cards and pens onboard on my flight to Phnom Penh from Kuala Lumpur.

After that dreadful with Moroccan immigration (and their arrival cards in particular), we exchanged small amounts of Moroccan Dirhams for the taxi ride to hotel (the rates were much better than Madrid), and headed out.

By the time we exited the airport, it was like 2 past 11pm and we gave up on the bus. After some harsh negotiations with the taxi drivers we talked the price of a petti taxi down to 100 Dirhams, and headed for the Medina.
Tip: There were lots of taxis waiting at the parking lot, only a small number at the arrival. I guess there was some sort of “head of taxis” that dictated where taxis should be, and take cuts from the taxi fares.
While in Medina, OpenStreetMap was much useful than Google Maps. After several seemingly-dead-ends and narrow turns, we were at our hotel / riad, and called it a day.
END

Flight Log of Ryanair Flight 7752 from Madrid to Marrakech on February 4th, 2017 by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.