Don & Kully's World Cruise on Viking Neptune

We began our day in Marrakesh where we still wanted to visit the famous Majorelle Gardens. The garden is a two-acre botanical garden and artist’s landscape garden created by the French Orientalist artis Jacques Majorelle over a 40-year period beginning in 1923. The property also features a Cubist Villa that was the residence of Majorelle and his wife from 1923 until the late 1950’s. The grounds are absolutely stunning.

Here are a few of the things we saw during our three-hour drive to Casablanca.

Casablanca is Morocco’s largest city and its economic center. The city is a mix of neo-Moorish splendor and French influence. The city was made famous by the classic 1942 movie “Casablanca” most of which is centered in bar called Rick’s Place. The bar is totally fictious, but a number of Entrepeneur’s decided to open a bar called Rick’s Cafe in the early 2000’s and model it after the bar depicted in the famous film. The bar has become a major tourist attraction in the city, I call it a Moroccan take on Margaritaville. We managed to get a lunch reservation at the famous eatery.

After lunch we visited the Hassan II Mosque. The mosque is the third largest mosque in the world and the largest in Morocco. The mosque was completed in 1993 under the guidance of King Hassan II whom the mosque is named after. The structure stands on a promontory looking out to the Atlantic Ocean; worshippers can pray over the sea but there is no glass floor looking into the sea. The walls are of hand-crafted marble and the roof is retractable. A maximum of 105,000 worshippers can gather together for prayer: 25,000 inside the mosque hall and another 80,000 on the mosque’s outside grounds. It is one of the only mosques in the world that allows non-Muslims to visit (for a hefty fee), the inside of the mosque.

Our next port of call is tomorrow, 28 April in Tangir, Morocco. This will be our last port call in Africa.