kbutler1Before the trip, Morocco felt like a concept. It was like something from a mood board. Warm-toned desert shots, famous film sites, desert camps and camel rides. It was the kind of place that looks perfect on Instagram and slightly impossible in real life. I had expectations yet most of them were wrong. Going into it, the army simulation in Girona held the top spot for best experience of the Erasmus year — immersive, intense, and something I genuinely didn’t think could be topped. Travelling to Morocco took that title without even trying.
The Setup: An Erasmus Trip Unlike Any Other
The trip, organised through an external Erasmus company, lasted five days and four nights. Arriving in Marrakech late at night meant going straight to the hotel and preparing for the days ahead. With food and transport provided, as well as guided tours, all that was left was for the journey to begin.
What nobody mentions before signing up is that it’s not just your group there on the dates you chose. You’re sharing a bus with many other students who you’ve never met before. For us, this was a group of American students based in London for their semester abroad. In any ordinary case, neither group, Irish or American would have crossed paths with each other. However, that’s what made this trip so enjoyable. Within just hours of arriving, you were siting beside each other on long bus journeys, sharing stories and dying together under the sweltering heat. You were arguing over the charging spots or who had to sit in the front seat beside the driver, and already building inside jokes that would never make sense to anyone outside the group. It was that dynamic that set the tone for the days to come.
Day One: Arrival
Landing late into the evening meant there wasn’t much time to explore. After checking into the hotel and figuring out the room situation amongst everyone, the group headed out. Naturally — and inevitably — the first mission was finding the nearest Irish bar in Marrakech. It was only minutes from the hotel, which felt like fate. Singing along to familiar songs in an unfamiliar city, cracking jokes with people you’d only just met — you just knew it was going to be a good trip.
Everywhere you walked that night felt like a different world entirely. Nothing like Dublin, nothing like Barcelona. Sounds overlapping sounds, smoke rising from grills, street performers pulling crowds — it moved at a pace that takes adjustment. Overwhelming in the best possible way.
Day Two: Over the Atlas Mountains
An early start meant being out the door by 7:30am. Bags packed, onto the minibus, and off toward the first real stop on the itinerary. Nobody loves the idea of sitting on a bus for hours. Nobody. Though, those long journeys ended up being some of the best parts of the trip. Stuck beside people you barely knew two days ago, with nothing else to do but talk — conversations start that wouldn’t happen anywhere else. You realise pretty quickly that the assumptions you carry about people from other countries fall apart the moment you actually sit beside them. After a few hours on a bus through the Atlas Mountains, the idea that Irish students and a group of Americans had nothing in common felt ridiculous.
The First Stop
First stop was Tizi N’Tichka Pass — 2,600 metres above sea level in the High Atlas Mountains. Views like that are genuinely hard to put into words, and harder to photograph. No screen does justice to the scale of it. After a brief stop at an Argan oil workshop, where you got to see how the stuff is actually made, everyone arrived at the main event: Kasbah Aït Ben Haddou.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, filming location for Gladiator, Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy — walking through it, dusty and sunburned, felt completely surreal. The kind of place you’ve seen in films without realising it. Narrow streets, centuries of history, and the whole group slightly in awe of the fact that it still just exists there, in the middle of nowhere. From there, the bus pushed on to the Dadès Gorges for the night, where everyone stayed up longer than was sensible.
Day Three: Into the Desert
This is where travelling to Morocco stopped being a trip and became something harder to describe.
The Berber desert camp arrived by late afternoon, and with it, the part of the itinerary everyone had been waiting for. First up were the ATVs — loud, dusty, completely reckless, and exactly what was needed after two days of buses and history lessons. Tearing through the dunes with the group, everyone covered in sand and absolutely loving every second of it, it became clear pretty quickly that this was a different kind of day entirely.
Camels and Sandboarding
From there, the camels took over. Camel rides sound like a tourist checkbox until you’re actually doing one. Off-balance, slow, the dunes rolling out in every direction, everything going gold as the sun started to fall behind the horizon, it was one of those moments that felt almost too good to be real. Throughout the whole ride, the camera barely stopped — golden hour in the Sahara produces the kind of light that makes every shot look like it was planned, and with over 200 photos coming home from this trip, the desert accounted for a serious chunk of them. Sandboarding came next. Imagine snowboarding but on sand. It was a fever dream when you think back on it.
An Evening in the Desert
As the sun disappeared, the camp shifted into something else entirely. Drinks in the dunes while the sky went dark, stars appearing one by one until there were more than you’d ever seen in one place. Between the lack of signal, the single charging point that everyone was quietly rationing, and a Berber tent packed with people who had no business becoming friends this quickly, the night took on its own momentum. Songs got sung, games got played, and somewhere in between all of that, the kind of conversations happened that only occur when there’s nothing else pulling at your attention — honest, funny, the sort that start with nothing and somehow end with you actually knowing someone. When it all eventually wound down, it was obvious that something had shifted in the group. The strangers from the start of the trip weren’t strangers anymore.
Day Four: The Long Road Back
Sunrise Over the Sahara
The alarm went off at 6:30am. Nobody complained. Watching the sunrise over the Sahara was worth every second of the early start — walking out to the nearby dunes while everything was still quiet, the sky shifting from dark to orange to gold above the desert hills. One of those moments where nobody really says much because there’s nothing to add to it.
The Shower Scramble
What followed immediately after was considerably less serene. Everyone scrambling for one of the four showers with barely a drop of hot water between them, bags thrown together, and a full sprint to the bus at 7:30am to secure a decent seat. The front seat beside the driver was the one nobody wanted — and the unspoken competition to avoid it was as intense as anything else on the trip.
Nine and a Half Hours on a Bus
From there, it was a 9.5 hour journey back to Marrakech. Which sounds brutal, and on paper it is. In reality, the time disappeared. Between the naps, the card games, the sing-songs, the lunch stops along the way, and the conversations that had been building since day one, the hours moved faster than expected. Travelling to Morocco had already delivered more than expected, but it was moments like these — stuck on a bus going nowhere fast with people you’d grown to genuinely like — that made the trip what it actually was. At that point everyone had relaxed into each other enough that the chat came easily. Stories from home, trips people had done before, the kind of cultural differences that only come up when you’re genuinely curious about someone rather than just making small talk.
McDonald’s, Photos and the Pool
By the time Marrakech appeared on the horizon, there was one thing on everyone’s mind. Not the hotel, not the pool, not sleep. McDonald’s. We piled on the food and sat up top, looking out at the views across the city. Back at the hotel afterwards, photos got shared around. Over 200 of them, all taken by me throughout the trip, passed around on phones while people tagged themselves and sent messages asking to be sent specific shots. The compliments came easy, and so did the realisation that the people in those photos had gone from strangers to something closer to friends in the space of four days. From there, the group settled around the pool as the sun went down, nobody in any rush to move, just talking. No agenda, no next stop on the itinerary.
Day Five: Goodbyes and the Markets
An Early Goodbye
Day five started with the first real reminder that the trip was over. The American students were up and gone early, flights out before the rest of the group had even properly woken up. For a group of people who had spent the last four days travelling to Morocco together, it was a surprisingly abrupt ending. Contacts exchanged, a few photos sent, and just like that they were gone.
The Markets
With a quieter morning ahead, the group headed to the pool before making one last trip into the Marrakech markets. Nothing too ambitious — magnets, football jerseys, the kind of cheap purchases that only make sense when you’re in the moment. First time around, the medina had felt overwhelming — too loud, too fast, too much all at once. Second time around it was a different story. Bargaining came more naturally, the pace felt less chaotic, and the whole thing was genuinely enjoyable without the sensory overload of the first visit.
The Journey Home
By early evening it was back to the apartment, bags packed, and a taxi to the airport. The flight back to Barcelona was delayed by an hour — a fitting end if there ever was one — but eventually the wheels lifted and Morocco disappeared below the clouds.
Landing back in Barcelona, tired and slightly sunburned, it was hard not to feel the contrast immediately. The noise, the familiarity, the routine waiting on the other side. Five days felt like a lot longer. In the best possible way.
Final Thought
The Trip That Changed Everything
Travelling to Morocco was never going to be a normal trip. Five days, four nights, a group of strangers on a bus, and an itinerary that somehow squeezed the Sahara, the Atlas Mountains, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the Marrakech medina into one week. On paper it sounds like a lot. In reality it went by faster than anything.
Before Morocco, Girona held the top spot. The army simulation was intense, immersive, and something that felt impossible to top. Travelling to Morocco took that title without even trying and made Girona feel like a warm-up.
What made it wasn’t the destinations — though the destinations were incredible. It was the people. Americans based in London, an Irish group on Erasmus in Barcelona, all ending up on the same bus going to the same places. Long journeys, shared showers, arguments over charging cables, drinks in the dunes, a 6:30am sunrise that nobody complained about. Over 200 photos, a group chat still active, and friendships built in circumstances that couldn’t have been planned.
Morocco doesn’t ease you in. It drops you straight into it and expects you to keep up. Somewhere between the chaos of the medina and the stillness of the Sahara, it quietly becomes the best thing you’ve ever done.
