I googled the Hotel Riad Amssaffah in Marrakesh to see what world opinion had to say on this particular hotel. I found that it was mixed with most people giving it four or five stars and some giving it a zero with comments like “Worst place I’ve ever stayed at” and “Staff were surly and the service poor”. I concur with the first but not the second, except for the man who carried our suitcases up the stairs and then demanded payment. Most of us referred him to Rashid since tips were supposedly covered as part of the cost of the trip.I can understand this ambivalence because, although I only saw three bedrooms and they were all bad, I believe that there were some very nice ones - just not the ones which I saw. I thought that mine was bad until I saw the ones on either side of me; at least mine had an external window although the view out that window was nothing to write home about.

The view from my bedroom window. NOT a pretty sight.

But the room was so small that I was not able to stand beside either of the twin beds because the spaces between were narrower than the length of my feet. There was one light switch by the door but to turn on and off most of the lights I had to pull forward the bed head of the spare bed and reach down for the switches behind it.

My bedroom taken from on my bed.

The TV refused to stay on the BBC news channel and I had to sit holding the remote and every ten seconds or so turn to another channel and then back to the BBC. If I did not do that I firstly got static and then a blue screen of death. Somehow I always managed to do it just at the time when the key word was spoken and it was sometimes difficult to catch up with what was being discussed. One evening, looking for something English speaking I found a channel showing the film ‘Alexander the Great [with Arabic subtitles]’ which was, of course, like many others of that genre made in Ouarzazate, a town in Morocco given over entirely to film making.

Film lot just outside of Ouarzazate

The hotel was situated in the middle of a rather grotty part of the medina among roads so narrow that our bus was not able to get anywhere near and there was a fairly long trek through very winding streets. I never would have found my way there. Several people who had reviewed the hotel on the internet site I looked at suggested that anyone wanting to stay there should ask the hotel to arrange transport from the airport because “no-one knows where it is”.

The "Square", Marrakesh

It had once been an old house, typically with a courtyard in the middle which acted as a light well with rooms around the periphery. Unfortunately this meant that very few of the rooms had external windows; most had windows opening into the light well. My room had an external window but the view from it was uninviting and it allowed a great deal of noise, particularly from the myriads of motorbikes which prowled the narrow streets.

The courtyard of the Hotel Riad Amssaffah.

The ground floor was gorgeous and that is where we ate our rather uninspiring meals. Breakfast was just adequate; I looked out for Danish pastries every day but only scored them once … and on our last morning, when we had to have out cases out by 4.30 am for a 5.00am trip to the airport there was no breakfast at all - only coffee. I did feel that perhaps someone could have cut some bread and thrown in a few sachets of jam or butter but in fact we got nothing until long after we reached Casablanca. [see Leaving on a Jet Plane ]