Day 24: Homeward Bound
We got up early and took a grand taxi to the Menara airport, Marrakesh’s international airport. It was fairly modern and impressive-looking – although distinctly Moroccan, unlike the generic airports you come across around the world. We boarded the RyanAir flight that we booked 6 months before – finally, all of these things that we were dreaming of, we finally fulfilled them and now our trip is almost done.
Going home from North Africa to the Philippines is a 2-day process. First, we have to fly back to London, where our return tickets to Manila are booked. Then, we have to take a 17-hour Qatar Airways flight, with a 6-hour layover at the Doha International airport. So although our trip is officially done by Sunday, we don’t actually get home until Tuesday – with Philippine time 8 hours ahead of London and Morocco.
It felt really great flying back to London – our first stop in the trip. Apart from going back to the metropolitan city we enjoyed best, our good friends Nicky and Vane were there to welcome us back, and after some last minute pasalubong shopping, we had dinner at a proper Chinese restaurant – the closest thing Pinoys can get to familiar food in the Western world! After dinner and a last drink at the pub, we went back to their apartment to figure out how to carry all of our luggage home. Fortunately, Mench is really an expert at packing our stuff – I don’t even try. With some difficulty, we got everything together and managed to get on the Tube train to London Heathrow Airport – as usual, the last one approaching midnight, managing to catch it by barely a few minutes.
Now, we were around 8 hours early at London Heathrow for our flight back to Manila. We figured that booking another night at the hotel and the transportation to the airport in the middle of the night would be a lot of unnecessary expenses, so we just decided to use the rail pass we already had for the day and take the last train to Heathrow. As a result, we were there in the middle of the night – with everything closed, and nowhere to go except some aluminum seats where we would spend the next few hours while waiting for our flight. We do not recommend this experience – it’s a cold and miserable one, not being able to sleep in the terminal while sitting on not very comfy seats! But at this point we did not want to take on additional costs, and even though Mench was getting very cranky at our less than ideal situation, we stuck with it (there was no other choice anyway) until the check in counters opened at around 4:30AM.
Now we’re really on our way home. It’s time to get back to our daily lives while at the same time savor the experiences that this trip has afforded us – and share about it with others as well, to inspire people to fulfill their own dreams of travel around the world. Our Manila to Morocco trip is done!
