Station road to Marrakech

Busy and loads to do. Best place for taxis

DO NOT TAKE BUS HERE! Reject anybody that tries to sell you bus tickets here, you will end in an old bus that takes and drops passengers continuosly and takes much longer. Buses for touristic destinations(i.e. Essaouira) depart from the new bus station near to railway station (gare de Marrakech) with CTM and Supratours companies.

Contrary to what tourists are told, I found that the non-CTM, non-Supratours buses that depart from this station to be of equal condition to CTM buses, with air-conditioning working. Touts will approach you as you enter the Gare Routiere. I found that saying "Not to travel. Pour informacion" worked best in batting them away. Inside the station, there are around 20 counters (stalls), grouped by destination not by bus company. So if you want to go from Marrakech to Ouarzazate, you will go to Counter 6. Here there is a listing of all times. The price quoted to me for this route was 90 Dirhams, which is the same as the CTM price - this makes me suspect I was being quoted a tourist price. In any case, it wasn't a rip-off, so I was happy to proceed. The ticket given to you is a hand-filled slip of paper, in Arabic (see pic). They will tell you the platform on which the bus will arrive. Once inside the bus (at least on my route which was run by the bus company SATAS) the seats are first come first serve. Often the bus will leave only after it has filled up completely, rather than at the exact advertised time. But hopefully this is not more than around 15 minutes. Admittedly if you do not speak Arabic you may find a lack of communication at this stage, as the conductors and driver are trying to hustle people into their last available seats. Overall, I wanted to get off the CTM+Supratours wagon because I found it full of foreign tourists (like myself! ha ha) and therefore completely lacking in any local flavour (on this SATAS bus for example, someone played some beautiful Moroccan music halfway into the ride, what a soundtrack as you cross the High Atlas mountains!). If you are a more independent traveller who doesn't mind a bit of "uncertainty" and a slight feeling of being "rushed", I would recommend you try getting on buses from this station. The atmosphere on the journey is second to none.

Always watch out, but the busses can be really cheap there

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