What's it like to ride a Moroccan train?

The first thing that surprises people is how ordinary it feels, in the best way. You buy a ticket at a tiled station, find your carriage, and settle into a padded seat by a wide window. Then the doors hiss shut and Morocco starts unspooling outside the glass — flat plains the colour of terracotta, lines of olive trees, a shepherd lifting a hand as you pass. On the Al Boraq high-speed line between Tangier and Casablanca, the countryside blurs to a smear of green and gold at 320 km/h, and you arrive before you've finished your coffee.

The slower intercity trains are where the country leaks in. Someone unwraps a paper bag of msemen and offers you one before they've taken a bite themselves — that's just how it works here. A grandmother asks where you're from and tells you, via her teenage grandson translating, exactly which riad you should have booked instead. The light shifts as the afternoon wears on, turning the Atlas foothills lavender on the horizon, and the rhythm of the rails lulls half the carriage to sleep.

Be honest with yourself about the realities. First class is worth the few extra dirhams — you get a reserved seat in a six-person compartment, which matters on busy Friday and Sunday departures when second class fills to standing. Delays happen, usually modest, occasionally not; build a buffer if you have a connection. The toilets at the end of the carriage are functional, not lovely. Keep your bag where you can see it and you'll have zero trouble.

What stays with you isn't the speed or the price, though both are excellent. It's the feeling of being held inside the country's everyday motion — the call to prayer drifting through an open door at a small-town stop, the vendor's tray of harcha and orange juice on the platform, the way the whole carriage exhales when the lights of Marrakech finally appear. You step off feeling like you arrived the way Moroccans do, not as a tourist in a bubble.