Why We Started Morocco By Train, Then Hired a Car Halfway Through

We spent 6 weeks travelling around Morocco in September 2025 and went into the trip fully planning to use public transport.

Mainly because everyone says you can.

And technically, you can.

Morocco's train system is genuinely good in parts. Cheap, straightforward, fairly comfortable and honestly easier than we expected at the start. We landed in Tangier, grabbed a taxi from the airport to our hotel, then spent a few days exploring the city mostly on foot and using local buses.

After that we got trains between Tangier, Asilah, Rabat and Casablanca and for that section of the trip, public transport made complete sense.

The trains were cheap enough that we barely thought about the cost, stations were easy to navigate and Jax actually loved the train journeys because he could properly look out the window instead of being strapped into a car for hours. We had snacks, downloaded films, card games, all the usual long-travel-parent survival tactics.

For city-to-city travel along that route, we honestly thought we'd cracked Morocco.

Then we started planning the next section properly.

The point where public transport stopped making sense

The problem wasn't the trains themselves. It was everything after the trains.

We realised pretty quickly that once you leave the main connected cities, things get awkward fast. Especially as a family.

Essaouira was the first point where we paused a bit. The station situation wasn't ideal for where we actually wanted to stay near the beach and port, and then when we looked ahead to Imsouane it got even more complicated because there isn't a train station there at all.

So suddenly we were trying to work out buses, transfer points, luggage, timings, delays, taxi prices at the other end, and whether we really wanted to spend six weeks dragging backpacks on and off different forms of transport in the heat.

And honestly, we didn't.

Particularly with our route involving the Sahara Desert later on.