Part 1 -Morocco!!

Okay…now that we are finally a little bit settled in here in Saint Louis I have finally written up a more detailed account of the whole adventure south!

This is going to be very very long so it may take some time to sift through... sorry!

I have already sort of detailed the trip through Morocco so I will just skim through that for some of the travel details for future travelers wanting to take this route and looking for info…

The ferry that we took from Tarifa to Tangiers cost us 31 euros (there was a 10% discount price that weekend. The normal price is around 37-39 euros) and took about an hour by the time the ferry took off, sailed, and docked!

It was kind of cool, along the way the captain came on the loud speaker and told us that we were passing the two sailboats that were in the lead in a Round the World Sailing Race!

Once on the boat, you have to get your passports stamped with an entry stamp that shouldn’t cost anything…you need to fill out a small white piece of paper first with your name, passport number etc. The genderamerie check your passport as you are leaving the boat to make sure it has a stamp! No visas required for us.

We couldn’t really find a youth hostel because the one we had in mind that we found in an old guide book that was listed as a Hostelling International Hostel no longer existed. So instead we ended up walking to one nearby where the old hostel was supposed to be called Hotel California. It was in a tall, narrow, dark building but the receptionist was super nice and the price was good (70 dirhams each = 7 euros).

The bus from Tangier to Casablanca cost us 80 dirhams each. 70 for the ticket and 10 for the baggage underneath. The buses seemed to leave fairly frequently and through a number of different companies. I think you can buy a ticket in advance but we just showed up and since the bus was leaving that minute we were herded on to a bus and ended up paying once we were underway.

Oh – on the way to the bus station we encountered our first lesson, or as we like to call them ‘morals of the trip’…the map, verbal directions, and the actual route are often very very different! So make sure to scope out the route before!! Or be prepared for confusion and more walking than you planned for…..

In Casa we finally met up with Lenny although we had to wait a day because she was in Rabat when we arrived and had to take a train the next day back to Casa.

While we were waiting for Lenny to come from Rabat, Raff, Genet, and I needed to do laundry and so we asked at the reception how we could go about doing that. We were given directions to a place but it turned out that it was a dry-cleaning place and they wanted to charge us 7 dirhams each piece….which, with all our underwear and such, would have been a little much! So we decided to do what many travelers before us have done and wash in the sink! Raff and I were almost done our laundry and while I was upstairs trying to rig up some string to dry the laundry, the receptionist came to the bathroom and started yelling at Raff that she couldn’t do laundry in the sink and that we had to leave because the hostel was closed from 10-12 for the cleaning ladies to clean (a detail no one had bothered to mention to us prior to this point)! So after much yelling and confusion we were banished to the roof terrace to wait out the cleaning time and to finish our laundry!!! It felt a little like we had been sent to our rooms the way they treated us!! But we can add a moral to our ever growing moral book…..never wash laundry in a hostel sink or you will be grounded!!!

In Casa we did a lot of walking around and becoming comfortable with being in Morocco. We even went to see Rick’s Café…but it was a little strange because none of the movie was actually filmed in Morocco and the real café was built after the movie was made! But still neat to see.

In the evening we went out with a friend, Hakim, that we had met the night before at the tourist information office. He had been super friendly and nice and had offered to take us out and show us around town the following evening. We ended up going out to visit his ‘second mom’. A woman originally from Zaire but spent most of her life in France and is now living out her retirement in Casa. It seemed like a fairly fun idea so we agreed to go. The trip ended up being quite an adventure because we walked for about 45 minutes to get there and he kept telling us it was close but we kept walking through all these different neighbours and getting a little suspicious! Hakim also walked ridiculous fast and would cross the road at random before we even knew where he was going! And for those of you who know, crossing the street in Morocco takes a bit of practice! You need to be bold…but not too bold because the cars will NOT stop…..you have to move! Basically the technique is walk to the middle line (dodging cars), close your eyes and push through to the other side. It is quite a skill actually and we actually got really good at it!!!

Eventually we did make it though and it was really nice. We had tea and cookies and chatted about all sorts of things! Turns out that Hakim was just overly eager and friendly and so, though it was hard to judge his intentions, he meant well in the end!

At this point Lenny was feeling really ill (she had picked up a traveler's diarrhea bug in Rabat) so we took her home and then Genet, Raff, Annie, Hakim and I went out looking for a pub/bar to have some cold beer and chat. We found two nice places (I can’t remember names). One was more pub-like (la Brasserie) and, although we clearly stood out, no one seemed to mind that we were there. The second place had music and dancing and was kind of a cross between a restaurant and a pub back home!

Given our curfew (doors lock time) was 12…we made it an early night and headed home. Lenny spent ALL night miserably running to the bathroom and by the morning seemed thoroughly exhausted but through the worst! Although, she took well over a week for her to feel totally fine again.

Casa was an okay city! It was loud, dusty and dirty but that makes sense given that it is the biggest city in Morocco! It was certainly fun to explore it and I think we all really had a sense by the end that we were comfortable where we were and handling being in a different city.

The hostel (the only youth hostel in the city) was just inside the Medina walls (old city walls) on the port side. It was a good location other than we were told repeatedly not to walk through the Medina at night after 8 pm. But walking around the walls did not take much time either. During the day the Medina was quite cool actually. Lots of street vendors, stalls selling everything from watches to veggies to beautiful traditional clothing. The hostel itself was okay. The breakfast was great…coffee, juice, baguette, two pasty thingies, and laughing cow cheese. Unfortunately the guys who ran the place were a bit odd and didn’t really seem to like telling you things. For example, that you had to be out of the place from 10 to 12, or that breakfast was from 8 to 9, or that you weren't allowed to wash clothes in the sink! Fairly basic orientation rules that most places lay out right when you get there! They also kind of treated us like silly western girls who didn’t know what we were doing…..which, although it may have been true in a few instances, seemed a little unfair! But they weren’t mean spirited or anything and the place was really clean and the rooms good sizes. We paid 60 dirhams per person….for a 4 person room and then a 5 person room. Lenny paid 135 dirhams for a private room when she first got there. The place wasn’t too busy. Not too many other travelers so it was hard to meet people.

From Casa we decided to take the train to Marrakesh. The train systems in Morocco are fantastic! In the train station or on the trains, you wouldn’t even really know you weren't in Europe somewhere. The train cost 84 dirhams from Casa to Marrakesh and we left from the Casa Voyageur station.

Lenny took a train to Rabat and that cost her 32 dirhams for one way.

The only downside to trains in Morocco is that they don’t travel past Marrakesh. If you want to go further you have to take buses! But the bus system is really good too. It is in sync with the trains so that you can transfer if you want to go south.

On the train, pulling in to Marrakesh, a women approached us and asked us where we were from. Her name was Amal and she was a Moroccan who had just finished studying at NYU and was home for some time before going back to the US. She had heard us speaking English and thought we might be American. She gave us her phone number and told us that if we called her the next day we would go for tea.

Turns out that by tea she meant go to her house and spend the day with her and her family drinking tea, eating lunch, drinking coffee, chatting!!! It was incredible. When we called her the next morning she came and picked us up with her sister and they took us to their family’s home. Her mom lives there with 3 of the children and since her mom doesn’t work outside of the home she spends her day at home cooking and caring for the family. So we had amazing home made Moroccan cookies with our tea. Then just as we were about the leave her mom told us that she had made enough lunch for everyone so we had to stay! We had a Moroccan salad (tomatoes, onions, cilantro, oil, vinegar…mmmmm), we had lentils, we had these fish balls made from sardines, and we had a whole big cooked fish! It was incredibly tasty and all freshly home made! We could not get over Amal and her family’s generosity!

She was an incredible woman. She had gone to New York to further her studies in Dentistry. After two years there she got sick and was diagnosed with brain cancer. Rather than go home and fight the sickness with the support of her family she stayed in New York for her operation and treatment and did not tell her family the whole time! Luckily she had insurance because the school had made her get it so she was able to afford the treatment but she had to extend her studies by two years so that she could stay in school and still benefit from the insurance. That meant that she was a full time student and a full time cancer patient…by herself…in New York!! Her mom to this day still does not know that she had cancer.

Anyway…we had a great day with her and felt really lucky to be invited in to her home like that! She didn’t expect anything in return because she would eventually be repayed back through the kindness of others or perhaps she already had been payed back by the kindness of her fellow students in New York through her sickness!

Marrakesh was a really nice city! Much smaller and cleaner than Casa and a little less chaotic. Although, we did go to the souk and that was certainly chaotic! Just a little side …once it gets dark a bunch of street performers come out and there are huge crowds that gather to watch. But – if you stop, and you clearly stand out like we did, the performer will likely single you out and then you cannot leave until you have given some money!!! The guy we stopped to watch was going a hilarious impression of Michael Jackson dancing!!!

During the day, in the same square as the street performers, there are just people everywhere! Women doing henna, snake charmers, people selling trinkets, people walking around in traditional dress that look like they are just hanging around but if you take a picture they will chase after you for some money! Being discrete is almost impossible as they all seem to work together and tell each other. Once you actually get in to the souk it is much like the Khan el Khalil in Egypt! Windy narrow streets, lots of people, lots different goods!! You can totally get lost in there for hours if you aren’t careful! The sounds, smells, colours are so bright and intense that it is really quite an exhausting experience.

The hostel we stayed at was really nice in terms of how it looked. Nice green space with trees where we sat to eat breakfast.

Unfortunately it had some drawbacks…..The curfew at the hostel was 11:30 for the gates and 12:00 for the common areas. This seems a little silly but there appeared to be only one guy working there so maybe it was necessary for him to get some sleep!

Oh and the women and men’s rooms were separated. It felt a little like being in a boarding school!

And we think that maybe the hostel in Casa called ahead because there was also a very clear sign in the bathroom saying that no laundry could be done in the sinks!!!!!

To leave from Marrakesh there are apparently three bus companies that go to Dakhla. We only visited two of them. Supratours is the official bus company that works with the Marrakesh train lines to provide transportation where there are no trains. CTM is the other company. We ended up going with CTM simply because it left an hour earlier (2:00 as opposed to 3:00) and cost 10 dirhams less.

The trip is done in two parts Marrakesh to Agadir – 80 dirhams and Agadir to Dakhla – 340 dirhams. Marrakesh to Agadir is only about a 4 hours drive and then we had an hour layover in Agadir before the long haul down to Dakhla. The trip should have taken 25 hours but ended up being 27. Supratours takes the same time!

In Dakhla we stayed at Hotel Sahara (there are two Hotel Sahara’s…one is called Hotel Sahara regency….that is a classier place….for budget travel stick to just Sahara)

It cost us 30 dirhams a night each and in one room we just had a mattress on the floor for the third person! The place is nice enough. The bathrooms are a little smelly and there are a LOT of men staying there and not so many women.

There is a guy who works there that can arrange rides to Mauritania. He is really pushy and kind of a bully but we discovered that his prices were not unreasonable. He was asking 300 Dirhams to cross the border to Nouahdibou and 500 Dirhams all the way to Nouakchott.

We may have been able to find cheaper prices but we didn’t look too hard and we probably only would have knocked 50 dirhams or so off the price. There was a group of french people heading down through Morocco the day after us and they said they were going to look for a cheaper price.

I guess the best thing would have been if we weren’t in a hurry to get to Saint Louis and if we weren’t 5 people. I think that if we had hung around for a couple of days eventually someone would have passed through who would offer a lift. We, for example, met 3 frenchmen who were traveling down to the Casamance in a big van and could have carried passengers but 5 was cramping it a little. We also met several big convoys at the border of French adventure tourists who definitely had some extra seats available. So there are hitch hiking options!

But we were in a hurry so we had to pay the price...