Thursday, July 19, 2012

Tangier, Morocco

Being so close to continental Europe, we figured it would be an interesting experience to travel to Morocco by boat across the Gibraltar Strait. Getting to Morocco in itself is the beginning of a quick adjustment period to a different way of life. The boat on which we embarked, loaded late, sat in the port for an hour and a quarter after the schedule departure and as we rode across the waters, the boat for some reason was very obviously leaning to the right. While I napped on a table Adam explored the boat and said he had determined that our vessel was one that was fixed once problem arose and preventative maintenance was not a common practice. (And many of the fixes were very rudimentary.)

The trip across was interesting more so for observing the family dynamic of the Moroccan’s in the cabin and starting to get a better appreciation of the many ways that women dress.
Once we arrived at our terminal at Tanger Med, we disembarked and went for the shuttle. However, when we got to the police check he informed Adam and I that we were supposed to have had our passports stamped on the boat before getting off! So we had to run back onto the boat and track down the border guard who was already packing everything up and getting ready to leave. All the employees had kept asking us where we had been and why we hadn’t got our passports stamped and we just honestly hadn’t understood the announcements on the boat overhead. Luckily it wasn’t too big of an issue, and we hustled so as not to make the other guests wait too long for us on the shuttle.

We had arrived in Morocco! Our first task was to find the free bus that would get us from the Tanger Med port to Tangier city about 50 km away. It was all a little confusing because there was so little signage, but some nice men pointed us to a unmarked white bus and said that this was the bus we had to take to the city. I confirmed with the driver and got on while Adam loaded our bags. Within five minutes, Adam had not yet boarded the bus and I heard a huge commotion coming from outside. A big black bearded man dressed all in white was yelling in anger at some of the other people beside the bus. In my mind I was convinced that Adam had already got into a fight and we had only been in the country for five minutes. Luckily Adam was just ‘near’ the fight and wasn’t exactly directly involved. It appears that one group of people had been cramming the luggage space full with junk they had brought back from Spain. Apparently loading was the job of the man in white, and he didn’t take too kindly to other people preventing him from getting his Dirham, so a fight ensued. The part I didn’t understand is that when Adam finally came on the bus one of the men in the bout followed him and then came up to me and shook his finger in my face while saying something in Arabic. Adam says that they had been asking him if he was with someone and he thinks if I hadn’t of been there they wouldn’t have let him on the bus since they kept trying to take our luggage off.
Morocco is full of scammers – and mean ones too. I don’t like being harsh with foreigners because I usually travel by myself I tend to prefer to pay the extra for a scam and have someone ‘act’ nicely so that they can get away with what they are trying to pull, then to call them out on it and find myself in a bad situation. When we arrived in Tangier, we didn’t have any orientation to the city, we didn’t have a hotel destination and we didn’t have anyone to help us figure these things out other than a pack of scamming taxi drivers. Really quickly (and I do take full responsibility for this) we were in a cab with a non-English speaking driver and his English speaking ‘tourism approved’ guide. They were taking us to the train station. When we got to the train station, Adam wanted us to take our stuff and end the ride, but apparently that wasn’t cool with the driving pair since they had talked to me about driving us to the train station and then on to our hotel for a rate. Luckily, in a patriarch society it is pretty easy to defer to the man in any sticky situation, so I just kept my mouth shut and when they tried to talk to me I deferred them to Adam. The fight was tough, the insults were flying about and at the end of it I had a little breakdown because I felt so horrible that I had had to break my word even if it was to a scam artist. It was just the first of many such situations in our time in Morocco, so I believe it was a good first hardening.


I said to Adam that the reason I have never been scammed so easily before is because typically when I travel I am either being picked up by a local or I know exactly where I am going. This is the first time where neither of those two circumstances existed, and armed with zero information, it was too easy to get sucked into the scam. I am happy he was understanding and was able to take the brunt of the aggression.
Next we had to find a hotel. Finding a hotel was not a big problem, but one with internet was a little harder. We finally settled on the first hotel we found with wifi, which was the fifth hotel we visited, and unfortunately also the most expensive. After hotel search, we ventured into the streets of Morocco which had come alive with the night. Restaurants were busy, the ocean’s boardwalk was littered with people (the women almost all covered in typical muslim garments), and the shops too were all working. Our first Moroccan dinner was a nice change from the bread, cheese and salami we had been eating for the previous week. I had a chicken and beef couscous with roasted vegetables topped with stewed prunes and toasted peanut. Adam had a beef tagine and a freshly squeezed orange juice.

I was exhausted after visiting Gibraltar all day and then the transit to Morocco, so I was happy to call it a night and unwind. Adam on the other hand was eager to hit the streets and see what was going on. This would become our routine for bulk of our time in Morocco where Adam drops me off at home between 10-11 pm at night and then goes out adventuring until 1-2 am in the morning.  (Luckily he always finds his way home, and the stories he has to share are both entertaining and a strong reminder that I am much happier being at home in bed.)

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