Travel to Agadir

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After leaving Rabbat, we had a police escort on the drive from where the highway joined Casa-Marrakech higway. We had to drive near to Marrakech to get down to the Atlantic coast at the resort town of Agadir. OK, not resort, but more of a package tour dump site. But, it was a convenient base to explore the southern coast.

There were two police officers in dress uniform on each highway overpass, two or more motorcycle officers at each highway on ramp and an officer stationed every 100 meters or so. Every public bus and passenger van was pulled over by an armed police detail and was being searched. At first we thought the extra security was because we were close to the airport. But, we passed the airport, and the security detail was still there. We counted over 1000 police, as we noticed police paddy wagons dropping new troops ahead of us to take up their guard posts.

Wow! It did feel like a personal escort when police wagon after wagon brought troops from the back of the escort detail to the front where we were driving. We were expecting to get pulled over, because of some VIP behind us, but we kept sailing through the whole trip.

Later, we asked a police officer near Agadir who was the arriving VIP? We expected many heads of states were arriving for some conference and were being escorted from the airport to Marrakech. It turned out there was no foreign dignitaries. This was the standard drill any time the king of Morocco moved, and today he was going from Casa to Marrakech.

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