Blogs from Morocco, Africa - page 3

It’s a slow start this morning as we recover from our long and sleep deprived two day sojourn out into the desert. I am however pleased to note that I do seem to be slowly learning to walk again after the several hours I spent astride a camel. I head bravely off alone yet again into the maze that is the Medina. The impossible dream is to somehow make it the two kilometres or so through to Bab Boujloud, the Blue Gate, which is at the opposite end of the maze. The walls that surround the Medina are somewhere around eight kilometres long and there are lots of gates. The original Bab Boujloud was apparently nothing special, but when the French took over they decided the city should have a grand entrance, so in 1913 the ... read more

Today we head off on a two day overnight sojourn out into the Sahara Desert. Our guide introduces herself as Ouma, and we meet our travelling companions, a young Dutch couple and a family of three from France. We climb steadily up into the Atlas Mountains as we head south, passing through some impressively thick and extensive cedar forests. Our first stop is at the town of Ifran, the so-called "Switzerland of Morocco". We’re up at over 1,600 metres and most of the buildings look like Swiss chalets; they’ve got steeply sloping rooves which will hopefully stop them caving in in winter when the snow piles up. Ouma tells us that this is the world’s cleanest town. We haven’t been to every town in the world, but I’m still not overly sure about that particular claim. ... read more

Today we get to sample Morocco’s train system with a four hour ride south to the ancient city of Fes. The Tangier train station is an unexpectedly pleasant surprise - a large, opulent modern edifice that would put any train station in Melbourne to absolute shame … not that that would be all that hard. The countryside south of Tangier doesn’t look all that dissimilar to the farmland back home - fertile and productive, with seemingly endless fields of olives, corn, oranges and other sundry fruit and vegetables, all grown under irrigation on an almost industrial scale. And we soon realise why it looks and feels so much like home - there are gum trees, lots of gum trees - the only things missing are the kangaroos. We spend some of the time following the Atlantic ... read more

We discover that the activity of choice for young Tangierians at 5am on Sunday mornings is to tear up and down the main drag outside our waterfront hotel with their hands more or less constantly parked on their horns. At least now we don’t need to worry about our alarm clock not going off. And whilst on the subject of clocks and time, what time actually is it? I’ve got three “devices”, and at the moment they‘re displaying three different times. My iPad’s synced to the hotel wifi, so we think that’s probably right. Our phone company doesn’t do roaming in Morocco, but our phones occasionally detect a network across the water in Spain, and when they do they revert to Spanish time, which is an hour ahead ... and my Fitbit … it’s always been ... read more

Today we’ve got a long and messy day of travelling to Tangier in Morocco, via Malaga, where we’ve got several hours to kill while we wait for our late evening flight. The bus that we came on to Nerja stopped at every pretty coastal settlement along the route, and we‘re looking forward to again enjoying the excellent coastal scenery on the way back … and as an added bonus the trip will again be a long one, soaking up some of those hours we need to kill. But it seems Mr Murphy has again decided to intervene in our lives. The bus back is an express; there are no stops, so so much for the time we were looking to kill … and it doesn’t follow the coast so there’s no scenery to look at. I’m ... read more