Casablanca January 8, 2007 Monday Even accounting for our late start (we were very reluctant to give up our comfortable, WARM Rabat hotel and the reliable Restaurant Mixed Grill) we made it to Casablanca shortly after 1pm. Casablanca, the largest city in Morocco, is a huge shipping hub and not too much more. Most of the locals we met when we arrived in Morocco advised that we not spend much or any time here, but the magic conjured up by the city’s name, an exotic face conjured mostly by the film, and the relative ease of stopping off the train as [View Full Entry]

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January 4 - 7, 2007 Thursday We woke up in Chefchaoen at 5:30 am and left our hotel at 6 am. Our bus was a little late so we ended up pulling out of town at 7:45 rather than 7, regretting that we could have stayed cold in bed longer. The bus was fairly jerky but we were both able to sleep a little because we were very tired. If you’ve read the blog for awhile you know that 5:30 am wakeup calls are not the norm. We arrived in Rabat around noon and took a taxi with a fast meter [View Full Entry]

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January 1 - 4, 2007 Monday We left Hotel Ibis at 10 am and took a cab to the CTM office for the 11 am bus. At the bus station we met a law student from Toronto, fresh from a semester in England, who started talking to Roger while Amy was in the bathroom. We chatted with him for a bit and tried to sit by each other on the bus. Contrary to Amy’s research, the Moroccans do care very much about keeping assigned seats and we were unable to sit together. We spent the bus ride sleeping and gazing out [View Full Entry]

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December 28 - 31, 2006 Completing this entry more than two years after we were in Morocco it struck us how lazy and boring we were in Fes (and maybe all of Morocco). We think at least our initial laziness boils down to a few things. First, we arrived in Morocco right before Eid-al-Adha (there are various names for this holiday used around the Muslim world) and we received conflicting information both before and after arriving in Morocco as to what impact this would have on our visit. Information ranged to the extreme in many cases, suggesting nothing - absolutely nothing [View Full Entry]

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December 23 - 28, 2006 We spent a lot of time debating where to spend our Christmas. We considered staying in Turkey but thought a traditional Christmas might be more accessible in a non-Muslim country. We also thought about going back to Slovenia and heading to Bled for a nice quiet snowy Christmas. In the end the promise of a big city Christmas with Chinese food and movies won out. Needless to say, we chose poorly. We had no idea that London completely shuts down for Christmas. But not just for Christmas. Stores start to close between 4 and 6 pm [View Full Entry]

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December 17 - 23, 2006 Sunday Our bus up the Dardanelles arrived in Istanbul at 8pm. After some confusion we loaded on to a servis van encountering the rare rude face the servis apparently brings out (two guys in the front seat took up three seats, the back seat someone always seems to sit down at the end and doesn’t move over so you have to crawl over them…). A local guy on the bus told us when to get out, and we did, ending up far from where we wanted to go (someday we will learn to identify the signs [View Full Entry]

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December 15 - 17, 2006 Friday We pulled into Cannakale after dark and with not much of a clue as to where we would be staying for the night. The bus from Selcuk dropped us at Cumhuriyet Meydani, an open square between the ferry docks at the end of the main street of Cumhuriyet Boulevard, a corridor of busy shops, hotels and restaurants with a narrow park running down the center of the avenue. We dropped our bags on the sidewalk and took turns popping in and out of the nearby hotels, ultimately settling on the neat Canak Hotel. Saturday Cannakale [View Full Entry]

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December 11 - 15, 2006 Monday After slicing inland to Pamukkale from the Mediterranean we cut back to the coast and the Bodrum Peninsula on the Aegean coast that is home to the town of Bodrum. Tourism is the local business in Bodrum, although we were told that the town retains a little more of its unique charms than other coastal cities overrun by tourism. We arrived in Bodrum after dark and navigated the narrow streets and crappy map in our guidebook to Mars Hotel which our previous innkeeper in Pamukkale had recommended. The neighborhood where Mars is situated seems to [View Full Entry]

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December 9 - 11, 2006 Saturday When we woke up Saturday we knew we needed to get out of Antalya. It was a nice enough place and not touristy in the way that other well-trod, over-blown, tout-filled towns are in other parts of the world, but for Turkey it was our low point thus far. We had really been struggling to make decisions about what to see and where to go while in Turkey. Any sane traveler should be able to see and savor Turkey in 26 days but we felt smothered and rushed almost since our arrival. The tough decision [View Full Entry]

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Antalya December 7 - 9, 2006 Thursday We arrived at the Antalya bus station about 5:30pm. There may have been a servis, a smaller bus that would take us closer to the city center, but we were stupid enough not to check. We ended up waiting for a bus to the gate of the old city for about 20 minutes when, with darkness quickly falling, we gave up and took a cab for 12 Turkish Lira ($10). After getting a room among the narrow streets of the old city we walked to a nearby park high above the crashing waves, able [View Full Entry]

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