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Published: January 6th 2011
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I’m looking out the window of the enormous, empty ferry at the coastline of Morocco, mountains rising quite impressively out of the Straight of Gibraltar. The huge mountain to our left was one of the pillars of Hercules (the Rock of Gibraltar being the other pillar) that formed the ancient demarcation of the Greek and Roman world.
We departed from Algeciras, Spain just half an hour ago and should be in Morocco within the next 15 minutes - it’s only 9 miles across but the shipping corridor extends the trip a bit. We worked our way down from Arcos yesterday to the coastal city of Cadiz, touted as the oldest city in Europe and the harbor from which our buddy Christopher Colombus put everything known in his rearview mirror. After the rural countryside the vast business of the big city was a bit mind-rattling. We found a place to ditch the car and set out to see a few of the attractions along the seaboard. It’s definitely a place that requires the devotion of a few days instead of the hour we spent there. We ran into the American couple that we met our first day in Arcos at a
tiny bakery. So random is the world to meet someone that went to SUNY Oswego (not far from where I attended college) in a tiny bakery in a little hill town in southern Spain but to also bump into them a second time an hour away in a big city…kind of fun.
From Cadiz we escaped and worked our way down the rural coastline heading for a spot that Nick had recommended called Bolonia. It is a small beach town with a crazy sand dune that is consuming the pine forest around it, the Roman city of
Baelo Claudia's ruins that date back to 200BC, pretty mountains around the town - seemed like a good place to check out and wasn’t far from Algeciras where we had to be early enough this morning to catch the 11am ferry.
The Roman ruins were closing just as we got there, a bummer for sure as it is the most complete example of a Roman city on the Iberian penisula but we were able to look down on it from the hills and then up to it from the beach. We wandered down the beach to the crazy dune that is slowly
eating up the pine forest. It's definitely a different sort of thing, seeing a sand dune consume a pine stand. We found a Spanish guy in his 30s having the time of his life using a wakeboard to sled down the dunes while his girlfriend watched and just shook her head. Up and down up and down he went, a sweaty mess. He handed Todd the board with the biggest grin ever. Boys are funny.
video We returned to the little town to have dinner and decided to splurge on our first real meals in a while. The prices were a bit outregeous but we figured the fish as about as fresh as it was going to get. My fish was a huge piece of very nice somethingorother, grilled with oil and garlic and Todd...well Todd ordered fried fish. He was thinking a nice plate of fish and chips type fried fish. But it turns out when you don't specify what KIND of fish you want them to fry they just take whatever happened to come up in the net, bread it and fry the shit out of it. Then they put it on a plate and put it
in front of the tourist and then sit back and watch the fun. Todd's plate was heaped high with whole sardines, what looked like baby squid or octopuses (octopii?), giant octupus tentacles that looked deceptively like onion rings...pretty much one of every little creature of the ocean was there on Todd's plate. Deep fried to perfection. He made me eat most of it.
We contemplated staying at the hostel there but the 100 roosters or so wandering around outside made us think better. So we went back to the main road and stayed at a place we had checked out on the way by, more expensive but nicer and somewhat more hopefully quieter. And it was after the raucous party in the downstairs echoey bar cleared out. Rested up nicely for the next part of the trip...to Morocco!
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macette
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that was fun
had a good laugh at todd's fish plater,lisa you should write a book,