Morocco

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Geo: 35.8179, -5.19417

Crazy adventure for 3 weeks in Tangier, Asilah, Chefchouen (Rif Mtns).

We really hadn't a clue what we were doing but arrived in Tangier at night with nothing booked & a guide book that suggested some where. But we met 3 more people on the flight with nothing booked either & a place picked from their guide book which turned out to have no room at the inn. So the 5 of us tried the one in our book which once upon a time had been a fab hotel. It was on the edge of kasbah over looking the port & the view was great but the hotel was all faded grandeur with basic enough rooms, it was grand we were happy, so cracked open the duty free with our new friends & let our hair down.

Sometime in the night I woke up (possibly by over head light going on) & realised I had searing stomach ache. Both of us did, I started puking in the bin as had no en-suite bathroom, then C started puking & we continued this every 15 mins in turn each one for about 12 hours, (in the end we really thought we were dying of something terrible.) Very very ill and we hadn't drunk thaaaat much but we hadn't taken care with local water or condensation on the bottles.

Thought to ourselves let's go out for some air. Get to the hotel gate & quickly realise you HAVE to let a local guy guide you or you will be plagued. So there was an old man style tea hut at the gate of the hotel where lots of guys hung out & the younger guys pounced on us so we picked one 'Myel' & explained we were skint (we were). He said ok & took us through the kasbah, sure the smells only made our puking worse, God knows what the poor guy thought with us taking it in turns to get down on our hunkers to puke. At this point we were puking bile as we had nothing left, so we drank orange juice just because we knew it would taste nice on the way back up. After a while he left us to it & we headed to the beach where even as we continued to puke kids begged off us & sharply retreated when they saw us burying our puke in the sand & snarling at them.

Thought we would have to fly home so went back the hotel & bumped into our 3 new friends again, one of whom was the son of a pharmacist & had a tool box of medical supplies with him & sorted us right out with some medicine when we told him our symptoms. Then we were right as rain, phew.

So the next time we left the hotel Myel was waiting, not put off by our disgusting antics, & took us all around & was lovely & even let us hang with the old lads in the hut, just like Irish old lads in a west of Ireland bar only smoking kif & drinking mint tea instead of tobacco & guinness, and shouting at Saddam on the telly.

A few days later we met our own friends from Dublin in a pre arranged cafe from the guide book (no mobiles in them days) where great creme caramel was served. And after a few more days we all headed down the coast to Asilah.

Asilah is a nice little beach town where you could hear the calls to prayer & we rented a house that had a banana tree growing in the middle of it. Some of our friends were a bit stupid the way they let themselves get hassled by the locals but we had a great time. Made friends with some locals who assigned us all Moroccan names - mine was Fatima why I don't know.

After a week our friends went home & we innocently went onto Chefchouen in the mountains - beautiful place but apparently the only reason you'd go there is to buy lots of hashish in the Rif mountains, so no one would believe us we weren't interested in buying a big haul. Don't remember there being much tourists there & after the 1st night we discovered the hotel didn't take Mastercard (the only one we had) so as we had feck all cash we had to go really cheapo place (for .89p a night), so cheap even the walls had gaps to the next room at the top. Anyway we had chosen our guide (telling him we skint, why the hell else would we be moving to cheap accomodation) as he was kinda fair skinned with good english - a local drunk, who had tried hustling us ealier, told he was bad news but we ignored him as we thought drunk Moroccans were probably bad news too. Well we were wrong .... had a fine 1st few days being showed around etc. and then one night he says let's go for a turkish bath, right so says us, he brings C in 1st & does a back massage/scrub thing & it's all fine. Then he sends C out & brings me in, wasn't 100% sure this was normal but I had a bikini on so at least I wasn't naked, then I realised this is what he wanted & I figured that naked women were not the norm there so I ran out to where C was, our guide was not impressed & turned pretty nasty - thank God I wasn't alone. Then he starts asking us for money & we reminded him we told him at the beginning we had none, so then he says give me your watch etc. we told him piss off (not that the watch was worth much but it was the principle now) & he said we needn't think we were getting off this lightly & he'd be back for us tomorrow before we left (we had planned to leave on the evening bus).

So we were a bit shook up & then we notice the manager of the hotel was pacing up & down outside our room & as he seemed to know our guy well we got really scared he case he was gonna do something to us & then we decided we'd leave on the 6am bus as our man would not be up (he slept til lunch time the other days) so we packed up & slept in our clothes (hardly slept) & escaped at 5am only to see the hotel manager tailing us down the street ! Got on the bus (full of chickens & goats) & saw out the window he kinda nodded (not in bad way) at us, so we can only presume he was in fact trying to protect us.

Back to Tangier, to same hotel, where we got the welcome of the world from Myel & the hotel manager was all "Oh now you have seen all of Morocco" & he gave us a lovely room like as if we were the returning prodigal sons! What a great trip.

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