Greg and Mandy's Travels

Our last morning in Morocco. I’ve been told to make sure that before we leave I tell you that Casablanca buses are new, comfortable, and out of keeping with anything else in the city. So now you’ve been told.

Picked our way down the roads and excuses for footpaths to the station, had a coffee, and boarded the old train to the airport. Morocco at its best this morning. We boarded carriage 1, coz that what was printed on our tickets, but was shooed out by the conductor who shrugged his shoulders and said we should be in second class.

There was an almighty crush to get out of the carriage first when we arrived at the airport.…

Unfortunately we were woken at 2:00am by an elderly mother in Melbourne who decided to touch all kinds of buttons on her iPad one lunchtime as she munched away. Not once, you understand, but three times my phone rang in the middle of the night. ‘Don’t know what those button are all for’ we were told. ‘Did I ring you? Sorry, didn’t mean to’. Then the Imam starts at around 5:00am, so all in all …..

Today was the last day of our Iberian itinerary, and was designated as our PCR test day. We need a negative PCR result to be able to get into the USA tomorrow.…

Well, it’s not often that I say this, but really you can give Casablanca a big miss. Other people we’ve met have said the same thing, but we thought they might be exaggerating a bit. No they weren’t. 

The pollution irritates your throat. The cars are old and noisy. The buildings, so lovingly constructed by the French between the wars, are dirty and neglected. Fountains don’t work, like lots of people. There doesn’t even seem to be a nice centre to explore like other cities. 

Casablanca is a business and commercial centre of five million, with the rubbish, the noise and the pollution to match. …

Unlike Egypt where it is thought unseemly to build a pyramid bigger than your father’s, here in Morocco its definitely the done thing to build a bigger mosque than your dad’s.

We walked up to the old city here in Casablanca for the start of our city free walking tour. We saw the relatively small mosque built by Sultan Youssef of Morocco who was king from 1912 to 1927 during the time the French ‘occupied’ Morocco (although this seems to have been at the king’s request to shore up his weak support and control his opponents). The mosque was built next to the old city walls in an effort to give the native moroccans a mosque of their own away from the french settlements and occupied areas, and to be fair there were only about 200,000 people in the city at the time.…

Checked out and trudged down to the train station. 

Really, Morocco is one of the worst countries for pedestrians. If they have a bit of a footpath, it will suddenly narrow, then you’ll have a tree, a post and a hole all vying for the little bit that’s left, then you’ll come to where they have ‘borrowed’ the bricks from the footpath for some reason, then you’ll get to a curb with no ramp. All in all you end up carrying your suitcase a fair bit of the way.

Green men displayed at traffic lights don’t actually mean its safe to cross.…

It’s Friday. It’s Morocco. We’re next to a mosque. The first call to prayer was about 5:30am, and I’m sure he sang the whole Koran. Went for over twenty minutes. Can’t get back to sleep after that.

Tried a different walking tour company this morning, and they turned up early, and in the right place. Was a city medina tour, but kind of ignoring the main square, because that’s the subject of the evening tour which we are also booked on.

Very similar to the narration on the Fes medina tour. Saw the mosques, the bathhouses, the riads (enclosed courtyards), the market stalls.…

A kind of nothing day. After breakfast, we wandered 3km down the road to the old city for our morning tour, but nobody showed up. Despite having a confirmation email, being there 30 minutes early, and waiting almost 30 minutes past the appointed hour, we ended up giving up and wandering off to see what we could find by ourselves. Saw a bit of course, but without anybody to give you some context, it ended up just being a few hours of wandering through crowds trying to avoid the touts.

Found probably the only pastisserie in the city, and enjoyed a lovely morning tea, but in the end we walked all the way back to the apartment to regroup.…

So sang Crosby, Stills and Nash back in the seventies, and fifty years later we’re giving it a crack. Strangely for a capital city, the main train station in Rabat only had two platforms – one for each direction, and when we hopped on our train we found that our 6 seat vestibule was full. Two of them were in the wrong seats, but weren’t going to move until I showed them our tickets, and two more were old ladies who complained loudly in Arabic that I was expecting the others to move. Meanwhile our suitcases were blocking the passageway and nobody could go anywhere.…

Climbed out of the abyss that is the Fes medina at eightish before any of the shops opened and people flocked in. Nice time of the day to walk through the medina – very quiet and peaceful. Hard to tell its the same frenetic place you see in the afternoon. After another breakfast of coffee and pastries, it was into a local taxi bound for to the railway station – Gare Fes.

Off to the capital, Rabat, after an early scare when, double checking I had our tickets downloaded onto our phones as we prepared to board, I realised that I had downloaded Mandy’s ticket twice.…

Our day trip to Chefchaouen. (shef – sh – ow – en)

Chefchaouen is a town in the northern part of Morocco, famed for its very distinctive blue and white painted houses. It was originally founded in 1471 as a small kasbah, but grew quickly around 1492 when the Spanish started pushing the muslims and the jews out of southern Spain into Africa (or anywhere really), and the last muslim city of Grenada fell. Chefchaouen became home to Andalusian families between 1492 and 1609, when the last muslims were expelled from Andalusia by King Felipe III. Now its a major tourist site (that is, extremely poor and rundown as a result of COVID).…