Adventures

We went to Spain and then took a boat across the Straight of Gibraltar (and then through the candy cane forest...haha this makes me think of the movie Elf when he is telling about his journey) and then took an overnight train through Africa. 

The funniest part is that it took an entire day; 8:30am to 7pm to just get out of southern Spain when we were already on the coast and the ferry itself was only 35 mins :)  FYI: no ferries from Malaga, ferries from Gibraltar only go on Fridays, ferries for the other city don't go to the right place, ferries from the fourth city get you to city of Tangiers in Morocco.

Jim graciously let me step foot into our new continent first (he's gotten 3 other continents before me! - one because of birth) and we were there.  Within 5 mins we were picked up by a guy from the "tourism office" in perfect English who appointed himself our guide for the rest of the evening.  This all worked out fairly well but we were super skeptical and not really sure when we were being taken advantage of as tourists and we were in a new world.  What you may not know about Morocco is there are very few black people.  It is more similar to the middle east and is a mostly Muslim country with Arabic and French as the languages.  When we were in Marrakech going through the souks (market) I was surprised that we weren't immediately flagged as Americans but we weren't.  With Jim's dark hair and eyes and growing sun tan if we were walked and people didn't hear us speak we were most often called out to with Ohlas!  If they heard us speak English we got "where are you from? Sydney? South Africa?".  Funny.

The night we arrived we had to take the 9:30pm train to Fes where we had already booked a riad for the night.  We were thinking we would have been on 3pm train but didn't work out as such due to our adventures in Spain.  After we had already spent some  money on a handmade Moroccan linen and carpet (thanks to our "tourism office" guide) which are beautiful by the way, we decided to only get a second class train ticket.  That was fine during the first part of the journey till around 11pm.  Most of the train cars are set-up with little cabins with two long benches that can fit 8 per cabin sitting or we could each lay out on one bench when we commadered a cabin to ourselves.  Around 11pm, we were joined by a nice couple that only spoke Arabic but I was happy that we were sharing with them.  I pointed to the name of the city on my ticket and asked the man if that is were he got on because we knew we had to transfer trains but when you pull up to the stations most of them aren't marked!  At this point we figured there was a chance we would miss our transfer and skip the city of Fes completely and just ride the train through the entire night (as opposed to 2am) and make it to Marrakech instead.  At about 1am I was nudged awake by the man in our cabin and told we'd reached the city we needed to transfer at.  Thank you.  The problem was, the next train had already been traveling for a while and was packed.  It was 1am, a dark, hot, smoke-filled train filled with men only speaking Arabic and there were no seats.  We spend two hours crammed in sitting on the dirty floor of the narrow walkway in the car outside of the cabins.  We arrived 1 hour late (due to the train stopping for 15 mins per station most times) at 3am.  We found a taxi driver who drove us to the Medina (heart of the old section of Moroccan cities were the souks/stalls of the market are) and got out of the car at the Medina.  The Medina is old and not meant for cars which do not fit down the narrow maze of alleys.  As a tourist you need to be walked through when you first arrive and you could not find were you are going by yourself.  Pretty much short of impossible.  The nice guy walked us through the dark alleys all boarded up for the night with lots of garbage and stray cats.  Where am I?!  When the door opened to our riad it is a gorgeous oasis with a room decorated in great detail and a really nice host.  Phew.  PS walking out into the same alley the next day was completely transformed and a wonderful market.  Couldn't believe it was the same place.  :)