We didn’t want to have to rush off in the morning, so we took it a bit slower than we had the day before, only setting our alarms for 8:30. We decided to stay another night at the same hotel for the next night, so we didn’t have to pack up all our things and take all our bags with us, which was nice. Grabbed whatever we needed for the day and headed down towards the bus station, which was a short taxi ride away, finding a breakfast of chocolate croissants along the way.
We had thought that the bus ride to Ceuta would only be an hour or so, but it turned out it was almost 2 hours, so we didn’t arrive in Ceuta (or Sebta as they call it in Arabic. We found out that a lot of Moroccans don’t consider Ceuta part of Spain, but as a part of Morocco that is only un-rightly occupied by the Spanish) until nearly noon. The border crossing was fine, and the Spanish passport control officer called both of our passport countries, (Swiss and Dutch) “safe good countries” and waved us through without and stamp or hardly even looking at the passports. For the next four hours or so, we just wandered around the small peninsula and island of Ceuta, taking pictures and at one point getting a ride from this one guy who was teaching his girlfriend how to drive a standard in their BMW. He figured we were probably lost or something and asked if we needed a ride up to the lookout point where we were headed to, which we didn’t refuse.
Ceuta is a pretty sweet place: really clean, but definitely quite the tourist place with a big harbour and cruise ships in it, dumping huge amounts of groups to go touring around. We headed back to the border at around 4:30pm and got across again without too much hassle, only having to brush off a couple of hustlers who tried to sell us entrance forms that were provided to us once we had reached customs. Turned out we had missed the 4:30 bus, so ended up having to wait until 7 to catch the last bus back to Tangiers, but it wasn’t too bad. We found a little snack shop and bought some awesome sub-like sandwiches that had fries and everything in them, so that kept us entertained for a little while, otherwise we just sat around and ate spits, talking to pass the time, and trying to figure out what the Arabic signs said around the bus station.
The bus ride back took longer than it took going to Ceuta so we didn’t get into Tangiers until nearly 9:30, by which time a lot of the cafés were already closed, so we just decided to head back to the hotel and call it a day, but along the way we came across a café that was still open where a bunch of Moroccans were watching a football match, Barcelona versus Real Sebet. Quite the entertaining crowd, so we joined them for the remainder of the game and actually got 2 goals in that Barcelona scored, while drinking cups of sweet green tea, bringing the end score up to 4-2 in favor of the favorite team for the majority of the room, definitely Barcelona as could be seen from the pounding on tables and yelling whenever they got close to scoring or did manage to get one in. The rest of the trip home wasn’t too eventful, walking through the alleys of the medina back to our hotel and we were only offered hashish twice before we got to our room. A good day all around.
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