Monday started out all wet. It had rained a good chunk of the night and was still coming down pretty good when we got up around 9:30 and slowly packed all our things back into our bags. It’s crazy how easy it is to unpack everything out of a bag, but always takes you at least twice as long to get it back in the way it was before you took it out, especially if your bag is packed about as full as it can get to start out with.
We checked out of the hotel, getting another signature from the hotel manager on, this time a 3 of clubs, as we went out. I decided in Casablanca to start a collection of signatures (along with the date and location of hotel) of the hotel managers of all the hotels that we’ve stayed in on our trip on cards, and hopefully one day with enough adventures and traveling around I will have all 52 cards in my deck of authentic Australian flag cards filled up with signatures from exotic places all over the world. It will be quite the accomplishment, and will have to be celebrated somehow when the time comes. As we stand now, I think we only have 3 cards signed, because we didn’t think of the idea until after we had left our first hotel in Casablanca, which cut out one hotel there. I’ll just have to make up for it, by traveling to a couple of extra places over the next four months while I’m here.
We grabbed some tea, juice and a bit more substantial food in the form of some kind of cake and apple cuchen or something at the Cinema Rif, while using their wireless internet. After checking all the necessities on facebook, and writing a couple of small e-mails off letting families know we were still alive and able to type, we discovered that we wouldn’t be able to catch a train out of Tangiers until 1:35, so we just stayed put at the café where we were and whiled the time away, watching it rain even harder outside.
The rain let up a little bit and when we finally left, it wasn’t coming down that hard, just enough to get you wet, but thankfully we both had rain covers for our bags and decent rain covers for ourselves, so weren’t hindered too much by the rain. Before grabbing a taxi out to the train station we stopped at a small snack shop and got a couple of sandwiches similar to what we had had for supper the day before with some kind of curried chicken and french-fries all in a long bun along with some vegetables. It might have been the wrong thing to do at that exact moment, or we should have left slightly earlier from Cinema Rif, because we arrived at the train station just as the train was pulling out of the station. We bought our tickets then anyways for the next one later that afternoon and decided to eat our sandwiches. Turns out when we went to board the train at 3:35 that that wasn’t the one we had to take either to get to Fes, and neither was the one that we barely had missed at 1:35, so it was a good thing that we hadn’t gotten onto it in the end.
We found ways to entertain ourselves by counting people, writing a couple of postcards, going through some pictures and deleting a couple of the 500 odd pictures that we deemed unworthy of keeping, and finally grabbed our bags and walked down to the beach that a couple hundred meters down the street. It was super windy and started to rain again, so we didn’t stay out too long, but long enough to have an interesting conversation with a guy who offered to take our picture together who turned out to be a gay who was trying to get out of Morocco, because he wasn’t accepted as who he wanted to be by his friends and family here and was trying to get to another country where being gay isn’t such a problem. Canada turned out to be his dream country, to be able to live in any way he wanted to, and sadly enough he’s kind of right, so when he found out I was Canadian he asked me how hard it would be for him to get some kind of work permit to come to Canada. It was kind of weird, because the whole time I was wondering if he had decided to start talking to us about his issues because he thought Stephen and I were gay. I sure hope not. Ha, definitely time for Stephen to get his hair cut. Other than that little episode down by the beach, nothing else really happened until we were finally able to board our train to head down to Fes. The trip down was pretty uneventful, later than we had hoped it would go, as our train was a bit late in getting out of the station, but we made it to Mechra bel Ksiri, where we had to switch trains in time to catch our connecting train, so that was good. Ate the rest of the food that we had left with us, along with a bunch of Spitz that I still had in my bag and did a couple sudoko races, which Stephen sadly won. It was awesome though, because on our second train, we managed to get into one of the cars that had small compartments that seated around 8 people or so, and had one whole compartment to ourselves, which was a lot nicer than the open cars, where we were subjected to listening to Arabic music randomly playing out of people’s cell phones or groups of Berber women discussing the latest trends in dessert dress codes or the health of their camels in high pitched voices.
We ended up arriving in Fes almost on time despite all the delays we had had at around 10 oclock. At first we were planning on just walking to the hotel that we had in mind of staying at, which was only around half a kilometer or so away from the train station, but as soon as we had come out of the train station, we were pretty much mobbed by a bunch of taxi drivers who insisted that their livelihood depended on us taking their taxi to wherever we were going, so in the end, we did take a taxi with these two crazy guys, one of whom I’m pretty sure was high on something illegal, who also claimed he was some kind of singer who had been popular in Amsterdam back in his day; which I’m sure was before he had lost most of his teeth, probably only had one or two left in his mouth, at least from what I could see. Both him and the driver talked constantly as we drove to our hotel, rarely even looking at the road, drifting from one side to the other, and straightening out with a quick jerk on the wheel when we threatened to either hit the parked cars on the one side or oncoming traffic on the other. But in the end we made it safely to Hotel Royal and were able to book a room for two nights at a pretty reasonable price, which also included a bathroom and hot showers between 7 and 11 in the morning.
After stowing our stuff in the room we headed off to where the hotel manager had told us were a couple of small restaurants and cafes to find something to eat and found a little snack shop that was still open, serving sandwiches and burgers, etc. so we had a bite to eat there before heading back to the hotel and bed for the night.
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