We got to our city safe and sound and eventually found the bus station. We then tried to get tickets to our next destination, Chefchaouen. There were no direct busses there so we need a bus to Fes so we could get a bus from Fes to Chef. There was some problem with the computers at the CTM bus counter and the guy speaking French just seemed like he did not want to sell me a ticket. CTM is a European bus company and is a good deal nicer than the local long distance bus we tool from Nador to Fes. We wanted a CTM bus because they were nicer and being that we were spending the night on the bus and the price was only a few dollars more we decided to splurge. While I was attempting to sort out the tickets Jay found a nice park with grass to sit in being we had a good deal of time before the bus we were trying to take would depart. I walked to where Jay was a bit frustrated for not knowing French and bewildered as to why I could not get the tickets. I came upon him speaking to three local looking guys. It was cool chatting with them and one of them ended up helping us a great deal with speaking with the CTM guy. We ended up getting our tickets with the help of the guy. We hung out in the part till dinner and then found a place to eat. We were quite fortunate because it seemed that every time we had a good deal of time to wait there was always a soccer game on TV. At the restaurant we found the same spoke true. We enjoyed our food and the game and soon climbed aboard our bus to Fes.
The night pervious we both had a tough time sleeping on the bus but this night we were both zonked out and soon arrived in Fes. Once at the Fes station we booked a bus to Chefchaouen but was not for three hours. We both tried to read but with little success Jay decided to sprawl out on four chairs and try to catch up on lost sleep. I was bored for a bit but once Jay fell into a deep asleep I was amused. Jay started snoring. Loud, powerful, body shouting through Jay’s nose and mouth about how little sleep it has gotten, snoring. It was great because Jay was across the room from me so it looked like I didn’t know the guy. People came in the room and smiled, laughed or even took a picture. I video taped the event and had to hold back my laughter while taping. It was great. The snoring passed the time and we got on the bus to Chefchaouen. This was a short one in comparison to the rest. Only four hours. Within a few blinks of our eyes and we were there.
Chefchaouen was beautiful. It is a city of 45,000 people, nestled at the foot of a mountain, with buildings completely white with most having shades of blue painted from four feet and down. It was seriously something out of a storybook. We got off the bus and walked through the medina in search of our hotel. A guy came up to us asking us what we were looking for (the bags gave it away) and we told him the name of our hotel. He lead us there and once there asked if we wanted hashish, which is like marijuana. We said no and he left. We got inside and it was beautiful. Not many places in the world a room for two in a beautifully decorated hotel would be ten dollars, but it
was. After offloading our stuff into our room we decided to hike up to a bit of the mountain looking down at the town that had ruins of an old mosk atop. We trail blazed. Climbing past a cemetery and houses we finally reached the top with beads of sweat pouring off me. Once we crested over the last bit we saw our three friends sitting against the ruins. The girl from Boston, Ali, the 
guy from Seattle (Clay) and the guy form New Castle (Andrew). It was so cool. We caught up with them and just sat for a good two hours. The sight was amazing. After a good long sit we decided to venture further up. All five of us were trekking through this countryside. There were “trail signs” that we were not too great at following but made it up as far as we wanted and again just sat and hung out. Jay started playing a game with the sunflower seeds we had purchased by throwing one up into the air in front and above him and trying to play the wind just right to catch it back into his mouth. That occupied a decent chunk of time.the mint tea being brewed in the corner of the room. In this room was a TV with awful American music videos being played. It was an odd atmosphere. The guy started going at Clay, asking him how much he was willing to pay for the ones he wanted to buy. Clay said that he did not have his money with him but if he were to buy he might buy two that were very similar but quite cool. The guy took the third away. He said what would you say about paying 900 dirham for those two? Clay told him that he like them but couldn’t pay that and he didn’t even have his money. There was a bit of talking back and forth as we all got our tea, well just about all of us. They forgot to give me one. Everyone else began sipping the tea while Clay and this guy were talking. The guy asked Clay to give him a “Democratic” price. They loved saying this and was very ironic because they did not live in a Democracy, but that’s beside the point. Clay told him that if he actually were to buy a painting he would only buy one. The guy asked him for a fair price. Clay told him that he was a student and he did not have much money for art. The guy persisted that Clay give him a price. Clay said told him that a price tWe made our way down the mountain and into the medina. Jay saw a shop in the medina that sold hookahs. Hookah is a way of smoking flavored tobacco that is popular in the Middle East and Asia. Jay ended up buying one and we continued walking back to the hotel. On the way to the hotel we stopped at a place where our friends Ali, Clay and Andrew had found that had amazing sandwiches. They were amazing and with our tummies full we went to the hotel. We hung out at the hotel for a bit but our group decided that it would be cool go to onto the mountain to look at the stars and the lit up city. We walked on the path up the mountain but there was not much lighting further up so we decided to scale a side littered with loose rocks and rubble. We made it up a good distance and all picked a big rock to star gaze. Our lack of constellational knowledge enabled brilliant half hearted attempts at linking starts to make figures and shout them out. It was a good laugh. The thing was though that if you have ever climbed up a steep loose rocky slope you know that getting up is usually not the problem, it is getting down in once
piece. Clay was the first to attempt getting down and was rewarded by falling on his butt, luckily not sliding. After the ginypig Clay showed us how not to start we all gingerly, some more than others, made our way down the slope while making a good racket. We all made it down safe and headed to get our mint tea fix. Clay was leading the pack and stumbled upon a cool art shop with paintings hanging out side for us to view. We all stopped and enjoyed. The artist himself came out and asked us if we wanted some “hospitality tea.” We did not get the picture yet so we went inside. The man told us that we could look at the paintings, enjoy the tea and we could talk and get to know each other. He said even if we did not buy a painting that it would be a good night because we would be friends. Clay was the one who was most into the paintings so he was looking around the most. He guy caught onto this. He asked Clay what his favorite paintings were. He selected three. The guy took those three off the wall and we should have smelled trouble, but it was being masked by the sweet aroma of the tea.The amount he was willing to pay would be insulting to him and he didn’t want to do that because he like his work. It was almost eerie how as the guy persisted and began to raise his voice the awful American music increased in volume as well. Clay said that he would love to give the guy 500 dirham for one. The guy along with all of us were shocked at what we had heard. Clay continued to say that he did not have that kind of money to spend on art and that he didn’t even have a house to put art in. The guy not even shaken demanded Clay to give an offer. At this point the tension was eased slightly because this guys helper came over and set my tea down. Clay said 100 dirham. The guy said ok. Clay told him that like he said, he did not have the money with him and that if he felt like he wanted to painting tomorrow he would come back to get it. Now lets remember that this guy invited us in for “hospitality tea” and told us that even if we did not buy a painting it would be ok because we would be friends at the end of the night. After clay told him he might come back tomorrow because he had no money with him the guy absolutely snapped. He started yelling at clay as the awful American music blazed. The man started getting scary and began insulting Clay, calling him a liar and a lot more things that I will refrain from typing. He turned to us, yelling how we are stupid kids and all we wanted was free tea. He demanded us to leave his shop. I had only had two sips of my tea and was sad to leave with the glass having sweet nectar still in it but I was scared for my safety. I was the last one to leave the shop and the guy followed us all the while yelling and cursing, using inappropriate English words but not really in the correct way. We came to a T in the walkway, we turned right, back to our hotel. The raging artist luckily turned left. After this we found a place to get some mint tea that had a much les stressful feel about it. After our relaxing cup of tea we headed back to the hotel.Once back at the hotel we all sat around a big table in the lounge talking and them smoking out of Jay’s hookah. The hookah however did not work all too well. The night drew to a close and we went to sleep with the intent on waking up early to go to a hammam, which is a traditional Moroccan bathhouse where one can get a massage after being cleaned. Jay was going to go on a eight or so hour hike after and I was going to try to play soccer with some of the local kids in a field we saw while up on the mountain. All these things were derailed by our accumulated lack of sleep over our traveling, which allowed our bodies not to wake up upon hearing the alarm clock and the knocking on the door by the guy we had organized to go to the hammam with. We needed the sleep and got it. We woke up and went for some breakfast. We saw Ali, Clay and Andrew that morning and told them where we were going for breakfast. They came and found us and we went looking at the shops in Chefchaouen. There was a lot of cool stuff. We went to this hat guy who exported happiness with his hats, which was a good experience and spent a good amount of time in a leather store. Our group ended up buying four bags from the guy. It made his day. We spent the whole day looking around at shops because we knew we were leaving that late afternoon. Before we left Jay wanted to exchange his hookah for a hookah that worked. Fair enough right? We found the shop and there was a different guy than the guy who sold it to Jay. We suspected a problem. We spoke with the guy there and he seem very nice and helpful. He told us we could exchange it for another one no problem. It seemed like it would work out well because they did not have any more the same size as Jay’s, they were all larger. So we were getting ready to leave the store with this larger hookah and the guy asked where we were going, that we needed to pay. Jay was not going to pay extra just to get a working hookah. The guy went off the get the other guy who had sold the hookah to Jay and he would not give Jay the bigger one. Also understandable. Jay just wanted a working hookah so they spent loads of time refitting the bits that fit into each other because the problem was that air was getting out where it wasn’t suppose to. After a lot of work we left wit the same one but now it worked. Success.
Our friend Andrew was heading back down to Fes for the rest of his say in Morocco so he left to the bus station and was said goodbye. Clay and Ali were going to Tangier to catch a ferry to Spain because their trip was coming to an end. Jay and I were going to Asilah. Clay and Ali were going to catch a bus to Tangier but because there was no way to get directly from Chefchaouen to Asilah we also n
eeded to go to Tangier so we convinced them
to take a grand taxi with us. Before we went down to get a grad taxi we had one last delicious sandwich. Jay and I were out of money though to pay for the grand taxi and for that matter the rest of our tip so we went to get money out of an ATM machine. Jay’s debit card has not worked the whole trip so I had to take money out for the both of us. I put in my American debit card and did everything to get money out but instead of spitting out money it eat my card. Big bummer. Luckily being that I have been in Scotland for a while I had a Scottish bankcard. So I used that and it worked. Big relief. We got in the grand taxi and said by to Chefchaouen. We had a nice ride to Tangier but on the way we saw a bus, one of the same types of busses we had ridden on our first bus ride, flipped over a railing and had rolled down a clip. We also saw a grand taxi in horrible condition after being in an accident. Both things we didn’t want to see but did not surprise me at all. We arrived in Tangier and parted ways with Ali and Clay. We got in another grand taxi to Asilah.The trip to Asilah was not long at all and we were dropped off at our hotel in Asilah. We had an interesting time filling out paper work with the desk worker who didn’t know a word of English and continued to talk to us in what ever language he was speak as if after time we would pick it up or something. Again he did not like the fact that we did not have a stamp. For the sake of space I will try to write the abridged version of Asilah even though it was great. In Asilah we went on a nice long walk along the Moroccan coast, laid on the beach there but the wind blowing sand on us turned out the but to much to handle, watched some local kids play soccer on the beach, watched lots of soccer at night and had a huge scare with money when my Scottish card did not work. It was really thin ice because there was really nothing we could do to get money if my Scottish card got eaten too so I was very careful. I eventually went into a bank and asked to get money out. They asked for my passport, which was at the hotel so they accepted my Washington State driver’s license. I didn’t really feel too good about how easy it was to get money out using a foreign drivers license but at that moment in time I was not going to tell them off, I was just glad we had money to get back to Spain to get on our respective fights.
We decided that we should wake up early on Thursday so we could get from Asilah to Tangier to get a ferry to Spain to get back to Malaga at a descent hour so we knew we would not miss out super early AM flights on Friday. We woke up and checked out and got some breakfast. While eating breakfast I got my shoes shined. It felt so cool and the guy worked so hard on each shoe. It was well worth the dollar fifty. We then got in a grand taxi and went to Tangier. It was great because the guy dropped us right off at the ferry dock. We went and got our tickets and walked up to the security checkpoint to get onto the ferry. We got to the booth and gave the lady our passports. She flipped through and we cringed. She went through again and again. Then looked at us and said, “stamp?” “we didn’t get one.” She told us to go talk to the police. We went down to the police. Got into the police office and explained what happened. They listened to our whole story and said frankly that we had to go back to where we got in. That was the absolute last thing we wanted to hear. We asked if we could do anything else here in Tangier. They told us we could go to the chief of police and we wanted to do everything in our power to get out of this country as soon as possible so we went to the chief of police. The story was the same. They couldn’t do anything for us. Even when we told them that we would miss our flights and that we needed to get on our flights. We had to go all the way over to where we got in and this was no short distance. We got a taxi to the bus station and got a CTM bus to Nador which is where we needed to get to and from there we would take a taxi to the boarder and get out. It is great that they have such a great bus system but for all long trips they only do nights so we had to wait till 8pm. That meant we had to be in Tangier for eight hours. Not fun. We got a taxi to an Internet café to buy one-way flights to where we had to go. I had no money in my bank accounts to buy a ticket so I was glad that Jay’s card worked for that and being that he owed me money from getting money during the trip it seemed to work out. After we spent an hour at the café we went to look for a place to spend the next seven hours. We found a patch of grass near the ocean and set up camp. I will not stress the more, but Tangier is not a nice place. It is very built up, which is good but just feels so weird and there are so many people who target tourists. The thing is that because Tangier is the biggest coastal city and being that it is 30 minutes from Spain there are so many tourists usually so people in Tangier are really quite good at spotting and targeting them. This sucked for us. All we were trying to do was pass the time by any means necessary. We were reading, sleeping (in turn, there always had to be one of us awake) and walking in and out of this really nice hotel. Just anything to pass the time, but every 20 minutes we had a joker come by trying to sell us something. At one point Jay left for to get something and I was left with the gear. There was an older guy who was across the street from us who had been looking over at us every once and a while and once Jay left he came moseying over. He came over and started telling me that Tangier was a dangerous place, but I was welcome here. He asked me what I was reading because I had been before he interrupted me. I told him just a book. He started going off about how people cannot eat education and he began to grab my book. I asked him what he was doing and he said he just wanted to look at the book. I was now wrestling with this guy who had a half eaten cookie in his right hand, trying to snatch my book with his left and had a little extra cookie left on his lower lip. I had no idea what to do but an older guy walking by stopped and started talking to this guy in Arabic and eventually I guess persuaded this guy to give me my book back and walk away and hopefully told him to finish the rest of this cookie that was on his bottom lip. I was so thankful for this guy walking by. Jay returned and I told him what had happened and we shared laughs. More guys came by trying to sell us stuff so us four house of this snapped. We began responding to these people in made up languages. When they come by they ask what language we speak…English, French or Spanish? With one guy I pretended I was mute. I know this sounds horrible and I do feel bad about it but things just didn’t seem normal on this day. One guy who came by asked Jay for some dirham, so Jay just asked him the same thing because we actually really didn’t have money either. We were delirious. It came close enough to time of departure that we decided to try to get back to the bus station. We made it back and found the bar at the bus station showing a soccer match. Perfect timing once again. We watched the soccer till we got on our bus. The bus was meant to get us into Nador at 7am but did not arrive till 9. We took a taxi to boarder and I really thought we were at a different one. There were so many more people and just looked unfamiliar.
We walked up to this building that had windows with workers behind them. We saw everyone in the line had white papers. We waited in line and got a white paper. We filled it out and waited in line again. Guess what happened when we got to the front of the line and gave them our passports? They looked through it four times. That’s after we told them we didn’t have a stamp. The guy told us to go around to the side and wait for someone. There was a military guy who wouldn’t let us pas until the guy came out of the building. He knew English and told us to hold on that he had to talk to someone. Once he left we were left to talk to people in French. Got real far with that. One guy came over to us and started talking to us in very broken English. All I made out was that he wanted us to stay a night in a hotel for some reason. I could not believe it. It was Friday and I had booked a ticket back to Scotland for that next day, Saturday at 11:30am and the ferry was seven hours and only left at 9am and midnight daily. I couldn’t believe that I might miss yet another flight. I was panicking a little. There was a couple waiting in the same place as us who knew French so we asked them to tell them what was going on. The man did and it seemed to help. We were just left there to stand for a good 20 minutes. After a while we were called to go closer to the boarder. I thought somehow we had made it. We had not made it however. We were escorted into a newly built very nice building that stood out amongst the dingy buildings that were at the boarder. We were led upstairs into a big office. I were told to have a seat. We sat down and began talking to a guy behind a huge desk who looked very important. Jay told him that we had come through the boarder and had not seen where to get a stamp and went through and did not get one. He asked us how long we had been in Morocco for and if we had spent any nights in hotels. We told him that we had been in Morocco for seven days. He asked us to name all the hotels we had been in and what cities we had visited. We listed all we could remember. He was such a nice guy but my heart was still pounding out of my chest. He told us that next time we needed to get a stamp and the he would sort it out. We were escorted out of the building and back to the place where we had become accustomed to waiting at. After ten minutes or so a guy in a suit came up to us and told us to fallow him. We went around to the side where everyone was waiting in line to get out of Morocco. Everyone else was giving the people with guns their passports and then let through. We cut the line with this guy and approached the man with the gun. He reached for our passports, I was thinking this is ridiculous, after all this we still aren’t going to get out, but just then the suited man yelled at the gun man and he let us through. We had not gotten stamp in and we had not gotten a stamp out. We have never been to Morocco! We did not care that we had not received stamps to go in our passports, we were just relieved to be out.
We made our way to the ferry and got tickets for that. We had a good amount of time to wait but we were getting really good at that. Before we knew it we were on the ferry. We were going to get a good night sleep on the nice ferry, which would lull us to sleep with the slight sea rocks back and forth. However, once we got on we realized it would be difficult. There were 10 Spanish teenagers who were not trying to sleep at all. They were yammering away and listening to music on their cell phones. This went on for a good two hours with us trying to sleep. We could tell others were getting annoyed as well. An old man who was reading his news paper spoke up and address this youngster. I couldn’t make out what he was saying much because it was Spanish but I think the man was asking where this kids parents were or his parents wouldn’t like how he was acting. Something of that nature. While the man was talking to the kid, the kid muted his phone music and actually looked at the guy but the second the man stopped talking the kid went right back to what he was doing. It was ridiculous. Him and his friends were goofing off and doing the exact same thing. After a few more minutes of this music playing and talking and jumping around another voice spoke up. This time it was from behind us. It was a deep voice. The kid did the same thing as with the older man, he muted and acted like he was listening. Then once the guy stopped he went right back to it. This second man was not like the first man. He was not going to let what this kid was doing to stand. The man got up. He was a big man. He was 6’5 and broad. He was charging at this kid. This big guys friends were holding him back and pushing him away form the kid. I saw the kid get real scared and was not saying a thing. The big man charged at the kid three times and then was pushed outside onto a deck by his friends to cool off. Once the man got pushed outside this young kid continued to go back and do what he was doing. This kid had some nerve. We could not believe it. About then minutes later security guards game and spoke with the kid and he finally shut up. We then got to sleep. We woke up and left the ferry. We walked to the city bus to the airport. Jay was going to stay in Malaga for a few more days to watch a bull fight but I had a flight to catch so we said bye and I got to the airport, got on my flight, got my back in Glasgow, UK, got to the bus station in Glasgow, got on a bus to Aberdeen and got picked up in Aberdeen and got back to Banchory. What an adventure!
Hope you feel the read was worth it. Two thing are for certain. I will never forget my trip to Morocco and if I ever go back I will make sure to get a stamp.
