And so the journey begins....

I have arrived in Morocco. I can now say I have been to all 7 continents! I arrived in Tangier. A city that I was warned not to go to by friends and by travel books. The surposed horde of people that is ment to greet the ferries and try and rip off unsuspecting tourists consisted of about 5 guys standing next to their taxis and didn't even bother making the 50 meter walk over to acost you. I arrived at my hotel. Woh, i have to say, I picked a fantastic place. It was just magic. I met a lady there that had just bought a house in Tangier. We headed over there later that evening to watch the sunset over the city. What an amazing introduction to Morocco and Tangier. The place as a magic vibe about it. By the time the sun setted I was so relaxed and had fallen in love with the place. I ended up saying in Tangier for another night just to get a chance to wander around the old Medina and the kasbar by myself. Well I didn't get too far when I noticed I was being followed, a little boy who lived near the hotel had followed me, so for the next 3 hours he proceeded to show me all the sites of Tangier. Admitedly I had no idea what he was going on about as he spoke french and arabic and I don't speak either. From Tangier I headed to Casablanca. Well firist impressions, this place is a shit hole! And that isn't being harsh. Tangier was fantastic and should have stayed there another night or two instead of coming here. But the damage was done and I was here. Casablanca doesn't really have much going for it. There are so nice places along the water front further out of town and the mosqic, one of largest in the world, was really worth seeing. Other than that, I wouldn't bother going there. I ended up joining up on a tour to do Morocco as I didn't know what to expect, as it happens could have come here without a tour and would have been fine, but you live and learn. From Casablanca we headed to Meknes. Here we had our first tasting, so to speak, of local markets. On walking in to market, what we thought were swarms of flys turned out to be swarms of BEES, yes bees, we had just walked into the sweet section of the market. Even the produce that had glad wrap over it had bees inside, there were persistent little buggers. After that we walked into the meat section, and then the smell hits you just after you see a huge bulls head just sitting on a bench. I pretty much held my breath for as long as I could the smell was that bad! We were all glad to get out there, one girl throught the rabbits in cages were for pets, it was hard breaking it to her that they weren't pet rabbits. The next day we headed to Fes, the business hub of Morocco. Here we visited this huge old grain storage area. Sounds boring right? Well amazingly it wasn't. This place was massive and it could hold enough grain for 3 years supply of the armies horses, all 20000 of them. While in Fes we visited the tanning ponds. Pretty interesting to watch the process that hasn't changed in centries. The old medina here is HUGE!! It is fantastic to walk around and get lost in, and you would get lost, there are so many twists and turns here. From Fes we headed on a very long drive to get out into the Sahara desert. We got to the Sahara about an hour before sunset. We hoped on our camels and rode away from the sunset. With the sun setting in the background we headed to our desert camp. We arrived there well and truely after dark. We sat around on rugs in the centre of the camp and watched the kittens eat bugs. We were all happy when a kitten ate a huge spider! No-one wanted to be sleeping with that tonight! We climbed up one of the sand dunes later that night, after being entertained with drumming and singing, to look at the stars. It was a lovely night. We were all up early the next morning to watch the sun rise, unfortunately it was cloudy and it was a bit of a non event. We headed back to the hotel on the camels. After there we headed to Todra Gorge. Our hotel was in the gorge with the huge cliffs looming over us. From Todra Gorge we started to make our way to Marrakesh stopping a various places along the way. Marrakesh is wonderful. As you walk into the main square there are snake charmers with cobras, I even saw a cobra strike at a guy, there are guys with monkeys, heaps of people trying to sell you things, and story tellers. It is in the evening when this place really comes alive, the snake charmers are still there, there are fire breathers and heaps of food stalls, even ones serving sheeps heads, and local musicians. The markets behind the main square are great to wander around in and get lost. There is so many things to see and buy. I enjoyed just walking through there and watching everyone else haggle. From here a small group of us headed for the coast to a town called Essaouria. This place was great for just chilling out and relaxing. It was completely touristy, but you could get way from that pretty easily with just moving a few streets away from the main drag. On one of our walks through the maze of streets one of the store owners offered to buy me from my friend for 30000 camels, he started out with a bid of 20000 camels. This is an extremely good price because up until then a couple of girls had had the offer of only 4 camels. I was very flattered and my friends thought it was hilarious. I turned down the offer to have mint tea with him later, can't knock the guy for being persistent. We all had a lovely time there, it was really relaxing. I had a great time one morning exploring the city, with one of the ladies i had met on the tour, before anyone was up and before the hussle and bussle of town started. We climbed city walls and wandered down alley walls. We watched the local fishermen come in with their daily catch and load it from their boats. I was like well corrigraphed performanace, One scoops the fish from the bottom of the boat and throws the basket of fish to another guy in the boat, this guy then throws that basket to guy standing on the whalf, the fish are tipped out and the basket thrown back to the guy in the boat. And this just continues in one fluid motion till the boat is empty, no one missing a beat. From there we headed back to Marrakesh. We were nearly back in Marrakesh when one of the ladies we were travelling with realised that they had left their passport in the hotel in Essaouria. Once at the hotel we organised a taxi to go and pick it up. It was a 3 hour bus ride there, so 6 hours later she had her passport back. The next day everyone was leaving. I had the rest of the day to kill as I was taking the night train back to Tangier. The high light of this trip was the last afternoon/evening that I was in Marrakesh, I was just about to walk into the markets to have a final look around when a Moroccan guy starts chatting to me and asks if he can join me to practice his English. So with that we headed into the markets. The highlight was when he took me into a drum store, one of his mates stores, but instead of trying to sell me things we spent the afternoon playing drums. I was shown how to play the morrocan drums. It was very cool, I had a great time and it was definate highlight of the trip.
A couple of girls on the tour were takng the afternoon train to Casablanca.They tried to send off all the things that they had purchased while in Marocco but the post office only sends things once a week. So I got them out of a bind by taking their parcel of goodies with me and sending it from Spain, this parcel of goodies end up being 15 kilos!! The night train to tangier was fine, I couldn't get a sleeping couch, so I got a seat. It ws very crowded for most of the night. I didn't get much sleep. I did a mad rush to the port, where I almost missed my boat because the customs line was so slow! There was only one guy stamping passports, the other two guys were reading the newspaper and having coffee. But I made it all the same. next stop Tarrifa Spain.