So here’s what a travel day post-COVID looks like.
7:30 Wake up
8:39 Get email saying our PCR test yesterday was negative
8:45 Make futile attempt to check in to our flight online
9:05 Leave apartment and walk to bus station
10:15 Board bus to the airport
12:30 Arrive at airport and find which terminal and counter we’ll use
12:35 Sit around
2:30 Stand around in queue for check in
3:30 Show passport, PCR test results and vaccination certificate and receive boarding pass
4:00 Sigh deeply with relief and buy a coffee
4:30 Try to work out which is the correct immigration queue and realise it doesn’t matter
4:45 Sit at the gate
5:00 Stand at gate behind the Business Class passengers
5:10 Board the same bus as everybody else including the pained Business Class travelers
5:25 Squash aboard a little twin prop known as an ATR-72. Not sure what type of plane it is, but I found Charles Kingsford-Smith’s chewy under the seat. Get handed an alcohol wipe with tongs
5:30 Clean the last passenger’s prescriptions from the seat pocket
7:00 Arrive in Casablanca and de-plane into a bus. This time the Business Class passengers got their come-uppance – they were met by a limo
7:25 Show our PCR test to a lone woman under siege standing in a walkway
7:30 Hand our arrival form to a lone woman under siege standing further down the same hallway.
7:31 Glance backwards to see if she’d managed to hang on to the hundreds of forms being thrust at her
7:35 Try to satisfy the immigration guy with our passport, boarding pass, and accommodation details that had us staying in another city hundreds of kms away
Then we were in, and free. Tried two ATMs before we could extract some Dirhams (bet you didn’t know they were called that!) and bought a muesli bar to get change.
Then we looked for the check in counters for our next flight to Fes. Rinse and repeat. Well, it would be rinse and repeat if it wasn’t for the fact that our boarding pass and all the information boards in the airport told us to go to gate D4 in terminal 1. When we gave up looking, a bored security guard told us, in French, that gate D4 was actually in terminal 2. Now who do you believe? The security guard of course. This is Morocco.
Gone from announcements in Spanish, to indecipherable announcements in Arabic, French and English.
When the bus finally delivered us to our plane at 11:30pm, we found that it was the same plane that brought us in. Why I couldn’t just curl up on the seat for a snooze is beyond me. Landed at 12:30, piled into the taxi at 1:00, had a huge misunderstanding with the pre-paid driver who wanted to be paid again at 2:00, and was met at the Old Blue Gate by our host who proceeded to give us the full history lesson on the way to our cave.
But, heck, in the middle of a pandemic we’ve successfully made it to Fes in Morocco. What do you think the chances of pulling that off would be?
Dar Benjelloun studio flat, Fes-Boulemane, Morocco