Greg and Mandy's Travels

It’s Friday. It’s Morocco. We’re next to a mosque. The first call to prayer was about 5:30am, and I’m sure he sang the whole Koran. Went for over twenty minutes. Can’t get back to sleep after that.

Tried a different walking tour company this morning, and they turned up early, and in the right place. Was a city medina tour, but kind of ignoring the main square, because that’s the subject of the evening tour which we are also booked on.

Very similar to the narration on the Fes medina tour. Saw the mosques, the bathhouses, the riads (enclosed courtyards), the market stalls.…

A kind of nothing day. After breakfast, we wandered 3km down the road to the old city for our morning tour, but nobody showed up. Despite having a confirmation email, being there 30 minutes early, and waiting almost 30 minutes past the appointed hour, we ended up giving up and wandering off to see what we could find by ourselves. Saw a bit of course, but without anybody to give you some context, it ended up just being a few hours of wandering through crowds trying to avoid the touts.

Found probably the only pastisserie in the city, and enjoyed a lovely morning tea, but in the end we walked all the way back to the apartment to regroup.…

So sang Crosby, Stills and Nash back in the seventies, and fifty years later we’re giving it a crack. Strangely for a capital city, the main train station in Rabat only had two platforms – one for each direction, and when we hopped on our train we found that our 6 seat vestibule was full. Two of them were in the wrong seats, but weren’t going to move until I showed them our tickets, and two more were old ladies who complained loudly in Arabic that I was expecting the others to move. Meanwhile our suitcases were blocking the passageway and nobody could go anywhere.…

Climbed out of the abyss that is the Fes medina at eightish before any of the shops opened and people flocked in. Nice time of the day to walk through the medina – very quiet and peaceful. Hard to tell its the same frenetic place you see in the afternoon. After another breakfast of coffee and pastries, it was into a local taxi bound for to the railway station – Gare Fes.

Off to the capital, Rabat, after an early scare when, double checking I had our tickets downloaded onto our phones as we prepared to board, I realised that I had downloaded Mandy’s ticket twice.…

Our day trip to Chefchaouen. (shef – sh – ow – en)

Chefchaouen is a town in the northern part of Morocco, famed for its very distinctive blue and white painted houses. It was originally founded in 1471 as a small kasbah, but grew quickly around 1492 when the Spanish started pushing the muslims and the jews out of southern Spain into Africa (or anywhere really), and the last muslim city of Grenada fell. Chefchaouen became home to Andalusian families between 1492 and 1609, when the last muslims were expelled from Andalusia by King Felipe III. Now its a major tourist site (that is, extremely poor and rundown as a result of COVID).…

Today is our day to explore Fes, in Morocco.

Fes, for centuries, was the traditional capital of Morocco. It’s original old town, known as the Medina, was an ancient walled city built from the 11th century, so parts of it are about 1000 years old, though much of what we see is either newer or restored as the original buildings were constructed with mud before cement was discovered, and have largely crumbled.

It’s an absolute rabbit warren, grown randomly over the centuries as people have built anywhere there was space, and now inhabited by around 300,000 people, some of whom never venture outside the walls.…

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.…

Today was Alhambra day – the second of the three days that the holiday has been built around.

But first we had to get our PCR tests to be able to get out of the country tomorrow, so we presented ourselves to one of the international clinics in the city promptly at 9am to have our brains tickled.

After the obligatory morning coffee, it was back to the apartment for an early lunch before walking down to the main square, and hiking all the way up to the top of the hill where the Alhambra is located gazing down over the city.…

We noticed that when we arrived in Seville in the rain that the footpaths were all brown and extremely slippery from a mixture of the rain and very fine red dust. Our clothes ended up with dust spots when they dried, and cars were filthy. I just put it down to the fact that nobody had a parking spot, let alone a garage to wash their car in. It was even worse when we got to Cordoba. Walking down the hill on cobbles after rain was like trying to walk on ice, and when it dried, all the footpaths looked dirty.…

The first of three special days that formed the pillars of our holiday – Cordoba.

We booked a guided tour of the Mezquita-Catedral for late in the day, and set off to see the other major sights of the city on a self-guided walk.

Córdoba was once the Roman and Moorish capital of Spain with its roots in the banks of the Guadalquivir River in Andalusia, Spain – the same river that flows up to Seville and was a major route of international trade, so Cordoba had an important role over the years. It has a rich cultural and architectural heritage and in medieval times it was one of the few places Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together peacefully. …