Tuesday 3 July 2012

Arriving in Al Hoseima.


Sorry about the weird formatting, i cant work moroccan computers...

Nobody can expect to feel completely normal after surviving the night on a bus/rollercoaster weaving it's way through the Rif Mountains, but the day that followed seemed even stranger than you'd imagine...

We arrived at 5am to discover that the hotel we wanted to stay in was unsupprisingly closed. After being shooed away by the cleaning lady, we collapsed by the side of a road and waited for the sun to come up properly. I was curled cat-like on the pavement as we were approached by a tramp who, after trying to talk to us in an unknown language, hopped over the big fence behind us and after a few minutes returned with a large piece of cardboard for me. Strange, but it was actually more comfortable. As we were sat moaning about our situation, a policeman wandered over. They allways make me a little jumpy in other countries, so i tried to keep my head down (this meathod of avoiding attention is much more affective when you're not blonde in an arab country) and McGee got talking to him in Spanish. Turns out, the policeman thought we were a family, which is a little confusing considering the boys are less than a year younger than me and McGee is 30. Some time later, i jumped out of my skin when the tramp returned with a questionable blanket for me to sleep under. No such treatment for the boys, but they found it pretty entertaining.




After we had finally checked in, everyone apart from me and Pete went to sleep. We were too wired from our coffees and once we had fried on the roof for a while, went out to explore. Unfortunatly in our exhausted state, we bumbled around with no real direction for quite some time; getting lost in a market of thousands of live chickens, allmost paying 800 diram for 4 peaches (that would be around 70 pounds...) and eventually finding ourselves wandering down a dirt track, through a building site onto the beach. We deffinitly shouldnt have been there, but i think the builders took pitty on us.






The beach itself was rather strange as the male:female ratio was around 100:1, with the blonde population consisting of just me and Pete. We hung around for a whlile regardless until we turned our eyes to the colour of Pete's feet and decided that that was enough sun for one day. The walk home was punctuated with a brief, but baffeling stop for mint tea. We went in (again, not a woman in site), drunk our tea, tried to pay and eventually gave up. Even now, i cant work out why we werent allowed to give them any money, but Pete suggested that maybe we were followed in by a large group of Morocan men following my hair, so the owners let us off the tea as thanks for all the extra buisness. ha ha! Later we went to a sandwhich shop, where my only way of communicating was to hand over what i guessed a sandwhich would cost and point to everything and see what they produced. It seemed to work pretty well and i was even given change.

Back at the hotel, the boys were up and complaining about squat toilets. How do you avoid splashback, why is there no toilet paper and other boy type talk. Slept well that night before heading to the beach yesterday morning.