Sarah

Not wishing to worry anyone but I still appear to be in Morocco and tonight I should be in Malaga. There seem to be some very heavy winds so after a 4 hour wait in the port at Tangier we decided to check into the Hotel Continental and keep an eye on things. Luckily our flight isn’t tonight so we still have 24 hrs to get back to the airport and hope the wind dies down. Keep your fingers crossed! I don’t want to spend christmas in the Hotel Continental. No really don’t worry (mum) we’ll get back somehow.

So where did I leave you?

Aaah yes Fes. After another lovely breakfast in Riad Lune et Soleil we went to get a Petit taxi to the train station. Luckily ….oh I can never think of his name….I have been calling him Lionel and now I want to call him Vernon….aaah yes Jurgen drove by and offered us a lift to the station, via a cash point. We got to the staion and bought our tickets. The ticket man got someone out the back who spoke English to come and explain to us that we were travelling on a very special day as the train company were celebrating their 20m traveller by having a competion. All you had to do was to fill you name on a form and then put it in a tombolla. The lady wished me good luck and gave me a sweet. If we win we get first class train travel in Morocco for a year….yes! All this excitement was had with an instrumental version of Obladioblada (I don’t think that is one word but you get the meaning).

We got to Asiliah station and as I was getting off the train it started to move which I didn’t think was very good. Mustapha came to meet us with a random silent friend. Mustapha speaks basic french as do we (though a little more basic than him) so it was a little difficult to communicate but we got there in the end. We managed to communicate the most important things such as we would like fish for dinner (poisson) etc. He dropped us off in a coffee shop so he could go and buy the poisson and a man started hassling us and got us coffee and then we realised we had taken coffee from a strange man and another complete stranger had gone off with our bags and we could be in a bit of a rubbish situation. But it was ok Mustapha turned up again with our bags and some fish and the man hadn’t drugged our coffee.

He took us back to Berbari his village and the place we were staying. The owners were away and there were no other guests it was just me and Tom and Mustapha and a lady who did the cooking and never showed her face. We knew you needed a 4×4 to get to Bebari but I don’t think we were prepared for the state of the mud tracks leading up to it I thought the car was going to tip over at points.

Mustapha showed us some rooms because we had the pick of all of them as there were no other guests. We chose the Ron suite, a room at the top of the main house. The house was made of bamboo and mud and our bed was made of mud too. It was such a brilliant room - a massive bed, a lovely little bathroom and mud steps up to the bed.

The living space was also very nice. Windows all the way round leading onto a few terraces and there was a grand piano. The most random thing was the stalks nests in the village. There was one directly above our room and it was the biggest thing I have ever seen as you will understand if you have seen a stork. It started walking around the tin roof this mornign and that was very scary, clicking its beak.

So we were there along. Mustapha lit lots of candles and from about 4pm we started to smell these lovely smells coming from the kitchen. For starter we had a whole spicy aubergine with salad and then for main we had fish tagine with 2 whole red mullet (we thing it was that) each. It was delicious. Then poached pears and dates and things for pudding.

At night it was noisier than East Street with the dogs all having a big bark at about 11pm and the cockerels going all night and then the storks and the donkeys having a go too then the call for prayer at 5am.

But it’s ok because the next day was a total relax as there really wasn’t anything to do so we read and played chess and I played games on Tom’s phone and then we went to Asiliah with Mustapha as he had to get us some more food. We had to push he car to make it start. We got so hassled we went to the beach where we got hassled some more so we just walked quickly to run away from the people hassling us.

That night we had a delicious soup for starter then for main we had lamb with poached pears, dates with sesame seeds and hard boiled eggs. That also was delicious except the pears were poached in a red liquid and we couldn’t identify their origin to start with as they looked really really fleshy, I won’t tell you what we thought they were but it was a little bit scary.

So then we got the train to Tangier this morning and here we are, still in Morocco. Still being hassled. We are going to go back to the port in a minute and check out the ferry situation. I’m tempted to get a taxi to reduce the hassle.