From Tangier we started the trip home. This began with a taxi to the Tangier ferry port for the ferry across to Tarifa. This is the same ferry which we should have got a day earlier, but was cancelled due to the weather in the Straits of Gibraltar. We turned up fairly early, but it seems there was little point in doing this. We queued for security and then border...
Following our rearranged schedule, we took the morning train to Tangier. This is the newly developed fast train line up the west coast of Morocco, developed along with the French and using TGV style trains. The trip was very smooth, though slightly predictably ran around 20 minutes late. In Tangier we had booked into the IBIS, less than a ten minute walk from the...
From Marrakesh to Casablanca was a fairly straightforward three hour train journey and all went pretty much to plan arriving early afternoon, a little too early to check in, so we went for a walk around for a while and a long lunch in a nice local café. For supper we found (sort of!) a local fish and chip shop and while the decor and the service were of the Heath...
Things rarely go according to plan and the next stage of the trip was one of those times. The trip from the hotel to Fez railway station all went well, but then went rapidly downhill when we were met by railway officials outside the station saying ‘Il n’y a pas de trains aujourd’hui ….‘. It seems that the torrential rain overnight had...
Another day, another Moroccan town and this time we are heading to Fez. To get there was another bus ride, so after a prompt start we headed down (finally it was just downhill!) to the CTM bus station at Chefchaouen. We got there far to early and the bus was late, but only ten minutes or so. Five hours later we arrived at a tiny bus station – apparently the...
From Tangier, the next stop was to head south to Chefchaouen, a town name that seems to have come from a competition to name a town with all the vowels in it. If they had gone with Chifchaouen, they would have managed it – a missed opportunity. To get there meant catching the bus from Tangier CTM bus station, so the day started with a 15 minute taxi ride south...
OK, so we weren’t actually tacking to Tangier, but we were on a boat. There is no train from Cadiz to Tarifa, so we caught the bus down first thing in the morning. It was then about a twenty minute walk to the ferry port at Tarifa. The name “Tarifa” is actually derived from the Umayyad Caliphate military commander, Tarif ibn Malik, but the current...