Had our breakfast, paid the woman who ran the hotel (I waited for our 50 Dh change as I refused to pay them a hiram more than I owed them), and we walked down the busy street and got a petit taxi to the train station. Bought tickets to Rabat and waited an hour and a half for the 11.30am train. We first encountered he who cane to be known as ‘Blue Slipper Man’ on the platform, when a skinny fellow in an ill-fitting dark grey suit and an incongruous pair of powder blue Moroccan slippers pointed us in the direction of the toilets when we were looking for them. He then came to sit near us on the platform.
The train arrived and after we had boarded and we’d been travelling for almost an hour, he appeared again to sit across the aisle from us, having obviously searched the train to find us again. We got up and moved to another seat further down the carriage. Later he moved a couple of seats closer, but luckily he had finally got the message as I was gearing up for a confrontation. Thankfully Blue Slipper Man left us at Salé and slipped back into Morocco and into our travel stories.
Rabat train station was chaotic, as they’re in the process of building a monolithic new station. We left the platform and found ourselves in the centre of Morocco’s capital, in a big city buzzing with people and traffic, a wide boulevard to our left lined with two rows of giant palms.
Shouldering our packs, hot and exhausted after a very hot and sweaty two and a half hours on the train in second class, we walked several blocks to our first choice of hotel, but it was full. Back to the station and a couple of blocks in the opposite direction, we arrived (dripping with sweat) at Hotel Belere, a modest city hotel with ridiculous pretensions, a grumpy man at the front desk, and full marks for the worst gin and tonic Carol has ever had.
In the lobby we tried to use their internet connection, but it wasn’t running and Mr Grumpy Rude Bastard had no interest in helping us. We headed out into the city and found a nice place to sit on the main avenue to have tea and something to eat, but no one seemed interested in serving us and no food was on, so we ended up in a little quick food place for a cheeseburger and chips. On the way back we visited a tiny little English bookshop, almost every available space piled high with cardboard boxes full of books – you had to turn sideways to move amongst them – and attended by a little old man huddling in the entrance. We emerged with four new books to read.
Back at the hotel we collapsed for a while, both of us now gripped by flu, and me with an incredibly sore shoulder muscle. Time to re-evaluate our plans …
About 7pm we went to an internet cafe and I struggled with the bizarre Arabic/English keyboard (which seemed to have a few transposed letters to make it even more challenging) to write a quick email to the family. Then we went next door to a restaurant called Mamma’s for dinner. This strange, low-ceilinged, dark cave of a restaurant seemed permanently trapped in a 70s flashback, but the pizza was good. However we had to move tables after almost being driven insane by the tuneless humming of an old man at a nearby table cradling a glass of red. The waiter explained in French that he was a regular, and acknowledged it was terrible …
Back to the hotel and we collapsed into our twin beds, the air-conditioning off and the windows open and an incredible racket of street noise and construction just held at bay by earplugs.
Oh yes, before we went out for dinner we went up to the rooftop bar for a drink. I asked for Heineken and got the watery Flag beer brand instead, and Carol asked for a gin and tonic and got something that tasted like flat tonic water. Still, the view over the city was pretty good.
8th October
Our plan now is totally focussed on recovery. I awoke feeling absolutely crap: sneezing, sniffing, and my nose running like a tap, and Carol was up coughing all night, though she says the cough has ‘broken’.
After a laughably bad breakfast – flat bread like rubber, powdered scrambled eggs, and water with orange flavour pretending to be orange juice – we thankfully took our leave of the Hotel Belere and its sad 70s business man’s hotel ambience and walked to the station, getting tickets for El-Jadida, a two and a half hour trip down the coast (changing at Casablanca). We’ve booked two nights (to start with) at La Villa, what looks like a nice place to relax and get our strength back.
The first half of the trip was fine – first class this time so comfier seats and working air-conditioning. But after a quick change at the ugly industrial area of Casa Port station in Casablanca, we were back in a hot, stuffy, uncomfortable carriage again, despite supposedly still being first class.
A long hour and a half later – the old woman opposite who sucked her dentures out and in every ten seconds was the highlight – we made it to El-Jadida, a place that has rapidly established itself as a paradise in our eyes without any evidence so far whatsoever. I felt like my brain was going to leak out my ears and my nose drop off.
Out the front there was a mad scramble for taxis – or a mad scramble by taxi drivers to stuff as many fares as possible in each taxi, rather – and no one seemed interested in just picking up us and our non-paying bags. Eventually we got a taxi (shared with one other, an old man), and got a ride to La Villa, complete with the driver pointing out highlights along the way.
Luckily for us, La Villa was exactly what we needed. A young guy called Yisham runs the place, and though his English is very limited, he is very helpful and sympathetic and has been taking good care of us.
Our room is small but modern, neat, and clean, there’s a nice terrace area, and we even have a small flatscreen TV, though the only thing worth watching is BBC World News.
In the evening we had dinner on the terrace; a really excellent meal that unfortunately was to be our last there for a few days. Carol even had a glass of wine.
9th – 11th October
I may as well lump these three days together as we did the same things on all of them – feel sick, read books, and try to recover. Yes, we are both laid low by flu and stomach upsets. I left the hotel once, briefly, to get water and some packets of chips, but apart from that we’ve not moved from La Villa. We’ve eaten breakfasts on the terrace, had a few potato chips for lunch, and Hashim has brought really nice healthy soup and bread to our room at night.
Luckily we have a few books – I’ve plugged through A Traveller’s Guide to Morocco and have almost finished Public Enemies (a book about famous American criminals in the 30s).
I brilliantly managed to pull a muscle near my shoulder blade leaving Meknes, and that has been incredibly painful – I must have torn the damn thing. Ironically, my (usually sore) back has been fine through all of this …
It’s Sunday afternoon now now and we both finally seem to be on the recovery side of the slope. I had a full body massage today but disappointedly it didn’t help my shoulder, which I’m sure will bother me for quite some time to come, dammit.
We have one more day here in El-Jadida when we’ll try to actually see a bit of the town; then I guess it’s the train to Marrakesh and a decision has to be made about what to do next. Our enthusiasm, not surprisingly, is a bit low.
Obviously being sick and sore doesn’t help, but Morocco has so far been tougher than expected – the language barrier makes things quite difficult, and the heat and humidity has made even short trips extremely uncomfortable.
I look back on things like 12 hour bus journeys in India and find it hard to believe I ever endured them – of course it’s easy to forget how difficult things were at the time from a remove of 11 years.
Hopefully we’ll both be feeling much more positive tomorrow. We’re extremely thankful we found such a good hotel in which to recuperate, that’s for sure.
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