Algeciras

Saturday, February 26, 2011

We stayed at Hostal Marrakesh, a place that seems to be primarily a place for a Moroccan family to live – in a hotel. There were a few rooms available, but we may have been the only guests. For ten or fifteen rooms there were two bathrooms, and in only one of them was there a shower. When we checked in at 8:30pm or so there was only one towel for the two of us (in the entire hotel!), so we shared it. Our room had three twin beds and a sink, and paid €30. Not bad. It’s weird to us, though, that bathroom standards are below what we would have in our own homes – things in disrepair (no hook for the handheld shower head, etc.). But it was clean, it was it was fine.

At night the receptionist (owner?) switched from Arabic to English Al Jazeera anf we spoke about Qaddafi. He thinks it’s a matter of days before Qaddafi steps down, as 80% are against him at this point.

In the morning we went down to the ferry to buy tickets to Tangier. As we approached the port there were a few guys who told us very adamantly that the ticket office was closed, and pointed us aross the street (back to where we’d come from), and then followed us. We lost his tail and found a guy in a ticket office who seemed honest. But the ferry’s internet site was down so he couldn’t sell us the tickets, and he sent us to the terminal. We followed someone walking through the gates (they had seemed closed), but we had a hard time figuring out where to go until we asked some workers. Yes, the system was down, so we got handwritten tickets. You do buy them at a travel agency, but it’s one of many right at the port itself, and it was the same price as the first guy we went to on the street. It was supposed to take an hour (not 40 minutes as the first guy told us). We rushed to the boat (the ticket guy chased down Dave who’d left his passport), and got to near the front of the line thinking we’d “just” made it. We waited for the vehicles to unload, the new ones to begin loading, and the passengers to disembark, and finally we boarded. Sure, we left in the 9s, but nowhere near 9am. Time seems to be either “mañana” or “Inshallah”. Who knows?