Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Last day in Morocco

We decided to take the shorter road over the Rif mountains since the group decided to take it easy instead of driving for about 8-10 hours.

I wanted to change some extra Moroccan Dirhams back to Euro before we left Fes and apparently it is a very difficult process. None of the banks or exchange offices want to change, some of them asked for the last receipt of the Euro-Dirham exchange. Apparently Moroccans are allowed to change but foreigners not. We then decided to change our Dirhams at the border.

A simple day with no planned action can be an adventure in Morocco. We were planning to buy gas in a town called Taza but it turned out to be an impossible project. The town had a huge market, people, animals, cars, trucks everywhere. 5 or 6 gas stations we checked were out of fuel. So we had no choice but drive further. Jaime with his 30 liter tank had no problem but I and Adrian would eventually run out of fuel. My bike did about 390km when we found gas, which is a record. Well the last 100kms I had to drive like a grandfather.

The border of Morocco and Spain at Almeria is not really a nice place. Bunch of people, I don't know what they are doing there the whole day. The Moroccan site is super dirty, feels kind of not safe. There are bunch of police officers but still chaos exists. After we started our paper process and were in the middle of the border crossing we realized that we needed to change money. The guy who helped us in the entrace was there and took me and Marie Anton back to Moroccan site and we changed money in a kiosk. Funny enough, by following this guy we didn't need to show our passports to Moroccan police again, so much for the security. But the golden rule of borders is valid here too. Getting out of a country is always easier than getting in.

On the Spanish site, officers didn't even check our passports. Since our bikes are Spanish registered and not very common in Morocco.

Now we are in Melilla. A small harbour town which has been under the control of Spain since 1500. Although we are still in Africa, it feels completely Spain here. Even the time is 2 hours ahead. Ceuta and Mellila are small harbour towns on the coast of Morocco which belong to Spain with heavy military presence. Spain also owns couple of small islands close to the Moroccan cost.

Tomorrow we will take the ferry to mainland Spain, spend the night in Almeria since the ferry is arriving late in the evening and the following day we will drive to north to take another ferry from Denia (close to Valencia) to Mallorca.

The Morocco trip is over but still there are 2 days and more than 600kms to my family.

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