Day 15: Tetouan, again!

Soutpiel Safari
John & Jenny
Sat 20 Nov 2010 16:28
Day 15: Friday 19 November 2010. Hotel Malaga, Tetouan, Morocco
 
We thought we would be free to move on today but having bought the compulsory third party insurance, we found that it does not come into effect until midnight tonight! No amount of arguing, in French, with the insurance office manager would change his mind.  It seems that it is Moroccan insurance company practice that all cover stars from midnight and he wouldn't back-date it to midnight last night in case we had been involved in an accident since then!  The fact that the car has been in a locked compound since Wednesday didn't have any effect on him. So we are stuck here for yet another day.
 
We have found a good Internet cafe and after a great deal of walking and payment of a Dh 10 (80p) tip I did manage to find the one and only restaurant in Tetouan which was open today, and and we had our first good meal since Tuesday. It was quite uncanny walking all over the town finding hundreds of cafes, all actively populated but serving only tea and coffee and only three restaurants, two of which were closed.
 
My French is slowly getting better and I am becoming more confident.  My Arabic is also slowly becoming less rusty but it is taking longer to dredge up vocabulary that hasn't been used for 15 years.
 
We were really caught out by arriving in the middle of the Eid al Adha, but shouldn't have been.  When researching this trip last June and looking at a possible route through Saudi Arabia, I had written down in my diary the dates of the Haj and the Eid as these would have been very important relative to a transit through Saudi Arabia. What a pity I didn't look in my diary until tonight, we might have stayed in Spain a few days longer! Still, it has been a new experience for Jenny!