Travels with my Family

This blog will hopefully bring you up to date. We have been travelling/hiking/attending festivals, weve not been able to blog so here it all is for the last 3 weeks. We rented a car as we planned to cover at least 1000 miles and public transport though bountiful and everywhere is hard work. Anyhow i was a bit daunted about driving over here, but have found it a liberating experience. There are two rules to adhere too if you want to drive over here. The first rule of driving in morocco is                                                                            

1)There are no rules.  The second rule is                                                                                                                                                         2)See rule number one.                                                                                                                                                                              

There is no big brother looking over you. Lights, street markings are purely decorative. Much like British city Christmas decorations, they are there but they serve no practical purpose. Pedestrians can be ignored completely, the responsibility is soley with them to cross the road safely. Car is king you can do what you want. Strangely there are no more dents/crashes on their cars than in the UK and it is safe...pretty much you just need to let your hair down a bit.

El Jadida

Our first stop was El Jadida (baby have you seen her) 125 miles south of Rabat.  It was built by the Portuguese as a trading post and it shows, the streets are wider, the buildings more European. The beach looked good but the weather was pretty miserable, it cleared a bit as we set off to explore and we were welcomed to the medina by a rainbow. We visited the medina saw the ancient cisterns which were interesting big ornate rooms where they stored the drinking water and we walked on the ramparts, passed an old synagogue (see picture) and looked out over the fishing fleet. Unusually for Morocco the medina was a fairly quiet place, and as we left the walled city we headed into the chaos of the town proper and market streets. The market was great Hannah bought some jeans- chatting with a couple of local teenagers.  Then back to the hotel which had transformed from a quiet, slightly careworn urban hostel into a sleazy drinking haunt populated by lots of dodgy looking men lounging around drinking beer and smoking. As this was the first sign of drinking we had seen we thought we may have an evening beer in the courtyard, but as Dawn appeared to be the only woman in the place we left without trying the local brew, and went back up to the bedroom where Hannah and Gabe were happily watching pirate DVDS fresh from the market.  Regarding the toileting arrangements in this hostelry, I like being watched on the toilet like the next man, but keep my proclivities to myself. This hotel however obviously catered to people of this disposition which required someone to lock you in from the outside, otherwise the door swung open and you were in full view!  Anyhow Baby have you seen her was really a rest stop for what we had planned for the next 5 days.