So our journey began on Friday with a two-hr bus ride to a different city to catch our flight to Madrid. My roundtrip flight to Alicante to Madrid only cost 25 Euros after taxes and all the fees. Roundtrip to Morocco only cost 80 Euros. It should have only cost me 40 Euros but the price went up right when I was buying my ticket. Once in Madrid, we began to walk around and look for a place to eat dinner. We found this Caribbean restaurant where I had a good Cuban meal. After that, we walked around for a few hours and then called it a night and went to our hostel.
There also happened be a massive strike by the Spanish air traffic controllers that turned into a huge fiasco. They went on strike when there was a 5-day weekend, costing Spain millions of dollars, well Euros, because they had to cancel so many flights. I don’t know if it made the news in the US but it was a big deal. Hundreds of thousands of people were stuck at the airport. Once seeing all this on the news, we were extremely happy that we made it in.
We walked around all day Saturday and I actually remembered quite a bit from when I went to Madrid in 2006. That evening, we met up with some of our Spanish friends that came to Madrid also. We did some more walking around and then headed in to get ready for our trip to Africa. We had to keep watching the news to see the status on the airport and the flights. In the end, the military had to come in and take over until they apparently made the controllers come back.
The flight from Madrid to Tangier was only one hour. In the span of about 5 minutes we went from flying over the Spanish coast right onto the landing strip on Tangier’s coast. We go through customs and get our money changed before starting our adventure. The taxi driver could only read Sanskrit, so I had quite a task of attempting to explain the address and where we were going. We made it after all and the apartment we rented was incredible. It was without a doubt the most interesting place I have ever stayed. The living room looked like it was from a palace. We all had our own massive couches that we referred to as our thrones. Once we got settled in, we headed out to find a taxi to take us down to the port area. Once we got down there, it began to rain so we decided to find a restaurant to eat at and wait out the rain. We then had a massive meal that was quality and cost 1/3 of we would have to pay in Spain. During the meal, I received a text from one of the teachers at my school who was supposed to fly to Morocco on Saturday and he told me that his flight got canceled and he was heading back to Aguilas from Madrid. After eating, we began asking questions to our waiter about places to see and things to do but he really didn’t understand us so he got these two older guys who have a store across the street from the restaurant to talk with us. They spoke Arabic, French, Spanish, English and I think German also. They then hooked us up with a taxi driver who spoke Spanish. This was the biggest blessing of all for the trip. This man, Mohammed, was literally the nicest person ever. He drove us all around the city for almost an hour and half showing and telling us everything for only 20 Euros. We were even going to ride camels but it started raining kind of hard then so we passed on that. He also took us to the area where all the kings and princes of all the Middle Eastern countries have their vacation palaces. We couldn’t take any pics of them though. We then went to this famous cave that is called Hercules’ Cave and then he took us back into the city to have dinner. After that we went back to the apartment and chilled for the night.
So Monday morning Mohammed came and picked us up and drove us to a beach town that was about 30 mins down the Atlantic coast. This place was called Asilah and we spent a couple hours walking around and exploring. Mohammed then took us back to Tangier and we walked around for the rest of the evening.
Tuesday morning Mohammed picked us up one last time to take us to the airport. We thanked him for making our trip incredible and he thanked us and told us to come back and visit him and the country. We changed our money back and got ready for our flight back to Madrid. When we went through customs 2 of the guys asked me if I spoke Arabic since my name was Jamal.
Once back in Madrid, we walked around some more before eventually getting caught in a heavy downpour. The only bad weather of the trip, besides our turbulent flight back to Madrid from Tangier. Headed back to the hostel and the trip was pretty much over. Spent a bunch of hrs at the two airports and had over 4 hours of time to waste in Murcia while waiting for the bus to Aguilas.
We were extremely blessed to have such a great trip when they were so many opportunities for things to not go in our favor. Madrid was cold and crowded but we had a great time there and I even like it now. I wasn’t too fond of it in the past. Morocco was incredible. The food was great and so cheap while the people were extremely nice. I couldn’t have had a better trip.