Fes or Fez: Days 74-75

After walking to the train station, we left Tangier and headed for Fes/Fez. Morocco has been much more difficult, as far as finding our way around and dealing with "guides" who want to "help" us, than anywhere else we've been. In Tunisia when approached by "helpers", we would smile and say "no thank you" and they would say "okay" or "maybe tomorrow" and leave us be. In Morocco, they follow us for 100s of yards, trying to shame us into giving them money. After continuously saying "no, thank you", two got mad and told us to go back to our own country. Aside from the few nasty people wandering the streets, most of the people and street vendors are very nice and friendly. In Fes we actually agreed to have a young guy show us the Medina as it is very expansive and easy to get lost. He ended up leading us around for 30 minutes without actually taking us to anywhere we had asked to go. The only place he took us was to a friend of his selling carpets. When we arrived back to a place we recognized, we gave him a little money and ended our tour. On the other hand, our hotel was very nice and we met an elderly couple from England on the train that had stayed in the same hotel as us in Tangier and were staying at the same hotel in Fes. Small Western world. Anyway, Fes was fine, but not our favorite. It does have a nice train station and the train ride was very interesting. We saw lots of shepherds with their sheep and donkeys pulling plows and carts.

View of Moroccan countryside from the train. From Tangier to Fes was very green and rural.

Our train seemed to cause traffic problems wherever we crossed a roadway in the towns we passed.

Our hotel in Fes was Western appearing, but still Moroccan. It did have a nice pool area and a bar. Most places in Morocco do not sell alcohol (Southern Baptists maybe?), but many of the hotels do. Our hotel bar was known to be very popular with the locals. There were many more people in the bar than staying at the hotel and they all spoke Arabic. Mostly men, but a few women. We observed that most of the women drank non-alcoholic drinks or would drink from the drinks of the men with them.

View of the pool with the Atlas Mountains in the background.

View from the balcony of the carpet seller to which our "guide" took us. It was the most/only interesting thing we saw on his trip.

Front of the palace that was closed on Friday. Apparently this is the day they wash the doors also, which were very nice.

Clean door.

After wandering around the older Medina, we made it to the "newer" Medina area that was much nicer and easier to navigate. Here, there were no rude guides. It might have been that the police were much more visible here as only offical guides are supposed to operate in Fes. Tip: if you are going to Fes, ask your hotel to provide an offical guide. They should be able to contact a licensed guide to come to the hotel and lead you around. This is the gate to the Medina.

In the Medina, a view of another archway from the cafe where we had mint tea.

  

There are huge walls like this around a majority of the city.

View of another palace entrance that was well guarded, also surrounded by high walls.

Fes train station, which was very nice and easy to use. From here we headed to Marrakesh on the Marrakesh Express.

Tangier, Days 72-73

Due to rough seas, the ferry from Gibraltar to Tangier was cancelled. Therefore, we had to walk back across the Spanish border to La Linea, take a 45 minute bus ride around the harbor to Algeciras where we were able to board a larger (but slower) ferry to Tangier.

  

View from our ferry at Algeciras. The weather was nice at the port, but windy and the sea was rough.

The weather worsened, although we did see a rainbow as we entered the Strait of Gibraltar.

Steph was not feeling well. We were able to get a good seat on the ferry, but the yellow thing in the picture is a trash can we moved over in case of an emergency. Instead of the normal 2 and a half hours, the trip took almost 4 hours. It was very nice to get off the boat. The ferry arrived at Tangier's new port, which is about 30km from the city; however,there is a free bus that we were able to board that dropped us a few hundred meters from the hotel. We have found in Morocco that there are some extremely nice, helpful people, such as those at the ferry port and our hotel. Unfortunately, there are a lot of obnoxious people hanging around the tourist areas in the city. As we exited the bus, there was a large group of men wanting to "help" unload our luggage, put our luggage in a taxi we didn't want, and take us to hotels in which we did not want to stay. We were able to avoid these and made it to the hotel. During our short hike to the hotel, we ran into three different "helpers" along the way that wanted to give us directions we did not need or sell us things we did not want. Fortunately, the nice people outnumber the obnoxious ones.

Our hotel, the Hotel Continental where persons such as Winston Churchill and Prince Albert have stayed. Yes, it's that old. The rooms could do with an updating, but the public areas of the hotel were very nice.

Inside the hotel.

A courtyard in the hotel.

Tables for breakfast.

View of the old port, where our ferry did not arrive, from the hotel.

The Grand Socco, which is a small plaza and fountain near the medina or souk, market.

Streets of Tangier.

An archway leading into the souk.

 

Into the souk. Most shops sell clothes, souveniers, household items, etc., in addition to the food markets.

The market had fresh chickens and bread.

Fruits and vegetables.

And a large fish market.

(You could also purchase the head of a goat but we didn't get a picture of that one.)

Our lunch, chicken tangine, was very good. It is very much like a chicken stew with spices.

There is an extremely large beach in Tangier.

 

With the obligatory beach soccer game.

The Grand Mosque near the Medina and our hotel.

View of Tangier from our window.

Also from our window one can hear the call to the Grand Mosque; 5 times per day.

Rock of Gibraltar, Days 70-71; Do you smell what The Rock is cooking? It's probably a monkey.

To get to Gibraltar from Granada, we had to take a 5 hour bus ride to La Linea, Spain then walk across the border to Gibraltar. The only road and walkway into Gibraltar crosses Gibraltar Airport's one runway.

View from the bus.

View from The Rock into Spain of the roadway (N-S) crossing the runway (E-W).

Crossing the runway. There are gates and guards to stop traffic if a plane is using the runway, but we never saw a plane takeoff or land.

We stayed at the Rock Hotel, which is probably the nicest room we have had so far. The balcony had a great view and was larger than most of our past hotel rooms. It was a favorite of some of the apes as well. They are actually monkeys (Macaques in fact), but are called Barbary Apes.

This one had just jumped through our open balcony door. Steph bravely protected the bed in our room by jumping upon it and screaming "monkey!" This photo was taken once the monkey was thwarted from the bed, exited the room and sat on our balcony wall. Warning: there will be a lot of monkey photos in this post.

The view from the top of The Rock is amazing. Normally one can take a cable car to the top, but it was closed due to high cross winds. Rather than pay 50 pounds for the "guided tour taxi" to the top, we walked. It was only about 6km, but it was very steep.

Yes, it was very windy and we understood why the cable cars were not running. And Todd needs a haircut.

And of course there were monkeys at the top too. This little guy had an injured arm.

Most of the monkeys were very well behaved.

Cleaning time.

This one did not appear to be very impressed with the view. Or he might have been tired of tourists taking his picture.

The sign warns of biting, but this one just wanted to nap. Do not wake sleeping apes.

This girl must not have read the above sign. Shortly after this photo, the little ape nipped her hand. Of course, if she had good judgment, she probably would not have worn that outfit.

They like climbing on cars too.

The closest we were to the apes until the one entered our room.

And one more monkey.

Halfway up the Rock is St. Michael's caves. It was an incredibly beautiful cave system and it had a stage and seating area in it where shows are performed. Apparently, there are great accoustics.

Always well prepared. Even though we had a headlamp, it was too dark for most photos.

This is the cable car that was not running. It would have been an interesting ride, but a lot less exercise.

We also visited tunnels that the British military had dug to install canon. These were begun in 18 and expanded through World War II. Very impressive.

One of the commanders here designed a new carriage system for the cannon that allowed them to be fired downward.

During the siege of 1789-92, soldiers were flogged for offenses. It apparenlty was important enough to create a wax figure. Approximately 300 died from battle during the siege, but even more died from disease, mostly scurvy.

The Moors built this citadel on The Rock in the 1300s.

In this photo, you can see the openings where the cannon were placed in the tunnels.

After several hours exploring The Rock, we headed downtown to a pub for lunch. Gibraltar is very small, but has a lot of tourists. There are a lot of stores as well as it does not tax most goods and most of the tourists were shopping. We were happy to sit and watch as we ate. There is not a lot to do here, but we were very glad we came and it was a lot of fun.

View from our hotel.

Off to Tanger, Morroco.