Part 4 - Snow, Chicken Shit, and the Wrong Town.

The journey south from Madrid was unexceptional until we got within a hundred km or so from the coast when the train had to climb down from the central plateau. At Algeciras I checked the ferry times and it seemed that I'd either have a two hour wait there or a two hour wait in Tarifa - a much more pleasant town further along the coast. So I got the coach to Tarifa and had a couple of coffees in a pleasant back-street cafe before getting the catarmaran to Tangiers.

Tangiers was still as hassle-free as the last time I visited - despite all the warnings in the guide books. The hotel was pretty run-down, buyt was cheap and was pleasant enough.

The following day I took the train to Rabat. The recent flooding was obvious, and over the next few days it would continue to rain. The line from Tangiers to the main Fes - Marrakech line was being electrified - this surprised me. Then I realised that the mainline is fully electrified, and has an hourly express service from Fes to Casablanca using a mix of the old but comfortable 'standard European' coaches and some very smart new double-deck electric units. The three main stations that I saw (Tangiers, Rabat and Marakech) were also very smart - Tangier and Marrakech being completely new and impressive buildings and Rabat was in teh process of being rebuilt - obviously to a high standard.

Rabat is a pleasant enough place - the souk in the Medina is as chaotic as any other, but not so large, and because it has so few tourists the market was not full of the tat seen in Marrakech. I ended up staying in the town for three nights as I arrived on the Saturday and finally collected the visa on Monday afternoon.

One of the few westerners I saw was Nick, an Aussie who was applying for a UK work permit. For some reason it was only possible for him to get the permit from Australia or Morroco.

The train from Rabat to Marrakech was good, the scenery was nothing special until an hour or so from its destination when we started winding up through the rocky semi-desert landscape of the Atlas moutains.

Marrakech was a disappointment. It was ridiculously full of tourists, and although the souk was astonising, most of the stuff was geared up for the tourists and not for the locoals. Still I did occasionally end up walking through an alley full of metal-workers, and found the odd local tea-bar selling the standard Morrocan sweet mint tea.

OK, It's now day 11, and I'm in Agadir. Well, that's only partly correct as I'm staying in Inezgane, a town about 7 miles from Agadir. The reason for this is that I got off the bus from Marrakech along with everyone else, and didn't think to ask where we were. After picking out my back from the chickens in the luggage hold of the bus and cleaning it of shit and feathers, I checkied into a surprisingly cheap hotel, and set off to find the beach while cursing that the map in the guide book seemed to bear little relation to the actual location. After some time (about an hour's walk) a theory started to form in my head that perhaps they hadn't just relocated the bus station out of town but that I was in fact the wrong town.

Anyway, as I type I'm on a 'day-trip' to Agadir from Inezgane.

The bus-ride from Marrakech to almost-Agadir was spectacular - four hours of climbing through the snow-capped Atlas mountains befopre finally decending onto the coastal plain. We stopped for a ten minute break in a small town in the mountains, where I picked up a kebab sandwich thing (30p), a mint tea (6p), and a botle of water (20p). It was on this journey that the weather finally turned and it stopped raining.