The “11 am ferry” finally left Spain at 2 pm. The causes of the delay were incomprehensible but the ferry was the busiest we had ever known it. The Moroccan immigration authorities processed passports during the two hour crossing; the queue to present passports was long and very slow moving. It took us over a hour to reach the desk from the back of the queue where a grumpy (to the point of being rude) official processed our documents.
The whole setup displayed a complete lack of courtesy to patiently waiting travellers. No-one was around a to monitor the queues, to guide passengers or offer advice. I watched one European man stand nonchalantly near the front of the queue and blatantly slip in when no one was looking – then he called up his wife and four children! They were still processing passports long after we docked at Tánger Med and we were held up for another hour when several of the cars, minus their drivers, were blocking the exit from the car deck.
By the time we finally disembarked it was dark and raining heavily as we joined a dozen lanes of traffic feeding into six Customs lanes – everyone trying to barge ahead of the vehicle next to him – it was chaos. Our truck was bigger than most and Tony held his nerve in the foray, although there was a lot of horn blowing and rude gestures. Fortunately when our turn finally came to be checked by Customs we were waved through without being searched. The angry Frenchman just behind us, with whom we had been playing at dodgums for the past hour, was pulled over by Customs and had to empty the contents of his boot in the pouring rain – we felt so sorry for him!
It was after 9 pm when we finally left the port – tired, hungry and very disgruntled with Moroccan officialdom – and the rest of the human race! As soon as we could we stopped for the night at an Aire de Repos on the motorway.
The weather in Morocco had been extremely unsettled. We had heard many of the roads in the mountains were blocked with snow, so we took the coastal route.
The next morning it was warm, the sky was mostly blue and our grumpiness dissipated as we enjoyed driving south in the warm sunshine. We stopped for a couple of days at Kènitra, a town on the Atlantic coast just north of Rabat. We had lunch in one of the many seaside restaurants. Bread, salads and an enormous plate of grilled prawns (I had grilled squid) cost £25 for the two of us – no booze.
