Traveling from Spain to Morocco

We left for Morocco at 5:30 am. The trip would take 15 hours, with a 3-hour bus ride to the Mediterranean, a 2-hour ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar and an 8-hour bus ride from Tangier to Meknes (the other 2 hours were spent stopping for breakfast and waiting for the ferry). After getting accustomed to the Spanish lifestyle of staying out late and sleeping in late, getting up early was next to impossible. I slept terribly that night, and when I woke up I felt tired and sick. Before getting on the bus I vomited into a trashcan and then climbed into the bus for our ride to the ferry. Luckily we stopped for breakfast after an hour of driving. After stopping I felt a little better and was all right until we got to the ferry. Once on the ferry I felt even more miserable than before and after another hour of swaying on the ferry, I vomited a few times and then felt perfectly fine. I enjoyed the last hour to Tangier and could see both Europe and Africa at the same time. (I believe the two continents are about 8 miles apart when the strait is narrowest.)

After arriving in Tangier we stopped in an enormous supermarket to buy some food for lunch. The supermarkets are very similar to those in America, however I don’t think most Moroccans go to supermarkets for day-to-day shopping because supermarkets are more expensive and the food is not as fresh. After that we got on the program’s 40-passenger bus. It’s an old bus from the eighties with fake grass for carpeting and no bathroom or air conditioner, but its nonetheless quite comfortable. From Tangier we traveled to Meknes, stopping once for a bathroom stop and once because the police pulled us over for speeding. There aren’t really any driving rules in Morocco and if there are no one follows them. However I guess there is the occasional speed trap. Our bus driver was a maniac behind the wheel, passing cars on narrow roads and blind corners

From watching the bus driver and other cars on the road, I got a sense of how differently Moroccans (and probably most Arab countries) approach driving. Despite driving aggressively, they aren’t rude. They use their horns to communicate rather than as a way to express anger. Americans invest their egos in their driving and take it personally if they get cut off or someone tries to pass them on a blind corner. Moroccans, on the other hand, go with the flow and adjust to the other drivers, but they don’t take things personally and anger is rarely involved. In the city, cars cut each other off all the time and weave in and out of lanes as they please. I would think that this causes a lot of angry drivers and accidents, but surprisingly I haven’t seen much of either. Even though most cars are 20 or 30 years old with hundreds of thousands of miles on them, very few have any body damage, dents or bent fenders.