骑马看花 in Africa

The Chinese have a saying that goes "骑马看花" ("qi ma kan hua"), literally "ride horse look flower", which describes our most recent adventure over here in Europe.  Or should I say, Africa, because we did a day trip to Morocco yesterday!  Despite the fact that our guide book described it as a "self imposed hostage situation", we decided to do the all-inclusive, lead-you-around-by-the-nose-like-a-pack-of-tourists, organized tour.  If you google "FRS Day Trip" on tripadvisor.com you can see that this tour gets mostly bad reviews (and fortunately for us we didn't read any of these reviews until after we bought out tickets, so it didn't discourage us from buying the tickets, but set our expectations nice and low), but for us everything worked out very well and we all had an excellent time.  (And it brings up to 4 the number of continents I've visited this year :-)).

Anyways the day started with us actually getting up early (for I think the second time on this trip) so we could drive to Tarifa (about  1 hour drive) to catch our ferry. 

(Tarifa is advertised as the "southernmost city on continental Europe.  I love it when things are over-qualified like this, like anything can be the "most of" if you qualify it enough.  I would call Tarifa "the southernmost city on continental Spain that sounds like the name of a desert.)

(Actually the adventure started the day before, when we first tried to do the trip, but when we got to Tarifa I realized I had forgot to bring my passport.  You see not only is Africa another continent, but Morocco is also a separate country from Spain.  A fact I unfortunately forgot :-()  Passports in hand we had another hitch passing through (either customs or immigration) (I always get these mixed up).  You see we never got a passport stamp when we arrived in Rome a few weeks ago.  Not sure why, but it caused a small delay when we were boarding our Ryan Air flight from Italy to Spain, and now the (customs or immigration) guy had to run off to check with his boss while we made all the other passengers wait.  They ended up letting us go, and we also learned that for a day trip we wouldn't even get an Africa (or Morocco?) stamp at the other end :-(

The ferry ride took about an hour (it was advertised as 35 minutes which I believe is impossible) and in Morocco we were herded (literally) onto a bus (they separated us onto English- and Spanish-speaking busses) and then we drove around for awhile looking at the sights of Tangiers, and I thought about that famous Chinese saying which refers to exactly this kind of tourism.  (Except a modern update would be "坐车旅游".)  We stopped at the Hercules Grotto (basically an underground mall in a cave) and a few other sights, and then went to the official FRS restaurant for lunch.  It was entirely tourist groups, but the lunch was delicious!  Afterwards we wandered around the market and went to the local museum.  Overall it was quite a lot of fun!

At the end of the day (we were in Africa for about 6 hours total) they herded us back onto the ferry for the trip "home".  There was some commotion, and we found later that another tour group, which had been denied entry onto the previous ferry, was now kicking up a fuss because we were being given priority boarding onto this ferry. (We chatted with a couple of the folks on the ferry, and they told us that FRS (the ferry company) didn't even want to let them on this ferry, but the Moroccan police basically forced them to!)

(Back to the issue of passport stamps.  When we arrived back in Spain they did another search through our passports for the elusive "stamp".  "No stamp," I said, and we explained again how when we arrived in Rome they didn't stamp our passports.  And Africa also didn't stamp our passports because it was just a day trip.  I guess they confused Canada for a country in Europe.  (Well we're practically European.)  So eventually they stamped our passports on our arrival back in Spain, but they when we checked our passports later the stamp only said "Tarifa".  It's anyone's guess what they're going to make of this when we arrive back in Canada.)

Before this trip we were noting that we hadn't met too many Americans so far.  (If fact we hadn't met too many other tourists at all.)  But on this trip we met several Americans and even a Canadian couple!  (One of them was from Montreal and she came in very handy providing us some French translations.  One of the main languages in Morocco is French and we've become very language-confused, having to deal with Italian and Spanish and now French as well (in addition Chinese for me, which still is creeping into my daily conversation).)

This was a nice change of pace from our usual itinerary here in Spain, which is: sleep in, get up and have breakfast, visit a nearby town (details to follow) including a second breakfast and possibly lunch, hang out on the beach, come back to our cottage and relax on our rooftop deck (with a snack), have a nap, and then cook a late dinner (we've been eating at "Spanish time", around 10 PM).  Sometimes we throw in a visit to a Gelatoria (or a Spanish Helatoria) for a change, but we also picked up some ice cream for the cottage "just in case".  This is an exhausting schedule so obviously we had to take a "day off".

PS  Here is the sunset from our balcony:

In the past few days we've visited the local towns of Conil (a beachside resort), Vejez (a white mountain town) and of course Tarifa.

Here are some pictures of Conil:

The beach here is similar to the beach near our cottage (which is 3 km long and 40 m wide) although much busier.  There was a tower so we climbed it.  We had lunch at a nice little restaurant slightly off the main drag, and Jack had an "Iberian burger" (which we found out later is a combination of pork or lamb (?), not beef).  We're trying to eat as much seafood as possible so we had squid and I can't remember what else.

One day (the day of our aborted visit to Africa) we visited both  Tarifa and Vejez - Tarifa because we were there anyways (that's the departure point for Africa) and Vejez because we made a wrong turn and wound up there!

Here are some pics of Tarifa:

We visited "Castle Guzmond", which I think is our first castle visit on this trip.  I also bought some sandals for the beach.  The shop guy was Chinese, and when I asked "How much?" he called out to his buddy in Chinese and then told me "5 euros" (in Spanish".  So I asked him "多少" (how much?) and he looked confused and held up 5 fingers.  I paid him and said "谢谢" (thanks) and he didn't react.  I'm not sure if my Chinese has gotten that bad that quickly, or if he was just in shock hearing a tall skinny white guy trying to speak Chinese.

Here are some pics of Vejez:

We had a map but we still got lost, if you can believe it.  All the streets looked basically the same.  We are planning to visit more of these "white hill towns" later in the trip, and I expect that later on the photos will be pretty much indistinguishable.

Today we're planning (other than our regular itinerary) to try to see a football game in Conil, and tomorrow to try to make it to a Flamenco performance.  We're also going to try out the laundry facilities in our Cottage, and I think that's about enough excitement for today!

PS here is my breakfast from this morning.  We bought some bread in Morocco.  We asked for 1 euro worth and he gave us abut 5 lbs!  We tried to give some away on the ferry home but our new friends were too polite and just took a taste.  However with some Nutella and heated up in the microwave it is very delicious!