I know, I know, I said that I would write a blog at least once a week and now it has been nearly 3 months since my last one that I wrote. It´s not that I haven´t done anything and so have nothing to write about, the complete opposite exactly.
To summarize, this is what I did in a nutshell:
After my roadtrip through Portugal I set out on my own. I stayed in Sevilla for about 4 or 5 days where I spent my time walking hours upon hours around the city seeing all of the old buildings and structures, quite beautiful I must say. It is Sevilla that I visited the largest gothic cathedral in the world as well as experience my first flamenco show. Sevilla is gorgeously old and colourful with a strong arabic influence. Before the Christians arrived Sevilla was inhabited by Muslims which can still be seen by a lot of the architecture and tile work. Now that I have beene to Morocco (almost a purely Muslim country) I can see the similarities in the designs and the achitecture.
It felt good to be by myself again and control my own moves so I continued by myself to Arcos de la Frontera (a small ´white´town on the side of a cliff), Jerez de Frontera (the birth city of sherry - very tasty), and then Cadiz. Cadiz is a city on a penisula situated in the Atlantic Ocean. After being away from the ocean for a whole week and a bit I was in huge withdrawal and so ended up staying there for a week.
Being iN Cadiz for a week allowed me to settle my mind, body, and eating habits. After eating so well whilst camping with the boys I was in some serious need of a cleanse of meat, alcohol, and grease. I spent my days in Cadiz laying on the beach, reading, walking a lot, and I even got myself out for 3 or 4 runs!!! I was feeling amazing after this week of normality and began to realize that I don´t really like travelling all that much.
Don´t get me wrong I love visiting new places and meet new people, but this whole jumping from one place to another every 2 or 3 days is not my idea of travelling. I like staying in a place long enough to get to know the streets, the usual characters that walk the street, and to have a special spot I like to go to calm my mind.
Though Cadiz is not that pretty it would be a great place to live and play, but I had done that in San Sebastian and was really craving for something different; this is when I decided to make my way down to Morocco.
Morocco. Africa. It felt exciting, scary, and invigorating thinking of going there. But there was a lot I didn´t know about Morocco, about visiting a Muslim society, about the language, and about a lot, lot more. So I started asking people what they knew. Some people stated that Morocco was a bad place for a women to travel alone because Western women are seen as infidels and therefore up for the grabs. They said that the men would touch me all the time and that the shopkeepers would draw me up to their shops and give me tea then charge me exhorberant amounts.
Others said that Morocco was one of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring, friendly, and colourful place they had ever been to. Which one should I believe? I decided to take the advice of both but lean to the side of caution when it came to my interactions.
I left the majority of my belongings at the hostel I was staying at and my laptop with a girl I had befriended (bad idea!! Ít´s been 2 months and I am still waiting for her to give it back to me! Actually that´s why I have the time to do this right now. I´m sitting in an internet cafe in Cadiz hoping to god that she will return from wherever to meet up like we planned, before my bus heads back to Seville. Long story.) Anyways, from Cadiz I headed down to a town called Tarifa which is where I was to take a ferry to Tangier, Morocco.
Tarifa sits on the boundary between the Pacific and the Mediteranean and is known for its wind and kite-surfing. This too was place that I could have spent a great deal of time wandering around, or living, and was actually a bit disappointed that I had only planned to stay there one night.
That evening I tried to get as much information out of the people staying at the hostel as possible and also to see if anybody else was heading that way the following day, so that I could at least enter the country with somebody else. That is when I met Ben.
Ben was an Australian fellow, who had an amazing pair of mint green pants that he wore all the time, and who was also travelling to Morocco the following day. We decided that we would start our trip together and from there see how it went. The next day we departed on the noon ferry to such an adventure and an experience that I could have had no way of predicting.
And that is how it all began.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
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