Traveling.
So I've already blogged about my new town, but I haven't yet blogged about the travel experience. From Fes, it is two days out and two days back. All together it's about 15 hours away but you have to work around transportation schedules and abide by a world-wide Peace Corps policy that forbids traveling at night. So the way south was pretty easy. My bus ticket from Fes to Errachidia was 80 dirhams ($10) and that takes about 8 hours. As you drive south from Fes, you cross through the Atlas mountains. They are gorgeous and huge and the narrow roads wind around past huge cliffs. It's a site to see though it doesn't feel very safe. Apparently the buses are the safest though because they don't go too fast and rarely go over the edge... I slept most of that way. Once you start heading east though (after spending the night in Errachidia) you begin to see the Sahara Desert you always imagined. It's kilometer after kilometer of orange sand and small orange hills that rise out of nowhere. Then every so often you see date palms and greenery spring up. A true oasis. In these oases you can usually spot a small town, marked by a number of mud structures and winding alleys. After a few hours of driving east though, the oases stop coming and the sand dunes become more prominent. The skies have no clouds and become the purest shade of blue you've ever seen against the almost-fluorescent orange sand. There's some scrub that grows and you can see nomads herding some sheep, but the further east you go, the less sheep you can spot and then you begin to see nomads herding camels. Yes, camels. These are not camels that are being herded for tourists to ride. There are NO tourists out here. (You can imagine the stares I got on that bus. "What on earth is that blonde women doing on this bus to nowhere, unaccompanied?!" ) I don't have any idea what the berbers are doing with the camels but I felt like I was on a movie set. So after five or six hours of seeing nothing but sand and sky and camels you arrive at my city.
The bus rides TO my new city were not anything to write home about. They were standard. But the way back -- terrible. The first leg, back to Errachidia, was fine. But yesterday, when getting from Errachidia to Fes, we ran into obstacle after obstacle. For this portion I was not alone. Errachidia is a big hub for a lot of PCVs who want to get up to Fes. (This city has about 100,000 people) So we got on a 9 am bus that should have been in Fes in about 7 or 8 hours. But we broke down... many times.... It kept stalling and stalling and stalling. I'm sorry I don't know more about cars to explain it. Every time we'd break down, the women would stay on the bus and the men would get out and stretch. Then the driver and the driver's helper would open up the back and tinker with it until it was going again. One particular time we were stopped for more than an hour.
As we got closer and closer to our destination we broke down more and more often. One time, frustratingly, the driver pulled over to stop and pick some apples. Yes, he stopped to pick some apples.
So FINALLY after being in the bus for ten hours we arrived in Fes. We were on the edge of town when the bus broke down. AGAIN. We figured that it was time to abandon this bus and catch a taxi back to the meeting place where we were all supposed to rendezvous. There were 8 of us, and only petit taxis can be hailed. Petit taxis take a max of three passengers, so we needed three. The first two petit taxis whizzed by in seconds to pick up 5 of us. But I was in the group of three that was to be in the last taxi. Well, that last petit taxi we needed never came. We wandered around and tried to hail many taxis that passed that already had clients, with no luck.
Eventually some kids spotted us and they were wondering who these kooky tourists were roaming their neighborhood. We told him our plight and as soon as these kids got involved, things started happening. They were running in the middle of the street trying to flag down anyone. Soon their parents came out with all the commotion we were causing and they got involved. In about 10 minutes the parents had convinced a grand taxi to stop. Grand taxis are usually sedan-sized Mercedes Benz and legally can only be picked up at a taxi stand but this one "did us a favor." We thanked the neighbors profusely and hopped in.
There was already a couple in there and the driver told us he'd drop them off first and then us. They didn't look to pleased to see us, but we chatted them up in their native language, and explained what we were doing in Morocco. I also dropped the line about us working with the Ministry of Youth and Sports (true!) because we were told that could persuade someone not to cheat us....
So to make a long story short, we make it to where we wanted to go and we ask how much and the guy tells us 120 dirhams!! 30 DH would have been sufficient, if not generous. This was outrageous! The three of us responded shocked: "WHAT? THAT'S TOO EXPENSIVE" in Arabic. But his response was that he was coming from the airport and it is a flat rate. (lie). So we said we were not going to pay him 120 DH. Unfortunately though, even after that, we made two mistakes: 1) we should have gotten our luggage out of the trunk before paying him so that we could just walk away and he would have to chase us to get anything and undoubtedly he would accept something more realistic; and 2) we should have had bills smaller than 100 DH. It wasn't like he was going to give us change. So what choice did we have? He did us a "favor" and offered us 100 DH, which was the smallest bill we had. He accepted it of course, but it was still dumb. Fortunately, in our travel budget for our site visit they had worked in 120 DHs per person labeled as "in case you get overcharged for travel." So we were reimbursed. It was still annoying though.
Obviously in retrospect there are things I would have done differently in that cab ride, such as write down his license plate/car number. Taxis have gotten in big trouble for cheating PC volunteers.
By the time we got back to the PC hub we had been traveling for over 12 hours for a ride that should have taken 8. I'm still tired.
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