Rabat

From where we left Fez, we went from the bus station that catered for the CTM style buses which means new and air-conditioned and a bit more expensive than the beat up local buses. It only took us three hours to get to Rabat's Gare Routier (bus station), where we arrived not knowing where we were and with no money on us. This was becoming a recurring trend for us, which we really had to avoid for the next time we traveled as it was difficult to explain to a taxi driver where we wanted to go (an Auberge De Jeune recommended to us) via a bank and not get ripped off in the process. We got around his original quote of 50dirhams by demanding that he put the meter on, which is something they conveniently turn off and say is broken. It only turned out to be 18dirhams and we were happy to have found the place that was just outside the medina wall and down the road from the city centre.

The hostel was the same price as Fez but there were no private rooms, just male and female dorms (Kat had discover bed bugs in one of the beds she slept in so wasn’t too taken with the place at first). We ended up staying in Rabat for about a week in total and did so much in the time we were there, including having a little haircut session one day that consisted of Kat going crazy with the scissors and not only cutting all of her hair off

, took the blades to Ben’s bushy beard

We met Oli at the hostel and instantly became friends on the first day; there he took us to an English bookshop that he found where we brought a Rough Guide book for Africa for 135Dirhams. On the way back from the bookshop some little boy struck Kat’s arm with his fist for no reason whatsoever, in shock she just turned round and stared at the little shit whom was walking with his parents who knew what he’d done yet didn’t do anything in response except look at Kat’s gawping stare.

At the hostel we also met a man called Fabien. The crazy Frenchman took a little longer as at first we thought he was constantly drunk and the language was a barrier, but that didn't last long as we discovered he just looked squiffy in the mornings and the reason for lying down a lot was because of his bad back.

The touristy site-seeing we did in Rabat was visit the Royal Palace which was a mission to get to and although was free to enter, we had to go through a police check-point where they photocopied our passports. The palace was built in 1864 and has a glazed green tiled roof; we have found that most of the royal buildings have the green roofs, which we discovered in Fez is the colour of royalty. We sat down in the grounds for a while taking it all in and snapping away at the grand entrance of the palace.

On one of our walks around the riverside of the medina we were both attacked by henna ladies, Kat having her name and flowers doodels all over her left hand and up her arm and Ben having a manly scorpion (not by his choice), his name and for some reason a love heart on his arm. Despite our protests and saying we really didn't have much money on us, the two women having finished their speedily doodling asked or rather, demanded 100dirhams.

Even though they had said previously 'any price you like' and the fact that Ben didn't want a henna we gave them 20d as it was all that we had. They then wanted 20each or Euros to the value at which point Ben was getting agitated and said sternly no and pulled Kat away and started to walk off with them shouting in the background. The second set of henna ladies we came across in Rabat were a few days later and again we firmly said we didn't want one and had no money, but for some reason Kat's arm was tugged from her socket and saying it was a gift from them as they hennaed her name in Arabic up her arm. Ben again was offered the scorpion but almost ran away in protest. Afterwards yet again they demanded money and we said we thought it was free as it was a gift and we walked away.

Being at the hostel for a week we got to know the staff pretty well. We frequently shared our food with them and they loved the fresh melons we kept buying, one of their friends shared his red wine with us one evening which was a real treat. The wine gave us an idea for a wine and cheese night, which ended up to be just Brie in Flat breads and olives from the market for lunch one day; it was so really scrummy and the Brie was quite expensive but worth every penny. As we got to know the staff we thought we could trust them all until the moody breakfast lady asked to borrow our sun cream. We thought this was a little odd, but being English and naive we lent it to her. Rather than putting some on her face there and then, she took the bottle away with her and we heard in the distance of what sounded like the women transferring our sun cream into another bottle. Kat went of into the female toilets to investigate, but didn’t see anything as the moody cow went from the toilets to the reception. Ben got frustrated and went to the reception to ask for the sun cream back and catching her in the act with sun cream all over her hands and clothes, the woman got angry and held the sun cream to her chest in which Ben just snatched it back from her saying NO! loudly.

After the sun cream instant Ben stopped saying thank you to her for breakfast and her moody attitude didn’t alter, so we weren’t expecting an apology from her. We all thought her attitude was quite humorous in the end, especially when Kat, Oli and Fabien got their own back and helped themselves to extra coffee one morning which they had to deny like naughty children when she questioned them about entering her kitchen. She really wasn’t happy as it meant she had to make more coffee for some of the other guests who arrived later.

The other site-seeing thing we did in Rabat was walk to Tour Hassan that is a huge Kasbah where next to it lays the ruin of the second largest mosque in the Islamic world. The mosque was originally commissioned by the founder of Rabat, Abou Youssef Yaacoub el-Mansour, at the end of the 12th Century and had died 4 years after the building had begun and when the work was stopped it gradually fell into ruin, which was accelerated by a major earthquake in 1755.

Next to the ruined Mosque stands the Mausoleum of Mohammed V. where we wondered round trying to escape out of the sun whilst taking lots of the pictures of the Tour building.

Oli had heard that Morocco were playing Togo in a football match at the Rabat stadium which wasn't far away and tickets were bound to be cheap so we went along for the outing with him and Fabien. On arrival at the grounds there seemed to be a lot of army and police personnel who all mentioned to us to be extra careful with our bags and there were a lot of pickpockets. Due to Oli’s good, but broken French, he had managed to get the times mixed up and we had arrived 4 hours early. The tickets cost 30Dirhams (3Pounds), we started to get a bit peckish and Oli, along with Hamed (a Moroccan man from Casablanca who we met outside the stadiums grounds, and thought Ben looked like Brad Pitt which gave us all a laugh), went to a shop nearby to get supplies.

Hamed was a kind man and helped us a lot as it appeared he is a regular at the big football matches and he showed us the best and safest places to sit (up high and in the shade wherever possible). At this point just before the match started Emma had called us and Ben got to speak with Heather who told us that she had been in the local newspaper; Ben couldn’t hear very well because the boys were all cheering and shouting in the background in excitement and wanting to sound like the hooligans they are.

The match and atmosphere reminded Kat of the time when her and her sister (Georgina) took their dad to see a match one Father’s Day years ago to see Tottenham Hotspur play a friendly with Reading… Hamed sat with us and he was very passionate about his team, which was funny to watch when there was a near goal because he jumped up out of his seat screaming as if he'd sat on hot coals.

Fabien was cheering for the underdogs, Togo, and we stuck with Morocco (for they were the better players and we had to be loyal to the country we resided in).

After the football which ended in 0-0, Oli and Fabien went to an African music concert that same night which was on for 3days over the weekend, whilst we were pretty tired after the long day and shared a taxi back to the centre of Rabat with Hamed.

There were two music concerts on that weekend and we managed to get to both of them. The first was on the coast and was a French festival to celebrate the first day of summer and had a selection of local big bands, our favourite being a hip hop group called Fez City Clan

where one of the main rappers was a 13 year old boy - amazing. Whilst they were playing a group of guys next to us started to body pop and break dance to the music, which was really good and reminded of us of some of the nights out in Bristol. We have a few videos but have no idea if we can post them on here, we might try and put them on Facebook in the meantime.

The second concert was a variety of African music that ranged from acoustic guitars to loud yelping. We ate toasted corn on the cobs and homemade crisps that were sooo salty. Unfortunately we didn't stay that long at this one as we both had delicate stomachs and

we didn't enjoy some of the music as much as we had on the other night, however it was very different and on one of the performances, the dancing was crazy.

The women were going nuts on stage, scantily clad and thrusting parts of their body all over the shop. It gave us the impression that the women in Africa are much more sexually liberated then the ones we saw in Morocco, which was quite refreshing really,

From the moment we became friends with Fabien, he quickly became a legend in the boy's eyes as the 42yr old man seemed to have a girl in every port so to speak. He was visiting one of his girlfriends, Sana who lives in Sale, whilst he was in Morocco. She's from a traditional Muslim family so her relationship with him was a secret. It was lovely to get to know her in the little time we spent with her as she seemed so friendly and loved Fabien to pieces. One night the 4 of us went out for a very rare beer and stumbled through a broken French and English conversation which was good fun. It is illegal to drink in public outside an establishment here so we were sat amongst the prostitutes, dodgy police officers and other punters. It was because of this, photos inside the place were strictly a no no. We drank 2 types of beer, we can't remember the first it was that good but the second was called 'special' which was 5.5%, cost 15d a bottle and what everyone in the bar was drinking. We were a little merry after the 2 rounds and had to go back to the hostel that night and cook for 8 people. Oli’s friend Matt arrived that day for the festival in Essouara along with 2 new guys who they got speaking to, Kory the Canadian and Eddie the American who had grown up in Kenya. Both were traveling through to Senegal and like ourselves needed to get the Mauritania visa from Rabat.

Getting our first visas was like taking an exam that you hadn’t revised for. We didn’t complete the form fully because it was all in French and our French is pretty bad; Oli helped us a little but we didn’t want to lean on him too much as we saw he was struggling as well. We paid 680d for the two and had to wait till the following day to find out the result, worried that we would be rejected and wondered if that was the case would we get our money back… Luckily we passed first time and got the 30day transit visa for Mauritania.

Whilst in Rabat we also went to get a Nigerian visa, but after walking an hour there the receptionist said they only issue visas for Moroccan residents. On the way back we stopped at an authentic Italian restaurant which to Ben’s surprise sold Calzone that he regretted a little later after he wolfed it all down. We had olives and bread to start which meant the main was a little struggle even though Ben ate all of his and some of Kat’s; we took 3 slices with us and being all pizzed out gave them some homeless men sat in the shade near the Medina.

On the last day in Rabat we went to a huge beach near Sale in the early morning that Fabien had found earlier in the week; it was about 45mins away on the bus so Oli, Fabien, Kory, Matt and ourselves boarded the bus and headed to the coast where Sana would meet us. On the bus we got chatting to a Moroccan who was a Nuclear scientist at the Rabat research facility and was so passionate about his work, he got brochures out and started explaining to us about the machinery he works with and the intricate details of his profession. He offered to show us around his work but we had to decline as we wouldn’t be in the area much longer. We imagine it would have been interesting, but it was way over our heads.

We had to walk a fair way to the beach which was busy and full of people asking us if we wanted to buy things, we were asked 8 times to see if we wanted parasols in the 100yards walk from the start of the beach to the sea! Fabien had mentioned it was a swimming beach, but the sea had a really strong undercurrent and had waves you could easily surf on (if we could surf). We did little sun bathing as it was hot and took it in turns to look after the bags whilst we swam.

It was there where we said our goodbyes to Fabien and Sana before returning to the Mauritanian embassy to collect our visas and then said goodbye to Oli, Kory and Matt once we had exchanged contact addresses etc. The two of us returned to the hostel to collect bags and with a little help from the woman in charge, we got on the right bus towards the gare routerier for our onward travel to Marrakech.

Rabat, Morocco