Day 21 - Leaving Africa

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So we woke up early (6am), checked out of our hostel and caught a taxi to the train station. The Cabbie took us to the wrong station. I still think it was on purpose but Nick claimed it was an honest mistake. Regardless, we made it to the right station (the Main Station), bought our tickets, grabbed a quick breakfast and got onto the train. Didn't get the best sleep as we were in tight quarters. When we woke up and inquired as to where we were, we soon realized we had missed our connecting station. Of course, nobody was kind enough to advise us we had to make any sort of connection in the first place! So a few hours past our supposed connection station, we got off the train and jumped on another one, backtracking in the right direction. We had to make another connection around noon. This station was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. We didn't have any money for lunch and Visa/Interac was out of the question. Bartering didn't even work. After suffering from fatigue, the heat, and hunger, desperation set in. We cabbed to a bank, came back with cash, and ate our lunch. We waited for the train, listening to our music, playing hackey sack, anything to kill time. As soon as our train came, we jumped on (an hour early) just to be able to enjoy the air conditioning.

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Three hours later we ended up in Tangiers - it was about 7pm and starting to get dark. We were told our return tickets were no longer valid because the ferry we booked with was no longer running due to the wind and waves. We bought new tickets and I managed to sell off our useless ones to some guy for a decent price. We waited for a ferry for half an hour, just happy to get off the continent...

A different country, in fact...a different continent.

We did the whole security check, once inside the terminal and again en route to the ferry. We trotted down to the entrance of the ferry to find out we had been sold the wrong tickets! The security guy, about our age, probably felt bad for us and led us back to the ticket selling store. He helped us return our tickets to the guy who sold them to us - he pretended like he didn't know the wiser and couldn't find the receipt - good thing I had mine! So in the end we bought the right tickets from another store for half the price. We finally made our way onto the ferry.

We took our seats, just looking forward to getting across the water, back to Algeciras as we couldn't get to Tarifa due to weather and ferry issues. The ferry was delayed about 2 hours. It finally left at 10pm. To top it all off, the cafeteria wouldn't take the durhams (Morrocco's currency) and we had to do some serious convincing to get some food (and beer).

We realized along that ferry ride that they weren't kidding about the weather. It was hell-ish. The ferry was rocking worse than any amusement ride...and constantly. There were dishes constantly breaking, people constantly falling, babies crying, and people puking. None of this helped our already weakened stomachs. We finally got to Algeciras at 1am and of course there we no buses leaving anytime soon. The earliest bus was 8:30am and we were sick of travelling. Instead of bothering looking for or spending money on a hostel/hotel, we just decided to camp out. It wasn't that cold and we found a location away from everyone else. We locked our bags to our benches, tucked into our sleeping bags, and tried to get a couple hours of sleep til sunrise.