Prayers Answered

The Blue Sky Blues ended this week after another round of national prayers. We were sitting in the Dentist's in Agadir on Monday (not for me this time, for Beloved) and saw pictures of supplies being airlifted to people in snow. We thought it was Syria at first but it turned out to be the Rif. The screen changed to flooding near Tangiers. In Agadir  and Taroudant it was fearsomely windy but we had no precipitation. By Thursday there was snow on the Atlas 

but rain came only Friday night. More is forecast for today so the terrace furniture remains inside. Meanwhile there are pictures of Ifrane looking like a ski resort again so that should please the Court.

Calendar Days

Well I know we've just had Chinese New Year but we're in February and Islamic New Year isn't until October so that doesn't explain why people started to give us calendars last week. The one from the pharmacy was of the traditional type that all pharmacists get printed for customers and maybe we just got it then because we had not been to the pharmacy before this year, but the one from the coffee shop was a much more flamboyant affair with lots of attractive views of Morocco. 

What I couldn't understand was why a shop selling only coffee beans and the odd packet of spice to flavour it  would give us a calender promoting olive oil!

A Brownie-points Millionaire

Beloved has excelled himself today.  Whilst I did not even manage a proper birthday card for him, he produced a Valentine card! Purchased in Wales and brought and concealed from me till this morning. He had to buy before Valentines were in the shops but found a messageless card with a heart. His brownie points are infinite. I'm just a little bothered about what he'll cash them in for because as a former colleague used to say  "you can spend ages building up the brownie point account but when you cash it in you have to remove the whole balance at once" and, of course, if you leave it too long you find you've been paying negative interest.

Essaouira fishing port

We took the Quaker and the Geek to Essaouira which is a good place to take guests as it is quite compact and they don't need babysitting. We now always stay at the Palazzo Desdemona which is convenient for the car park but also just by the entrance to the souk close to the port and the beach, so you can't really get lost.
The Quaker still being bonkers for cold swims meant that they went to the beach. She was delighted to find that, it being school holidays here, there were camel rides at the far end of the beach. Sadly they did not have a camera with them to record this for posterity. The beach is not my sort of beach because it is entirely tidal and there are no fixed loungers to read in. It is much more like the Atlantic beaches of my childhood when sand got into your sandals,sandwiches, socks, towels and clothes but strangely has no deck chairs to rent for you to carry out onto the wet sand.
We left them to it and went to the fishing port where they were bringing in the sardine catch.

The fish were already in crates on ice and were handed up. 

People were coming up and buying boxes or sometimes just a bag  on the quay. The seagulls were happy. So were some of the feral cats. I have never understood the Westerners attitude to cats in Essaouira. Yes they are very good at begging if you are eating but will disdain the scraps which are not to their taste. There are charities set up by sentimental westerners to feed the cats. Some bring tinned food from Marrakesh! This is a fishing port. The scavaging is good!

We stayed a while and watched the boats. Most of the activity was in the inner harbour with the small boats but a few of the larger boats were moving in the outer harbour. 

Then we wandered round looking at the nets on the dock.

The larger boats seem to fish with nets but some of the smaller boats seem to fish with lines with muliple branches. Surely this can't be for sardines though!?

What They Bought

I've known the Quaker 40 years and never thought of her as being into stuff and buying things but it turns out I was completely wrong because the Geek and she bought more  to take home than any of our other guests and had brought an empty suitcase to carry it in. She said she preferred buying this than "tourist tat" so I leave you to judge.

The Geek bought a made to measure leather jacket and a hat. 

The Quaker bought 5 pairs of slippers and sandals.

A purse and pencil case.

A tremendous amount of well wrapped potions and oils from the Argan co-op.

A child size Burnoose for her grandson to pretend to be a Jedi Knight in.

A child-size silver bangle.

A Thuya wood tray.

A small wooden jigsaw.

A cactus silk scarf

Amalou, both with and without honey, dates, apricots, figs, and a variety of spices, fennel, coriander, cumin, saffron, lemon ginger, orange flower water.

In showing us these it became clear that the Quaker had told the Geek not to buy the things she didn't like but that he liked and would use different things so he went back to the Souk to buy Chillied Olive, Harissa paste and Preserved Lemons.
They did all seem to fit in the suitcase assuming he wore the coat and hat but that left them with 3 hand luggage bags between the two of them so I hope they got home alright.

A Mexican stand-off on the Tizi n' Test

The only upside of last week's collision is that the replacement Swift is not as underpowered as the original Celerio. The Quaker had wanted to go up the Tizi n' Test and Beloved had refused to drive it in the other car but with the bigger engine we went off to Tin Mal yesterday.

We had not been up for 2 years since we took the juggler and were very pleased to find that as the ascent started the road had been repaired. Instead of being 1 1/2 carriage ways wide with potholes and washed out bends it was all newly metalled with 2 carriage widths and a white line down the centre!! This continued for 17 km and the 7km from the col and just when the precipitous drop transferred to our side of the road it stopped and we were on the old surface. 11/2 vehicles wide, potholed, washed out and no planned passing places.

We went to Tin Mal. The guy recognised me again and we had a chat about what Ibn Toumert actually believed. One strand of research suggests that he may have come back a Shi'ite after visiting Iran but others refute this. 

We'd booked lunch at the Belle Vue and as that 30kms over the col to Tin Mal always takes much longer than you expect were expecting it to be a late one. Imagine our dismay when we turned a bend and found a mexican stand-off where a bus had met head on with a lorry on a hairpin.

 As the lorry was stuck between a crash barrier and the wall of rock behind it was clearly up to the bus driver to reverse as the road wad wider behind him. He was refusing to do so. All the passengers got out of the bus and it became a bystander event. The drivers of other vehicles blocked on each side joined in on the lorry driver's side. The bus driver was refusing to give way. 

The drop at this point was quite precipitous and on the lorry driver's side. 

After half an hour common sense prevailed and the bus backed up with much assistance from the passengers. The lorry crawled through and we were on our way to a very late lunch.

Nice Police but too much involvement

The Quaker and the Geek arrived on Saturday.  (He's not as virtually immersed as the Kiwi boys but he works as a systems administrator so to me he's a geek).

 Sunday being market day we took them to the market and Beloved got distracted by us changing our minds about where we were going and shouting directions he could not hear above the crowd and got his pocket dipped. He felt the wallet go and people nearby told us which way the guy had gone but as we didn't know what he looked like pursuit was pointless. There was a relatively small amount of cash but the Wafa bank card was in the wallet.

We hastily rescheduled the week's itinerary  to go to Agadir on Monday to go to the Bank and cancel the card. The Bank were happy to cancel the card, no money was taken form the account, but they told us that they couldn't order a new card until we had obtained an "Accreditation de Pert"  from the police. So we went ahead with the Geek to order a made to measure leather jacket from the leather tailor's and the Quaker and he went for a swim whilst we lounged on the beach and read. This is the Atlantic in winter so we have doubts as to their sanity but they said it was warmer than the North Sea in August. Nice lunch and then we left mid-afternoon to go to Taroudant police for an Accreditation.

When we got by the Saudi Palace there was extremely slow near stationary traffic clearly there was some obstruction. We crawled along. Some cars had tried to get ahead of the queue by driving through the Argan forest but that piste had now run out and they were rejoining from the right. Beloved said "I'm feeling squeezed here."  And suddenly he was. A lorry in the outside lane was veering towards us clearly intent on moving to the inside. Beloved slammed on the horn and stopped. Unfortunately the lorry didn't. It was only after his wheel nuts caught on our car and scraped along starting to pull off the front that he stopped.

We were now causing a tailback with our collision crossing two lanes but as the traffic in front cleared we could see that the original cause was a collision in the outside lane between a grand taxi and a Docker. I would not like to have been on the Docker. 

This was now a major spectacle for bystanders who all had their say and were helpful lending phones for us to call Hertz. After a while police arrived en masse.
It took some time for them to sort everything, measure, speak to witnesses, arrange a second Hertz man to move the battered car, a breakdown van for the taxi etc etc. What we didn't see was an ambulance. (Not for us, thankfully no-one was hurt, but for the docker drive; I think some-one must have taken him in a private car much earlier.) We were then very clearly told we were driving regular and were NOT GUILTY by the Gendarme with good english. However we were told quite sharply by the senior police officer who was snapping at everyone,mostly his own officers, to get in the Hertz guy's car. He was to take us to the police station for Beloved to make a statement. We couldn't argue, partly because we had no transport but mostly because the police were holding on to Beloved's passport and driving licence.
 At the police station The Quaker and the Geek were left outside and we went in and Beloved was told to write a statement in english. This then had to be typed up in french together with passport details, father's name, grandfather's name, mother's name, number of children and nationality. 
This last was problematical as apparently there is no equivalent of "British" in french and produced considerable discussion between the officers in arabic each time it came up. I think we Welsh ended up as "Anglais". The officers were lovely but we didn't leave the police station until about half nine and then we had to go to the airport to get a new car. We got Home about quarter to twelve and to bed at 2.00. 
Nobody'd eaten except me as I went off badly at the airport and had to have a sandwich. I lost it with the clerk because they were charging us for not returning the damaged car full of petrol so we got no credit for the petrol in it. As we already knew we were going to be stung for the excess of £1000 together with the non-sterling currency charge of £150  which the credit card company will charge on it the petrol fee seemed the last straw for an accident which was entirely somebody else's fault. We have little hope that Hertz's insurers will bother to recover the excess and pay it to us.
Yesterday we went to Taroudant police to ask for the "Accreditation de Pert". The first guy we saw told us very clearly in French that you could not have one except for passports and ID cards.  I asked could he give us a letter saying that to take to the bank. We seemed to have stalemate. Fortunately he spoke to his boss who had good english and agreed to give us one as "it is the administration's job to find a solution". He seemed quite regretful that we hadn't reported the theft of Sunday. We said as we could not describe the thief there was no chance they could catch him. He said he would have caught him because he knew all the thieves in Taroudant and would get them in and line them up and ask them if they'd stolen from two foreigners. If they said "No"  he mimed slapping them about the face and said they'd confess. We explained you couldn't do that any more in Britain and he looked shocked.