Moving from place to place is a big part of the adventure of independent travel, but sometimes it’s a tiresome, hot mess.  The trip from Seville, Spain to Tangier, Morocco included a bus ride, a ferry ride and a border crossing from the European Union into Morocco.  When I say border crossing just picture in your mind standing in long lines, lots of lines.  There is the immigration line to get out of the EU, the security check to get on the ferry, passport control to get into Morocco and customs to have our bags checked.  Normally customs is not a big problem, but on this day, the Moroccans coming home had piles and piles of huge suitcases that had to be run through the x-ray machine.

Our travel day began at the uncivilized hour of 3:45 a.m., as we left our hotel to catch the taxi we had booked the night before.  As the hotel door locked behind us, I was keeping my fingers crossed that the taxi showed up because our back-up plan was to strap on the backpacks and walk the mile to the bus station.  Luckily he arrived just a couple of minutes late and got us to the completely closed down bus station.  There were a few people milling around but no staff and the information board about where to find our bus was dark.  So we waited downstairs where the bus bays are and our 4:30 a.m. departure time came and went with a few buses coming and going.  Finally a bus showed up from a different bus company than what was on our ticket and I just happened to ask about it…”yes, that is your bus”.  I’m not sure how we would have known, but we found it and it was packed with people going home to Morocco.  They had been on the bus all night and it was hot, humid and smelled of food and bodies.  We got the last two seats (not together) crammed our bags into an already stuffed baggage hold and we were off.

As we got to the ferry terminal in the town of Tarifa, everyone started gathering their belongings. We weren’t sure what was going on…did I mention that the bus driver did not speak English and only made announcements in Arabic and Spanish? The one word I did catch was passaporte so I got out our passports and sure enough the driver came through and collected everyone’s passport.  After a while the driver came back and distributed our passports and ferry tickets (he held my passport to the end because he couldn’t pronounce my name – Tina).  We all gathered up our things including all of the luggage from underneath the bus and got in line to board the ferry.

The ferry was packed and included the Moroccan passport control line.  The ferry docked in Tangier an hour later and we were still standing in the line to get our passports stamped.  The customs line inside the terminal was very long and not moving, so the guards pulled those of us with just backpacks into a separate line and sent us ahead of the people with piles of suitcases, to try and get the line moving.  A woman in the line that was still not moving started yelling at the guards and then all of the ladies yelled and made a high pitched trilling sound.  We scurried out as fast as possible.

We walked the fifteen minutes to our hotel.  We are smiling in the picture but we still had one more hill to climb up to the Hotel Continental and our room’s air conditioning.