Our dash to Casa (as it’s called by locals) was purely a Mac rescue mission. We called the Apple repair centre the day before to ensure they had the right hard-drive in stock and jumped in the car as soon as my classes had finished at 11am. We hoped to make it there by 2pm so that the computer could be fixed in time for us to drive back the same day.
After printing off some basic street maps we hit the road by 11.30, planning to get straight on the motorway to Rabat – the same road we’d arrived by a few weeks earlier. Vince was sure he knew the way but after driving around in circles for about half an hour we were still no closer to even leaving Fes. A policeman’s directions left us clueless and it wasn’t until we got lucky by asking a guy in a van for help that we got anywhere – he was heading the same way and motioned for us to follow him. Finally at 12.15 we were on the right road. Why is it that when time is of the essence that everything goes wrong? On the way to Casa we were pulled over the police THREE times. Not because we were doing anything wrong, simply because we were driving a foreign registered car and they wanted to give us a once-over. We started to realise how it must feel to be a turban-wearing, bearded Arab trying to get through a Western airport. The first two times my minimal Darija had a positive effect – the stern looking cops broke into wide grins when I greeted them with “Sbah-l-kheer, labass? Kulshi bikhiir? l hamdu llah” etc and very quickly waved us on. The third cop wasn’t impressed however and asked for our insurance papers (which we now had!), then Vince’s license. The policeman said in French that we had failed to stop properly at a stop sign (total bollocks). Thankfully he was addressing me (because our steering wheel is on the ‘wrong’ side now he had approached the passenger window) and I pretended not to understand what he was saying. Vince also kept silent and hoped he wouldn’t query why a man with a French driving license couldn’t speak French! After repeating himself a few more times and us responding with blank expressions, he gave up and walked away.
The shambolic nature of our trip continued when we eventually reached the outskirts of Casablanca. This time it was my poor map reading skills (or the crappy map – the excuse I prefer!) that sent us way off course. We were hopelessly lost and overwhelmed by the size of the city and the lack of street names, so decided to ditch the car and take a taxi. It was now after 3pm. We scouted around for a landmark to leave the car by so we could find it again later and found a large hospital. After questioning a local we wrote down the name of the hospital and the suburb we were in and grabbed a cab. The cabbie’s eyes widened when we showed him where we wanted to go – we were nowhere near where we thought we were and it was a long way to the store. However, after a few wrong turns we finally made it to the Apple repair shop by 4pm. They had been expecting us but as it was now so late the guy said he couldn’t have the hard-drive replaced until the following morning. We had nowhere to stay and needed to be back in Fes for appointments early in the morning. In despair I laid my head in my hands on the counter and looked distraught. Vince hurriedly explained that we’d driven all the way from Fes, had a nightmare getting here and had to leave again that night. The combination of Vince’s begging and my feigned distress caused the guy to take pity on us and he relented. He promised the computer would be ready by 6.30pm.
Jubilant (and starving!) we headed to a restaurant on the corner and celebrated with caprese salad and pizza – both rarely found on menus in Fes. Sitting in that restaurant, surrounded by the traffic-packed streets of Casablanca and watching three trendily dressed youngsters – a girl and two guys socialising and flirting – at a neighbouring table, it seemed a whole world away from the traditional medina of Fes. With not a head scarf in sight, pizza on the table and members of the opposite sex socialising without chaperones it was a very different Morocco from the one we had experienced so far. The setting threw into sharp relief just how unique medina-life in Fes really is (I will talk about the experience of living in such a traditional society later).
The phone rang at 6.15pm – my lap-top was fixed and ready to be collected. When the guy demonstrated my Mac working again I was ridiculously happy. We headed back out onto the street and spent 30 minutes trying unsuccessfully to get a taxi – it was rush hour and the ‘Petit Taxis’ we did manage to flag down would not take us to our destination. We went back to the restaurant and asked the waiter to call us a cab, which he tried repeatedly with no avail. Eventually he drew us a map on a napkin and directed us to the nearest ‘Grande Taxi’ rank. Once there we hopefully approached the man in charge – it was now nearly 7.30pm. He also balked at the distance of our destination and suggested we ask a ‘Petit Taxi’. “But the Petit Taxis told us to get a Grande Taxi, and now you’re telling us to get a Petit!” I complained in my best French. “We have money, we know it’s far but we just need to get home please!” He went over to one of the cabs and had a long discussion, during which we silently pleaded with the God of Taxis to get us on our way. Finally he motioned us over and we got gratefully into the cab. “So, you know where we’re going?” Vince asked the driver. “No,” he replied, “I don’t know the hospital but I know the suburb. I’ll just ask someone when we get there.”
Too tired to care and just relieved to be going somewhere we sat back and watched him negotiate the hectic Casablanca traffic. We got stuck behind an accident for a while but eventually began to recognise some of the streets. “It’s definitely somewhere around here,” I said. Mr Cabbie pulled over to ask a passer-by for directions but after several minutes of head-scratching it appeared that he had never heard of the hospital. This started a pattern that was to be repeated for the next hour or so as we drove round and round in circles. “Hospital Moulay Rachid? I have no idea” was the common refrain. We must have asked about 15 people, including other cab drivers in the area, but the hospital no longer seemed to exist. Our cabbie resorted to doing lines of snuff from the back of his hand while driving as a way to quell his rising frustration.
Finally, miraculously, as we drove down yet another random street, the hospital appeared before us. Stressed to the gills but relieved to be close to escaping Casa, we gave the patient cab driver a hefty payment and limped back to our car. It was 9pm. It had taken us nearly three hours to find our way back to the car and we had a three hour drive ahead of us. Thankfully the demon of lost drivers had finally tired of playing with us and we managed to get onto the highway home without drama. The rest of the trip passed fairly uneventfully (except that after filling up with petrol the station didn’t take foreign cards and Vince had to hike down the road with an orange-jumpsuited station attendant to the nearest Shell garage…) and we finally got home at 1am.
And maybe it was because we’d had such a hellish journey, or maybe it was because the contrast between Casablanca and Fes medina had been so marked, but when we wandered through the peaceful car-free streets of the medina back to our house, we both felt relieved and grateful to be able to call such a place home.
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