Thursday May 7th The best breakfast yet, and the best views out over the valley to the blue hazed hills beyond, to go with our food. The best coffee too. We both had thirds from the flask. The choice of what to put on our bread and pancakes included home made Tahini, something I liked but I would never have thought of it as a breakfast spread, and home made marmalade. It was worth taking a long time over our food. There was no drama with our packing this time, nothing seemed lost and everything was checked twice before our walk into town to get money to pay the hotel bill.
The town is too small to have a hole-in-the-wall banking facility, so we got a ticket and joined the queue of about ten people at the recessed entrance of the local post office, where whilst he was waiting Anthony checked just how much money he had on him. He decided that it seemed like enough to pay the hotel bill, so we risked it and left the queue, nobody wanted Anthony's ticket. To be clear, everybody in the queue looked a bit dejected. We admired the articulated lorry/trailer that was the mobile eye clinic that had parked locally, and the many brightly coloured doors, all in different colours. At my suggestion we briefly looked in on the souk. After admiring the goat who quietly bleated at the back of the covered concrete square that passed for the vegetable market I discover that it is hat buying time again.
Anthony knows me by now, I admire what is in front of me and make a bee line for the clothes stall to find the coloured hats with desert designs on them, camels, towers, and similar visuals. To reduce his sense of impatience or discomfort with me he helps me choose the right hat faster, if he says that a hat is 'Lurid' then I know it is the hat for me. Purchase made we walk back to the hotel, paid the bill and exchange last pleasantries, and get in the now comfortably laden car. Our first task was to patiently negotiate the bunged market day traffic where there were laden lorries and vans going in both directions down the narrow street.
We threaded our way back through Paradise Valley which remained as stunning as the first time we passed through it. For my seeing the valley from the opposite side of the car to yesterday the views were different. E.g. in the cafe next to the shallow stream the cafe owner had put different coloured plastic tables and chairs in the stream so that customers could cool their feet in the water whilst eating. I enjoyed seeing that simple thoughtfulness, a lot. Anthony made our exit at a different point from where he entered the valley yesterday. to take us through a different part of Tiznit, to make for the vastness of Central Agadir.
Between Tiznit and Agadir the traffic was light, the travelling seemed easy. There were no cairns at the side of the road. The ribbon development also seemed much reduced. Agadir came into view quite slowly, but it got bigger and bigger, and bigger again, until it seemed HUGE to me. It was, by far, the biggest place we had visited in Morocco. From the outskirts of the city, where the kings name was imprinted into the side of the biggest hill to the centre took at least an hour of our travel time and it probably took nearer ninety minutes. But I enjoyed how we alternately hurtled and crawled along multi-lane roads and traffic light systems, as if we were a car-shaped pinball in a pinball machine. Anthony somehow knew which lane to be in, and stopped about four times to ask for directions, each time he asked we did not know how many more times we would have to ask, but we felt that we were getting closer, according to the rough map we had.
The hotel Anthony had read up about was called Hotel Kalam and I spotted it after about the fourth time of Anthony asking for directions and those directions getting him closer along the wide roads of fast moving traffic, but not at the place itself. We retraced our way back along very few of the roads in attempting to find the hotel, except for very short runs where we could see that we had missed our turn or we went twice around roundabout. If our map was rather limited, then the passers by who Anthony asked served us much better.
Settling in was easy, and a relief though there was a sense of 'journey's end approaching' between us. After settling in our first task was to find the hole in the wall from which to draw money, that proved easy though with the road repairs and remaking the pavements that was going on I had to really watch where I put my feet, awkward when there was also so much to see around me. Since my flight left before dawn I had to ask the the desk at the entrance to book a taxi. Anthony had no reason to drive me there when he did not know the way, disliked driving at night, and needed his sleep, and taxis were cheap. So I counted the money on me and they booked my taxi, they were surprised at the time I chose. I had a feeling that I would not be able to sleep before the taxi took me away so I asked for a midnight taxi even though it was well ahead of when I expected to leave. They wanted me to leave 2 am or 3 am, but I insisted on midnight. Apart from anything else I wanted Anthony to not be disturbed by my departure.
That fixed we were free for the afternoon. So we were free to look for coffee and cake. Soon we,found a very modern, very clean, looking coffee house with a choice of tempting looking cakes. The interior architecture of the coffee shop was what drew us in, along with the rare looking cacti in boxes all around the edge of the canopied space. Anthony took softwood cuttings of a couple of the plants, who knows? They might take and have a life i France.
After a few photo opportunities and some other minor fooling around we walked back towards the hotel, which was only ten minutes walk down the street, but very slowly. With the pavements as uneven as they were concentration was required.
Anthony suggested we go to the pool in the hotel. My swimming trunks found their use for the only time they would this holiday, Anthony wore his underpants and we were tow of very few people lounging and splashing about. The water was pleasantly cool, I swam several ten metre lengths of the pool and Anthony took some time in the water too. I don't know when I last swam in an artificial pool, but it was never anything like this, where the air was as warm as anyone could want and the palm trees gave us their shadow to cool ourselves under.
More packing and repacking in the early evening and then we set to read quietly, and wait until dinner, where unlike previous places we had stayed we did not know where we were going to eat in advance. Darkness was in the air when we went to look for a restaurant and when Anthony could see where we should go, then it was across a broad, busy, and seriously dug up, road. He went ahead and did not see me trip and fall headlong, as I followed. I broke my fall with my left forearm and feared for my glasses being broke but nothing like that happened. No real damage done, beyond sensing my own fragility afresh, in a minor way.
The meal was great, a Mozzarella cheese salad, the first proper green salad we had found in our travels, where one of the standard warnings was 'Beware of the salads' because they may or may not have been properly washed before being presented. It did not not matter one jot or mouthful to us that the cheese that was called Mozarella was surely not what the Italians had in mind when they coined the name of the cheese. It was not made from buffalo's milk, more surprising was to see our green salad garnished with very long, very thin, strips of cucumber peel. That was a bit of recycling to admire.
We had to leave the restaurant by 9 pm, which we did and I was much more careful walking back but then I could, there was no urgency in getting back. Anthony and I were in our beds in the dark for ten, I had set the alarm on my smart phone, a function that I did not know it had until I went through it's list of functions. I was not going to sleep anyway, knowing that when the alarm went off I would be getting up and going out, and informally at least it was the end of the holiday.
For the last day of this Holiday Memoir please click here.
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