Wednesday 18th of October 2023
Awake gone 8 am, and dressed and down for breakfast for 9 am. A fabulous breakfast, warm flat breads, butter, marmalade for me. Anthony had pancakes with fresh banana and chocolate sauce. Fresh orange juice and milky for both of us. At home I would have my coffee black and strong, but with the coffee as it was presented in Morocco, the milky version tasted best.
After Breakfast it was time to walk into the town. Our first task was to find a chemist.
Anthony had to present a prescription from the French health system to present to the chemist there, for him to get medicines that now were available off prescription in Morocco for him to take back to France where such meds were no longer available. The chemist was generous towards him and gave him forty pills rather than the suggested prescription number of twenty eight.
Getting 2000 Dirhams out of the bank proved to be much more of a trail. First Anthony wanted to try his card in a hole-in-the-wall machine. He was half blinded by the sunlight so that he could barely read the screen. From his reading of the screen he thought he was going to get his money out and a receipt. When neither appeared he asked the staff inside for assistance. They assisted him, he got his card back and the assurance that he had not lost the money but he had misread the screen's instructions. Then we drove around the block to park the rental car in a better place and take a break from the stress of cash machines after the previous altercation. It was my turn to try and the first machine I tried had a touch sensitive screen and I tried using my debit card. The sun was a serious impediment to reading what was on the screen, but it was clear that the machine was not accepting the card. Enter a Moroccan policeman telling us that the care was inappropriately parked. He was calmed when I produced both our passports from my black bag. With the car moved to a place that disturbed the local police less, we found another hole in the wall and this time I could read the screen better and it had buttons to press at the side which was an improvement on previous attempts. I tried the debit card card and the machine did not want to recognise it. So I tried the credit card and slowly got the hang of interpreting the instructions. With the first two attempts I got used to cancelling the transaction and retrieving the card. At the third go, and speaking out the instructions on the screen to Anthony beside me, who told me what to press we got the better of the instructions and got the money and a receipt. All by 11 am. The point being that for me at least, in my home country I would usually fill in a withdrawal queue and get money from a live bank teller, partly to slow down the bank automating it's services. But in Morocco the hole in the wall was what we had to work with.
The walk back to the hotel was via a wander around the only French-style supermarket in the town, there was nothing there for us-at least not today.
Anthony wanted to see the mountains close to Sidi Ifni, so between 12 noon and 3.30 pm we were on the roads out and around the town. For lack of vehicles on the road, the power steering of the car making the drive so comfortable. and the dramatic backdrops we passed through, we could have been in a very long car advert. Not that cars in adverts stop to give lifts like we did. Twice we stopped and gave local men twenty to thirty minute journeys to the next town from seemingly random stop point on the road.
Soon after we arrived back at the hotel a group of motorcyclists stopped and parked their bikes close to each other, in front of the hotel, with a large moving/storage van full of who-knows-what in terms of bike mechanics connected to the bikers as back up. Their arrival and settling in rooms in the hotel, and then having afternoon drinks outside was all quite a show of activity, added to by the display of workaday masculinity where the local boys were particularly impressed by the bikes and some of their mothers got permission for the boys to sit on the bikes and be photographed on them.
Our evening meal was fish surrounded by salted ice, with side portions of stuffed aubergine. it looked impressive when it was served. The hotel had agreed the meal with Anthony in the afternoon, where if they did tell him what sort of fish it was then his hearing aid did not help him catch and pass on to me that bit of information on to me. But the town was known for being a fishing port and went with the flow about the fish. It tasted okay, and there was plenty of it. Part of me would have liked a few different veg for more variety of flavour. The bikers were again the centre of attention as the dozen or so of them ate together, and collectively decided to eat their main course in front of the hotel, by taking their tables and chairs there, by agreement with the staff.
Read more of 'Carn'-Patrick McCabe before bed. I could admire how he satirised small town Ireland by reframing his fictional Irish small town as one of the many small American towns where in the late sixties the presentation of pop music on vast temporarily erected stages nearby became like some new kind of circus coming to town. Woodstock and Monterey were the names of the towns that came to my mind. I could admire his satires of certain English towns whose previous characters were warped by forced expansion, and later similar changes were wrought by dramatic economic shrinkage. But sometimes the grafting of different imported realities onto his fictional Irish town took more than a stretch of imagination, it stretched credibility. Anthony was mostly puzzled at what McCabe seemed to be doing, he had seen the Irish town McCabe was writing about for real, in the 1960s.
The third day was over.
Please left click here for Day Four of this diary.
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