But Africa Wins Again!Morocco is without a doubt the hardest place I’ve ever been to fight your way onto the internet. Having succeeded: often after hours of frustratingly trying, it’s rare you stay on line for long, before the operation is timed out, or signal to server lost.
Mind you, on the plus side, the Wi-Fi is free wherever I’ve been in Morocco.
But I think I’d rather pay for a reasonable and reliable service!
In Egypt, at the Red Sea resort of Hurghada, just before Christmas, (ie just before the Egyptian Uprising against Mubarak), e-mail and internet connections cost 100 Egyptian pounds —around US$10 — a day.
Dearest I’ve ever paid (and only to send out a major hard news story about a Somali pirate attack)was US$30 for HALF an hour: the standard charge on cruise liners, with their captive audiences, nowadays.
A Zimbo pal was totally horrified on booking out of a Dubai four-star hotel last month to be hit with a bill for US$720 for his niece’s interline bill for a three-night stay. Now that is wrong. Either provide a free service, or charge in advance so the client knows what the financial commitment is.
Skyping feeAs dearly as I love my family, I can’t think how I’d react if my sister’s 17-year-old daughter ran up a US$720 bill for me by constantly Skyping a boy she promptly dumped on returning to Ha-ha-ha-rare (Africa’s fun capital!) a week later.
So, at this stage, I can’t tell you how large Morocco is as compared to Zimbabwe; or how many hotels and rooms there are, what percentage occupancy they enjoy, nor the relative importance of tourism on Rabat’s economy. (Watch this space, after I return to civilisation tomorrow.)
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However, I’m staying at Agadir, an important sea resort on the Atlantic seaboard in southern Morocco.
It’s funny that as you go through life (I find), you’ve never heard of a place, person, book, piece of music, event or even word one day and — voila! — it crops up immediately afterwards.
I first learnt of Agadir as the scene of “the Morocco Incident” (in which the German Navy almost started World War I five or six years early!) in a history lesson. That very night, in 1960, I delivered hundreds of copies of the local paper announcing the place had been almost totally destroyed by a terrible earthquake.
Tropical/sub-tropicalThe tremor killed 15 000 people: then about a third of the population and the King ordered the old place razed to avoid disease in this tropical climate in a sub-tropical latitude. I didn’t know about that aspect until I did briefly manage to consult Dr Yahoo and Professor Google on the subject at the hotel.And that was AFTER I went unsuccessfully yomping around the Centre-Ville (Morocco, although a kingdom in the same dynasty for almost 1 000 years, was a colony of Spain and France for over a century) with my trusty Canon camera at the ready to capture images of venerable mosques, minarets, slave markets and fortresses.
Other than the indigenous population, the Carthaginians were first here; the Portuguese ruled from 1505 and Denmark gained the monopoly of its trade in 1751, but I was puzzled to find few if any buildings appeared older than me!
I now know that’s because hardly any construction survived the earthquake; most of “new” Agadir was built at least five kilometres from the “old”. (Rather like the “new” Umtali (Mutare) was re-built several miles from the original settlement, when the line of the railway to Beira was confirmed as having to by-pass the first town, due to the mountains.)
What survived, here, was possibly Agadir’s most attractive architectural feature: the Kasbah, a veritable eyrie perched 236 metres above sea level. Built in 1540 by Mohammed ech Cheikh as a starting point to launch his offensive against the Portuguese occupation and restored in 1752, it is a fine vantage point with a magnificent view of the sea and Agadir’s attractive beach: said to be the longest in Morocco.
I’ll be sorry to leave Agadir tomorrow after a very relaxing fortnight’s beach holiday with seemingly endless hours spent swimming in the warm gentle (at this spot) Atlantic Ocean, but rural Oxfordshire and my gorgeous grand-children call. At least for a few days when — subject to the recent vagaries of AirZim — I SHOULD be returning home after a month’s sanity break!
If I could see far enough across the breakers from my hotel, I’d be looking at the Spanish Canary Islands. But that’s according to one map I’ve seen here, which also tells me Mauritania lies to the east of us. According to another map displayed at the GereRouters (long distance coach station) Algeria is actually the nation to the east of us. I tend to go with that version!
What did we do before we could (sometimes!) call up Google Earth to check these things?
I can’t remember! If you can, let me know!
