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We are woken up by the musicians. They come stamping around the camp shortly after seven, standing by the flap of each tent and banging their drums. It certainly beats the hey-hey-hey Mickey Mouse message they played down the phones on a press trip to Disneyland Paris a couple of years back.

Today we were leaving. Not just the camp, but Morocco, too. The 4×4s had disappeared late yesterday afternoon, and now we were loaded onto a couple of dusty mini-buses and driven back down from the plateau and onto a fairly good road that took us back to the city in less than an hour.

When you use the good roads - like this one - you really see how different Morocco is to home. We passed by a boy at the side of the road sitting on an oil drum. All around him were ranged a series of smaller cans full of petrol he was selling, perhaps for the bikes that would never make it from one well-spaced station to the next. And there were no hoardings, either, save for the occasional notice of a coming development. There were no Gap billboards or McDonalds arches, no designer labels, and certainly nothing offering two of anything for the price of just one. It was quite refreshing.

The airport was less-so. Its bland, dingy terminal one is being renovated, with a beautiful entrance hall and a solar power plant, but the actual area where you queue and wait for your plane is nothing special. The x-ray people gave our bags a cursory glance and they told us to walk through the metal detectors without emptying our pockets. They beeped, of course, but the guard that stood beside them just rubbed his hands briefly across us, and never asked for an explanation of any wallet, key or belt bumps.

The whole airport felt unnaturally relaxed and laid back when you knew how frenetic the city it served was, just a couple of miles across an olive grove.

We put down in Casablanca, to drop people off and fill their seats with new passengers, and our 25 minute stopover turned into a 90 minute delay as an argument broke out at the back of the cabin between the ground and air crews. It was something to do with the forms the man from the ground crew kept waving close to their faces, but nobody seemed to want to sign them.

A compromise was arrived at, eventually, and the doors were close and we moved just slightly.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the captain, speaking over the intercom. ‘It seems that our slot is no longer available at Heathrow, and we’re going to be delayed.’

A collective groan rang out through the plane, which I suspect was less to do with the delay and more with his fibbing. Our slot was probably lost over an hour before, though no fault of Heathrow.

I think I preferred out over-honest pilot coming over.

Technorati Tags:
africa, marrakech, morocco

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Journal, Travel, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.