November – December 2013
INTRO
Morocco, finally! For years, I would hear “wait, you haven’t been to Morocco yet?”, or “you’ve been to Kyrgyzstan but not Morocco?!”
It’s not that I didn’t want to go to Morocco — I have been wanting to come here forever! — it’s just that there’s SO much to see in Morocco that I knew that when I did go, I’d need weeks to see it all, and with my (at-the-time) job-imposed ‘travel limit’ of no more than two weeks, I just didn’t have enough time to do Morocco! So, the minute I got a new job, you know I started planning!
Of course, if I was going to do Morocco, then I’d have to see Western Sahara and the Canary Islands too, because hello, they’re right there! AND I’d have to see the Alhambra, which I skipped in 1999 to see Bilbao instead!
So, it morphed into an epic road trip starting in Madrid (actually in amazing Salzburg, thanks to a long layover!), and driving down through Andalusian Granada and Málaga to Gibraltar — then finally a ferry to Africa, but not Morocco yet! The ferry docked in Ceuta, Spanish Morocco, where I then took one of the only two land border crossings from Europe into Africa!