"Chaos in Casablanca" The beginnings of Explore Africa- part 6

Finally the time came for the three different expeditions to each depart on their own adventures. Our first destination was of course Casablanca, Morocco, from where we would start making our way down to Cameroon in Central Africa. Along the way we would make longer stops to serve missionaries in Senegal, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon.

From Nigeria we flew horizontally across Africa to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from where we continued on our southward journey to South Africa.

Our introduction into Morocco was hectic. After flying through the night we were looking forward to some rest at our hosts. Unfortunately they could not pick us up at the airport and we had to follow instructions which they had emailed to Detlef in Cairo. We thought: “How difficult can it be?& rdquo;

Of course we were travelling on a real tight shoe string budget, and after being shocked by the pricey train ticket from the airport into the city, we decided to take the bus instead of the taxi (we only later discovered buses and petit taxis, as they call them, work out the same price). Our search for “bus nr. 14” took ages and we probably walked close to 3 kilometres, with our heavy backpacks, in search for the right bus stop.

I could see the team was struggling. We were tired, hot and we hadn't eaten in a while. It was our first real introduction into walking with our backpacks. Finally we got to a bus stop that listed bus nr.14, but unknown to us the address we were looking for was less than two blocks away from there!

Relieved we fell into the seats of the first bus that stopped. Thinking that the address was probably quite a distance from there we didn't even think of asking anybody if we were on the right track. Luckily Madeleen, true to her character, tried to confirm with one of the local passengers. But when the passenger kept on pointing backward our worst fears were confirmed.

We immediately stopped the bus and got off. The problem was we were in a very long one way, so there were no buses going back! This meant we had to put on our backpacks and start walking again.

Finally we arrived at the apartment and we were met with a letter on the door going something like this: “Welcome to Casablanca! There are friends in the city of Fez who need your help. We were thinking you could go there before coming to us. The last train leaves at 16h00.” We looked at our watches, it was 15h30. After having struggled for hours to reach the place, we had to go back to the train station we just came from!

This time we were definitely taking taxis. We rushed back onto the street. The only problem was no taxi wanted to pick us up! (The big backpacks probably scared them off). Finally one taxi took two team members, and two more team members got a free lift with another car. That left three of us. Nobody wanted to pick us up so we started jogging back. About halfway there, after numerous attempts to catch a taxi or hitch a ride, somebody picked us up.

When we arrived at the train station we had just bought the tickets and a few loaves of bread for dinner when the train pulled in. Exhausted we collapsed in the seats. It had now been a full day since we arrived at the airport. At least we could chew on the pieces of dry bread on the 3-hour train ride to Fez.

The team below from left to right: HP Grabe, Madeleen Muller, Elzet Saunders, Tinet Stols, Wayne Vermeulen, Detlef Dammann and Willem Taute (me).