Café Patisserie L'Opéra - Kenitra
Trip Start
Sep 23, 2006
1
12
15
Trip End
Oct 06, 2006
Kenitra, Morocco
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
The riding was hard - I got lost for a while, road surfaces were poor, which caused my pannier rack to break, and the distance long: more than 100km / 60 miles.
Worse than that, has been the squalid conditions some people are living in here. I have passed through towns where rubbish is spread out over vast areas, just taken by the wind; where animals scavenge this stuff; smelt the foul stench of rotting waste. Villages consist of rudimentary buildings made of concrete blocks with flat roofs, with dirt tracks for roads. In larger places there are trenches at the sides of the roads, which I presume are for waste. This is pretty much identical to Tanzania. There was a novelty/adventure factor there in seeing and experiencing the basic way of living. I got to come back to hassle-free living back home after 3 months though. No novelty here in Morocco though. It is really quite grim. Yet in downtown Kenitra - a city the size of Bristol, where I am staying tonight, I am sitting outside in a café and I could be anywhere in the world. All the facilities are here. All this may seem deeply unjust to me - that there are people with so much living right alongside people with so little - bikes, motorbikes, horses-and-carts, grand-taxis, trucks, people walking, all share the same roads. I imagine that people here aren't getting hung-up on that though - it's normal. I get the impression a lot of people here are trying to better themselves - selling things in the streets, and that there is no resentment to rich people or those with things they themselves can't afford, because they aspire to have the same. It is very much everyman for himself here. Kids don't get molly-coddled - as soon as they can stand upright, they're left to amuse themselves with the other kids, as far as I can see.
