A sea of so many blue taxis ...
Trip Start
Sep 16, 2006
1
23
69
Trip End
Sep 16, 2007
InZegane, Morocco
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Out of Tamri our ride took us high up along the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic ocean and dropped us down down and down to sea level through incredibly switchbacked mountain roads.
AND THE THE VIEWS!!!!!
The Atlantic coast is incredible and green, rolling, and very surfeable as we noticed many RVs and French, Spanish and Italian vans stuffed full of surfers joy riding up and down the coastal route checking out the next wave spot.
1 kilo of oranges and 1 kilo of banas a day keeps us nourished these days, taking little breaks along the cliffs, admiring the crashing surf below.
We neared Agadir, and saw a really neat and fully functioning port, complete with a huge repair yard where large wooden ferries and fishing ships were being repaired and rebuilt. Ahhh, Agadir. What can one say about Agadir, except that it translates to 'HELL'. The town is lovely IF you like hotels and resorts with pools and enclosed, uber secure patios. There are hundreds of sops everywhere, making sure all us tourists feel secure from the 'locals'. The town is also plastered heavily with billboards featuring half naked white folks, frolicking in the sea etc. The town also features over 1/4 of ALL of the hotel beds in the country of Morocco and is very new, very shallow, very cheezy, very touristy and modern, and affordable only to wealthy tourists. The town appears reallt well off, but this faux wealth is exacerbated by the fact that the hills surrounding Agadir are covered in crooked 'shanty towns' as they are referred to, where the non-tourists live. It's quite sad and quite a stark contrast.
A few kms past Agadir we stopped in a busy, industrial suburb called Inezgane, which was a maze of busy streets and thousands of blue taxi cabs- as it turns out, this is where all of those blue taxis come from! This is not exactly where the tourist buses would stop, but it was fun anyway. We've never seen so many blue blue taxis before, it was amazing...
We were told a cheap hotel existed near this insane taxi terminal, and so we made our way past literally, a sea of blue taxis to our 'hotel lous', which was the classiest floozy of a hotel -- with its' falling neon letters and shifty characters hanging about its' doorway.
Yep, you get what you pay for, and we got the world's cheapest, shiftiest hotel room in a high rise bus stop-taxi terminal plaza, with a radical view of the bus terminal below and the rooftops of the buildings below, where people had built brick rectangle rooms and spliced wires to bring in the electricity. Rooftop dwellers, like pods. We felt like spies... it was really fun and comfy. We chatted with the sweet lady at the front desk and mozied about the town at night, checking out the happenings, finding a good pastry shop, ordering in Arabic, and having a great time outside of Agadir. A little odd, a little shady, but Inezgane was a good place to be.
