Tangier Ville … Tanger Med… Tangier Ville… Tanger Med???
Leaving Africa and crossing the Med on my way to a Spanish adventure.
Racing the clock against Internet access so just a quit update.
Spent a couple of days in the Medina of Tangier and enjoyed my last days in Africa after five months on the continent. And now off to Spain for about ten days. First stop Tarifa and hopefully a ride share comes through or things’ll get interesting in a jiffy! From there the plan in Seville and then things get hazy again…Madrid? Cordoba? Grenada?
Tarifa was a bit of a bust…in and out in a flash. Didn’t even have time to try and snap a customary landfall pic with a flag of the newly invaded nation, or kingdom as it has happened.
I was in a mad dash to try and get to the corner of something and something…Tarifa by eleven o’clock. This somewhere was seventeen minutes away at ten forty when I finally got through customs, so it was a bit of a clip to get there. On top of that, no cell service! I was still using good ol’ Orange Maroc on the ferry and didn’t think to try and swap out my old Cosmote SIM card until much too late in the game.
So I hoofed it up the hill, which seems to be the norm in Tarifa, and planted myself on a stone base of a street lamp right smack dab in the middle of the street of what I had hoped was the exact something and something intersection I had sort of remembered from the ride-share site I’d bet the inauguration of my cross-continental excursion on. My thinking… that if my on the fly SIM card swap didn’t work, the driver would have to recognize the obviously insane passenger they’d agreed to pick and and drive to Seville.
I arrived on the spot at nine fifty three or ten fifty three, depending on which phone’s clock I chose to believe and rummaged through my backpack like a fiend after a dropped rock! I’d recharged the Cosmote SIM the night before, feeling pretty darn special at having thought that far ahead and scrambled to swap it out with the signal-less Moroccan card…to no avail. Whatever I needed to do to get it to work to find out if my ride had showed up or left without me was beyond my sweaty and breathe-less techno means. What I did manage to do was raise more than a curious eyebrow of pretty much every car that rounded this lamppost at the entrance of a quite popular area.
Left ride-less and data-less I repacked my bag and headed off in search of a wi-fi connect but leery of spending any of the only forty Euros I’d managed to exchange with a worker at the ferry port. My departure was earlier than the exchange opened so the guy working the door made ten euros on his own little black market. A small price to pay to not end up in Spain with six hundred dirhams. Off I went, up another hill, in search of somewhere to mooch some wi-fi. I thought for sure the Hostel would be cool and let me check my phone, but that’d be a big ol’nope in Tarifa apparently. The desk attendant was kind enough to point me in the direction of a Vodaphone store.
Fortunately Google maps works on the satellite data so I was able to see that I was six of one and half dozen between the Vodaphone shop and the TSComes Bus Terminal I’d saved before leaving Tangier. Not wanting to miss another ride, I opted for the bus depot and was able to make it there with only a half hour wait instead of two. I spent two euro eighty to make change for a two euro fifty bus ticket. And the worst part was that the espresso was junk!
An hour later I was at the Algeciras bus depot racing to the window thinking I had three minutes to catch the next bus to Seville but when you don’t the words for arrive and depart you’ve really got a lot more time than you think. So after hustling back into the bus corral I realized that fifteen thirty gave me almost two and a half hours instead of three minutes. So, squeezing the lemons I walked outside the terminal and found a phone store and purchased a new SIM card. Turns out the ride-share had cancelled on me after all, so the price of the SIM card was a wash.
So now I’m on a bus winding its way through the port of Algeciras on my way to Seville. I should have gone to Tanger Med after all!