Irregular Transport

After a small eternity in Rabat, I finally got my ass off of Currun’s couch (if I had stayed any longer I would have felt obligated to pay rent and change the litter box) and made my way to Azilal. Leaving Rabat, I also left “development” behind and enter the world of irregular transport. Rather than the sterile CTM bus station, I had to go to Rabat’s bus station where before I had even crossed the street dudes were already coming at me promising the cheapest rate to Casablanca and Marrakech. But I wasn’t going there, I was headed to Beni Mellal a random town in Morocco (honestly I know nothing about it) on this bus that I had to wait an hour to fill up before it would take off and then stopped for every couple of large Berber women standing by the roadside the whole way there. It reminded me of Dominican voyages past, when people would be standing in the middle of nowhere by the highway with live chickens waiting for the bus to the capital. Again I sat next this really nice women who offered me food when she saw that I was hungry (do all Moroccan women just carry food around all the time?) even though she was pregnant and I would have survived without the bread and milk. Somehow we managed to communicate all of this even though I don’t speak Berber and she doesn’t speak French. When traveling you realize how little you really need to say with words. In Beni Mellal, the final stop was a gas station which was convenient for me because the grand taxi station was right behind it. A grand taxi is a shared taxi or what we would call a bush taxi if it was slightly more beat up and driven by other kinds of Africans. Again I paid for a place in this dude’s four-passenger ride only of course they cram six people, don’t leave until they have all six, and then drive like maniacs. This was one of my worst crazy bush taxi driver experiences, as we were whipping around all of these narrow mountain roads and this fool wasn’t even trying to attempt to stay in his life even though often you could see who was 50 m from you around the next bed heading at you in the same middle of the road. I made it alive and met Natasha at the post office. Even though, to be honest after four months in Senegal none of this felt crazier than a stopover at Port Authority.