Morocco

Following Fes, we drove North to Tangiers, stopping in the city of Chefchaouen, located high in the Rif mountains.

The next day was devoted primarily to crossing the Straights of Gibraltar from Tangier to Algeciras where we spent the night.

Here is Jordan on the boat with a faint view of Gibraltar in the background. It takes about 2.5 hours on the slow boat (ours) to make the 11 miles + crossing. Then you land in Spain where it is two hours later than in Morocco, so you have pretty much spent the whole day...

We had a full day to explore the ancient city of Fes with the help of our guide Houcine. This included some of the oldest schools and universities still in existence in the Word

and the beautiful medina (old city)

The guide takes you to all the different crafts, including the tanneries

and the weaver shops, (hand woven silk and cotton fabrics) hoping you will buy souvenirs you don't need.

Jordan had a great day looking for cats all over the city...

On July 10, we made a day trip to the Atlantic coast city of Essaouira. We visited the small medina (ancient city) and had a great lunch of fresh grilled shrimp, fish and crab.

The temperature in Marrakech was in the 40 degree celsius so the first thing we did was give Jordan a buzz cut

Then we walked around the old city at night and the famous Jemaa al Fna where we enjoyed the entertainment and the food

On July 4th we traveled from Arraial to Rio, then few to Sao Paulo in order to catch an Air France flight to Paris. We managed to load all of our carry-on bags on board the cabin becuase we knew we had a tight connection in Paris.

We landed 20 minutes late, but exited the airport and hopped on a taxi literally in 5 minutes to Orly, where our connecting Air France flight to Marrakech Morocco departed from. We ran into a novice taxi driver and into the worse Parisian traffic jams ever.

We arrived at Orly 15 minutes before boarding and even though we did not have bags to check, we were refused on the flight by an overzealous AF employee.

With a bit of insistence, Air France put us at a nearby hotel for the day and on a Royal Air Maroc flight bound for Marrakech in the evening. So in the end, we lost about a half day which we would have probably used to recuperate in Marrakech anyways.