4/6/12

8:45 AM

We have to leave at 9:00 this morning so I will be quick. For breakfast I had bread and apricot jam, dates and a pancake-thing with honey that a woman had just made! We went for a short walk around the pool after breakfast and found out that the 6-year-old boy in our tour group is called Bond! We are leaving now so I will write later.

12:15 AM

We are on the coach to Meknes. Volubilis was amazing, but very hot. I took photos of all the mosaics, which were remarkably well preserved in terms of colour.

This is a mosaic of a man riding a donkey backwards, probably at a circus or fair.

There was a basilica (law courts) which had been restored by the French colonists, and a forum which was just lots of pillars. There was also a drain in the shape of a ‘morning glory’ flower, whose biological name is Volubilis!

The Romans named the town after the flower. Anyway, it was fascinating. There are lots of jacaranda trees around; they have beautiful purple flowers. We are going to arrive at Meknes in about 25 minutes.

2:00 PM

I am writing from the hotel room. Meknes was very interesting. There was a gate called Bab Kh’miss which means Thursday gate. It is called this because there is a weekly souk on Thursdays there.Unfortunately, after that the camera stopped working! I think it is just the batteries that are going wrong.

Then we went to the granaries of Moulay Ismail, who ruled in the 16th century. The granaries were very cool compared to outside, the thick walls and water running underneath would have helped to keep the grain fresh.

Next to the granaries were the stables, which held 1,000 of the king’s 12,000 horses! They were absolutely vast.

The town walls were amazing too.

I think I will go swimming soon – Grandma is coming as well, but they have drained the main outdoor pool so we have to go in a pool that is sheltered on three sides and is much smaller. But it looks very nice so we will probably go sometime before dinner.

3rd June 2012

10:05am

This morning grandma and I both had a cold shower (the hot didn’t work) and had a breakfast of bread, pastries, fruit and nuts. The coach took us to the Hassan II Mosque, the 3rd largest in the world after Mecca and Medina. We took off our shoes and put on our headscarves, and after a long wait, went inside. The mosque was huge, beautiful and strange. There was a marble floor with carpets on it, and the covering of the pillars was made from a mixture of limestone, clay, black butter soap and a few other weird things which I can’t remember. We then visited the hammam (Moroccan public baths), which is not used now, and there was a big pool with marble benches around it. We are on the way to Rabat now, the capital of Morocco.

11:40 AM

We are coming to the outskirts of Rabat now. We can see the Green Belt, which is a forest outside Rabat. There are some very nice pink oleander bushes beside the road.

2:00 PM

We had a walk around Rabat. It was very pretty, with blue and white walls and narrow cobbled alleyways. A woman grabbed my hand and did a henna design on me and then demanded money, but I refused to pay and so did grandma. When we told Hassani he was very angry and wanted to find the woman, but she had disappeared. I washed off the henna (it left an orange imprint on my hand), but not before I had got some on my clothes. After that Grandma and I had some mint tea from a lovely sort of outdoor cafe.

It is strange that although Rabat is the capital city, we are not spending very long here and we haven’t even visited the museum. However, I am sure Fes will be very nice.

9:25 PM

I am writing in the hotel room in Fes. It is a very nice hotel, but the staff don’t seem very friendly. Before dinner, I went for a swim in the hotel’s huge outdoor swimming pool. At first it was cold, but then I got used to it and it was heavenly after a long day of dust and heat. The pool is shallow at one end and 2m 10 at the other. I had great fun swimming while grandma watched.

For dinner, which we had at 7:40, there was a massive buffet consisting of cold salads etc., hot chicken, beef, fish and pasta, and desserts. I had an almost backwards dinner, starting with a beef stew with potatoes, salad and a bread roll and afterwards having carrot with coconut (very nice). For pudding I had a slice of melon and two small pieces of cake. To drink I had more mint tea, which was lovely. After dinner we walked around the pool talking to Keith and Angie, very nice people who we met in the lift this morning!

I went on a tour of the Imperial Cities of Morocco with grandma in half term. This is my diary.

2/6/12

4:05 PM

Grandma, daddy and I left at 9:00 this morning and drove to Cardiff. Daddy dropped us off at the bus station and we got onto the bus. The whole journey took 3 1/2 hours! We were very relieved to be at the airport so we could stretch our legs. Unfortunately, we had a three-hour wait before the plane took off. We passed the time by reading, writing and wandering around the shops.

Finally the gate opened and we got on the plane. It was cloudy though, so we didn’t see any of France or Spain. The sky was clear in Casablanca, however, and I took my first breath of Moroccan air as we stepped off the plane. It was dark already, because when you get nearer the equator, it gets dark earlier.

We had to fill in a form on the plane, and give it in at the airport in Casablanca. It involved lots of details like passport no. and issue date, but grandma and I discovered they were just being thrown on the floor when we handed them in! The floor of the passport checker’s office was absolutely covered with these immigration forms!

After getting our bags, we met the rest of our group on the Riviera tour. There were 45 of us! It was by far the biggest group that grandma had been in. The tour manager, Amabile, showed us to the coach and we drove to the hotel, Novotel Casablanca. It was quite a nice hotel, and we slept well minus the bed covers. It was hot at night, so we relied on the air conditioning to keep us cool.

Sorry no photos from today!