We decided to take an off-road route today to get away from the main road! Usually all but impossible in Morocco…but today the additional distance was manageable!
It was a great start to the day!
Coffee break…
….with camels!! Apart from two just outside Meknes, we really have not seen any! But here at least a dozen…babies and all!
Very cute really!
Still very windy…..but a nice short ride today so it did not become overly tiresome…
With a good downhill into Casablanca. We hit the city with around 20kms still to go…but the ride was better than I feared! Manic in places but overall very manageable…for such a large city!
Casablanca is by far Morocco’s biggest city…with a population of around 3.5m….more than the next three biggest cities combined (namely Fes, Marrakch and Tangiers!).
It was not always so. Indeed in 1906 when the French arrived…the population was only around 12,000! And as recently as independence in 1956…around half the population were European!
No more….but you can see the leftovers of the huge wealth of the colonists! This particular avenue went on for miles!
And so to our accommodation…a fantastic flat, with a lift big enough for bikes! Perfect! This morning I discovered that the booking I had prior made had been cancelled!! The old ‘plumbing problem’ nonsense, which has happened to me a few times before. And it always takes a magical 24 hours to fix! Sounds like double-booking to me! Always irritating…but the second booking is indeed as good as it gets!
So a relaxing afternoon…before wandering the streets. Most of the original growth was in the Art Deco period…so there are some interesting examples…
….and the streetscape is quite French in many ways (not surprising of course…!)…plus palm trees!
As I noted…Casablanca is a relatively new city, not full of ‘tourist destinations’…so not many tourists at all…just a very pleasant place to wander around.
We did find a great dive bar (Ma Touraine)…
….and then treated ourselves! At Rick’s Cafe..! (from the movie, in case the name does not mean anything!)
What a delight!!
And yes…we do understand the movie was filmed exclusively in Hollywood…and the cafe did not really exist! But some bright spark had the idea of recreating the cafe around 20 years ago! And it really is a delight! Pastiche maybe…but beautifully done…
(Monstrously expensive) Casablanca beers of course. And smoking inside in a fancy restaurant…those were the days!! Just not Ingrid Bergman as company!
And wonderful (& not so monstrously expensive) food. We went for the special…a giant rib-eye for two!
Great evening all round!
And even our two taxi rides were an experience to remember. Honestly…like mad super-fast dodgem cars. Not for the feint-hearted!! (…taxis sitting outside Rick’s Cafe were charging a full ten times the going rate, but 100 yards away taxis were happily on the meter!)
🎶Play it again, Sam