The first time I visited Casablanca was in 1974 on an InterRail tour with my (then) girlfriend Sue (now my wife) and my mate Les Jessop (where are you now Les? Get in touch mate.) I guess we were wannabe-hippies then, sort-of, and Casablanca was on the hippy trail. We stayed in a cheap pension, we ate street food, and we explored the city on foot. One afternoon we paid a visit to the family of Khalid, a medical student we had met on the train coming through Spain. He had given us his address and had urged us to visit. The family lived in an apartment right in the medina. His mother laid on food for us, but none of the family could eat a mouthful because it was Ramadan. In our naiveté, we hadn’t realised. And none of the women could show their faces because our arrival had caught them unawares and they were now trapped in the kitchen without veils. Awkward. Doubly awkward. But humbling. It was an eye-opening trip for us in so many ways.
I revisited Casablanca with Mike Taylor on the Plymouth to
Banjul Rally in 2008. I didn’t recognise a single sight from 1974. Three
decades on, the city was a massive traffic jam. We didn’t stay to do any
sightseeing. We found a cheap hotel, and parked on the street, our car stuffed with our kit. In the
morning we discovered we had left the car doors unlocked. But nothing had been
taken. It was 5:30 am. Tom Ibbotson in the car behind us, filmed
our early morning exodus from the city, so instead of a What3Words for this post,
here is our YouTube record of that drive south.
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Casablanca in 60 Seconds - YouTube
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