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August the 17th. We took the afternoon ferry in Algeciras. It was the ferry to Tangier and the passage across the Strait of Gibraltar was a short one. Soon we would enter Morocco and therefor Africa. Three hours later we were in Africa but it took us another two hours until we finally made it to Morocco. Bloody beginner mistake. The ferries arrive only every three hours in Tangier and local customs use every of these 180 minutes to delay your entry. Once we left the ferry the first locals swarmed out and approached the non-Moroccan cars offering you, or better urging you to accept their help with the customs paper works. We refused for a while but we never managed to figure out, where to go for the paper works and who was an official and who was on duty or just hanging around. So we finally accepted the “help” and got the papers prepared, still feeling uncertain about having to give passports, carnets de voyages and driving licence to an unknown guy, not knowing where he would go with this and if he would come back. At the end we had paid 400 Francs plus 92 Dirham (the Moroccan currency) for an insurance, 100 Dirhams to a police man and 150 Dirhams for the guy that “helped” us with the paper work (we had refused another “offer” valuing 300 Dirhams and some drug deal that we didn´t really understand due to our very basic French knowledge).
Our van got checked very thoroughly by the custom guys. They even stuck a finger into our water canister to check if we had fuel in it, completely overseeing the tin fuel canister strapped clearly visible on the roof of the van.
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