Casa Voyageurs

We have left Málaga and are high up in the air hugging the Spanish coastline in the tiny Air Maroc, turbo prop plane. It is a clear, sunny day. The Rock of Gibraltar comes into view. We veer to the left and I can make out hydrofoils plying the route between the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco and Algeciras across the straits.

I crane my neck and look back through the opaque glass of the porthole. Africa and Europe are simultaneously visible. It's a wonderful sight.

I should have retrieved my camera from the overhead locker but remembered Bresson's words about the best photos being the ones that aren't taken but simply remembered.

And within an hour we are in Casablanca where this journey began. Our time is tumbling to an end. Too quick, too soon to be going home I keep thinking. (My wife reminds me that we have spent four of the last twelve months travelling.)

The next day we are in "Le Petit Poucet", a bar which has changed little since the 1940s along Boulevard Mohemmed V.

Antoine de St Exupery used to stop off here on the Paris-Dakar mail-run, Camus was also a customer.

The guide books suggest Casablanca has little of interest for tourists. Alors! les bras m'en sont tombés! = you could knock me down with a feather! They were wrong again!

Casablanca has loads of charm - you've just got to open your eyes.

I will be sad leaving Morocco. A couple of days in Abu Dhabi to break the long journey home may throw up something interesting; who knows?

But I'm sad there will be no more French, no more Spanish - at least until I get back to work where I can have the occasional conversation with my African and Latin American students - a consoling thought. It's not the fun and challenge of communicating in those languages that I will miss per se, but the fabulous people they draw into my orbit.

I helped a blind man find Bus #44 downtown today after watching him stumble on the broken pavement and walk into a pole. He was very thankful for the help and I only realised later that not a word of our communication took place in my mother tongue.

A young guy on a motor scooter at some traffic lights waved at us and exclaimed (in English) : " I love Morocco". I found myself excitedly replying : "We love Morocco, too." He was elated. This happened in front of the Gare Casablanca Voyageurs (the Casablanca Travellers Railway Station) where tomorrow we take the train to the airport to fly home.

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