I guess a few weeks have passed since my last post, which means this is a big one!!! So if you're in a hurry it's probably not a good time to start… Here we go~

After my Seville post I moved on to Granada, which is further south-east. In short, Granada is probably the coolest city I have visited on this trip, and the first place I felt like I would move to live. I couldn't put my finger on exactly why this is, just the vibe.

I spent 7 days there in total chilling at the funky and social hostel, and walking around the city exploring. Granada has an interesting history; it has changed hands between Moorish people and Catholics a few times in the past, and while it is now firmly in Spanish hands it has retained a lot of interesting things from the Moorish culture. There are many gypsies that live in the city on a hill named Sacromonte, literally in caves on the hill. With them lives a great tradition of passionate flamenco among other things….

There is also an amazing resident street artist named "el nino de las pinturas" or "the child of the paintings". He has done hundreds of very cool artworks on buildings around town, some commissioned by locals and others just doing his own thing. Always revolving around themes of dreaming or other deep and meaningful messages written in riddles into his work…

I finally managed to drag myself out of the tractor beam of this place, and caught a bus to the small port town of Tarifa - one of the two gateways from Spain into Morocco and Africa. I spent 2 nights here, but could have easy spent longer. Kind of reminded me of Byron…

After all this relaxation I thought I was ready to face Morocco, and so caught the 1-hour ferry across to Tangier on the 7th.The friendly chap doing passport control was surprised to see my last name was "Tabet", remarked that it was Arabic from Morocco and welcomed me home…

I have to say; arriving in Tangier was not at all like coming home… Literally the SECOND I stepped off the bus at the port, I became the target of the first of many toothless "tour guides". The guy followed me to the bus station, waited while I bought my ticket out of that s***e hole then continued to follow me as I walked around looking for a café where I could shake him off. I went deep inside one of the places and had lunch while watching my stalker do laps out the front waiting for me to finish. It was a stand off. Eventually I guess he realised he wasn't making money off me and lurked off to find his next green tourist. Unfortunately for me I had opted for the last remaining bus to Chefchaouen which meant I had 8 hours to kill moving from café to café round the port. I have to say this isn't a place to hang out, but I had no wish to explore the rest of the city. I was hassled by countless toothless men who all seemed to be named Abdul. They had the same line they kept dropping as they opened their hands for coins- "close your eyes and open your heart". Yeah right. More like "close your eyes while my mate steals your wallet"… In the end I gave up and sat drinking a coffee with 3 toothless Abdul's at my table. After we established that I wasn't going to give them money or buy hashish or opium from them I bought us coffee and talked s*** with a few of them, which actually passed the hours quite well.

Finally I made it out of there, and onto my bus to Chefchaouen about 4 hours from Tangier. This is a big town in the Rif Mountains, and it's very beautiful. The buildings and all the streets are painted sky blue, which is stunning to walk through in the daytime… I stayed at a cosy hotel run by a Swiss hippy and her partner. There was a nice mix of people staying here and we all congregated on the roof terrace when the sunset prayer was being called to chill and be social.The town is super relaxed and was perfect to get used to Morocco on a smaller and slightly less crazy scale. It is the Marijuana and hashish growing capital of Morocco however, so the street sellers are equipped with a major arsenal of drugs to push on the tourists…. Most of whom go to Chef to fall off the earth for a few days/months/rest of life anyway. I had a chest cold (another one) resulting from 2 weeks of going hard in south Spain, and was not at all interested in smoking. Besides, my dorm buddies were addicted enough for me to passively inhale more than I would ever want to smoke (no wonder general motivation was lacking)… These guys spent every day turning our room into a dark and smoky hash den, and lying on their beds absolutely baked. Great holiday huh? When I was at the hotel I spent most of my time on the sunny terrace anyway. These guys however were the definition of the term "wake and bake"… They would wake up in the morning and light up a fat joint and blaze out for a few more hours.

I had wanted to do some hiking through the mountains but was deterred by the fact that there were armed men protecting the multitude of marijuana crops everywhere…which meant I would have probably needed a guide and I didn't feel like employing one.

I left after 5 nights, and teamed up with a crazy Spanish dj/graffiti artist named Denis and his girlfriend Rocio. We caught the bus to Fez and spent a night there. It didn't grab me at all, with all the streets literally lined with piles of rubbish and thousands of cats fighting over the scraps. We decided to continue together quickly to Marrakech, and after missing the early morning cushy coach we opted to catch public Moroccan buses. Really bad idea… It was 10 hours of really hot smelly bus travel, crammed full of hot smelly Moroccans and us 3 token tourists (the only ones). At this point I decided that if I didn't like Marrakech I was getting the f*** out of Morocco. Two things saved me. The first being the fact that Denis had a hook up at a luxury Riad (sort of apartment) for about $20 a night. This place was an amazing oasis of hot showers that blasted the day of epic bus travel away, and super comfortable beds. The second reason is that Marrakech is a really interesting city! The medina is huge, with an enormous main square full of fresh orange juice stands and a plethora of other salespeople for anything you could ever want and many things that you don't…

The street beggars and sellers here are less annoying now… I have learnt that smiling, looking them in the eye and saying no thank you in Arabic normally is enough. The small amount of Arabic I have learnt goes a long way, and I am keen to learn more. There is a perceivable change in the people when you attempt to speak their language. When meeting a Moroccan, they shake your hand and touch their heart, which is a gesture I really dig…

Wondering the medina the other day with Denis I came across a famous carpet maker. His tiny garage sized store is absolutely jam-packed with thousands of rugs. The special thing about this place is the owner, Abu who is 95 and still going hard making rugs. We went in to take tea with the man, and sat on a pile of rugs while he showed us photos of his many, many years of visitors while continuously saying "it's good" in French and grinning. We each took a photo while he held our hands and after the photo he kissed our hands.While I'm still not exactly sure what was going on for the rough 30 mins we were in there, it was a really nice experience and he was genuinely happy to take tea with more people. I bought a wool bag from him, which is a sweet memento (and a little more practical for me than a rug)….

I went to feed myself in the medina a few nights ago, which transforms at night and goes crazy with drumming, dancing and delicious smoke wafting around. No photo or video could capture the energy of this place so I didn't bother trying. Just sat eating meat skewers, drinking tea and soaking it up =) There's cute kids running around begging with huge puppy-dog eyes, hugging and kissing you until you give them money or try to walk away with one attached to your leg. I guess there are worse ways to be asked for money…! Also plenty of dark and dodgy characters that set off the personal space radar enough to keep me on edge. What was nice though is that there were heaps of locals out shopping and eating too; it's nice to see that it's not all about tourists.

Morocco's highest in one massive day! :

2 days ago I contacted the mum of a friend from home who has lived and worked in Marrakech for the last 7 years. I met Carol at a café beneath hear apartment in the new part of the city, she works there organising tours and nice accommodation for tourists.We went up to her apartment, where by coincidence her mountain guide was coming for a meeting. After meeting and talking to Mohammed, he said he could take me up Jebel Toubkal, which is Morocco's highest mountain at 4167mtrs, over the next two days if I wanted and if I had everything I needed. I did want, so we met at 6:30 the next day for a quick brekkie and coffee and caught a ride 1.5 hours to the base village of Imlil which is somewhere around 1500mtrs. We made very good time for the first few hours of trekking in the hot sun, and Mohammed informed me that he would like to be back in Marrakech early the next morning, and suggested that it might possible to push to the summit the same day if we continued at that pace and if I wanted to. I think he has done this once before, but I knew that 99% of people stay overnight at the 3200mtr mark to acclimatise a little and make a summit hit early the next day. I am a total sucker for a challenge but without really understanding the difficulty or how my body would respond to gaining over 3300mtrs of elevation in one day (Marrakech sits around 800)… I figured the elevation wasn't too huge. So we went hard until 2pm, taking mini breaks of a minute or 2 for water and a hunk of bread. At 2 we made it to the 3200mtr refuge, where everyone stops for the night. I was definitely feeling the strain… We lightened my pack of my sleeping bag and some clothes and continued after a 15-minute power lunch. Mohammed had no pack, as he hadn't known he was doing the mountain until the day before. He took it a little to heart that I wouldn't let him carry my pack, but I tried to convince him that I wanted to do it on my own steam and if I couldn't do it I would give him the pack. The 2.5-3 hours to the summit is the hardest physical (or mental) challenge I have ever done for sure. We passed some people coming down, who questioned us about heading up at this time. I trusted Mohammed; he has done this mountain regularly for a few years, and knows it well.The terrain was difficult, very loose and steep scree slopes (like gravel hills just slightly firmer than sand) and boulder scrambling. At that altitude, cold temperatures and the distance we had already hiked (probably the biggest factor), it was really hard work!For the final hour, we were both walking slower than slow motion. Every 5 steps required a breather and I had the uncomfortable sensation that I was on a never-ending uphill scree-slope treadmill.All of a sudden though, the summit appeared over a ridge 100 metres away, the path stopped and the ground dropped away into the clouds. It was absolutely stunning, and worth arriving late to the top because it was empty and totally silent…. After high fives and a few cheesy summit photos, Mohammed went off to pray (it was almost sunset) and I flaked out on the ground under the flags.The sun at this point had started to dip below the peaks, and a freezing shadow had begun to move across the ground. We still had to get down so strapped in and started again, literally surfing sideways and running down the enormous slopes of loose rocks. I had two torches with me but we didn't need them thankfully. We made it to the refuge right on 6pm, after more than 2600mtrs of dizzy vertical altitude gained on foot, and god knows how many km's of winding tracks. It was just on dark as the happy gents at the refuge swooped on us with hot sweet ginger tea, and some bikkies.Our heads were throbbing horribly and we were quite dehydrated, but grinning ear to ear. After a few bowls of delicious soup and some tajine, I went to sleep at 8:30. At 5am I awoke to the noise of the 15 other people in the refuge preparing to go to the top in the bitterly cold morning. I smiled smugly and was stoked to be warm in my sleeping bag for a couple more hours. I'm still smiling after an amazing day on the mountain; it was nice to push my own limits and know what is possible. I think this may be the first of many adventures to bigger mountains in the coming years J. The bug has bitten! I'm now back on my bed (which is not dissimilar to lying on a concrete slab) in Marrakech, around 26 hours after leaving to start the climb. Such an unbelievable and memorable day… It wouldn't have been the same or as rewarding without pushing it so hard! I'm positive that doing it over 2 days would not be nearly as epic, but I loved doing it the way we did. It wouldn't have been possible without Mohammed either; I gave him a black spray jacket of mine as thanks, which he borrowed and had taken rather a shining to…

I'm not yet clear on how long I will stay here in Marrakech, a few more nights at least. My hotel is nice and quite clean for about 10 bucks a night. I am starting to crave the beach now, and the coast is only 3 hours away.

Apologies for the mammoth post. Morocco is an interesting place and I think a month here will pass quickly. The last 2 weeks have been a total overload…hopefully I have transferred a bit of my brain onto paper.

Much love to all =)

~