“Sorry, your flight is delayed by five hours. Perhaps these meal vouchers will help,” said the bored looking officer at the check-in desk. He handed me a wad of paper tickets. It was early afternoon at London Heathrow Terminal Two, and my latest adventure had not got off to a smooth start. “Food vouchers are all well and good,” I replied, “but we have a connecting flight to catch. What’s going to happen there?” I was met with a blank look.
International travel has its share of trials and tribulations. When everything works out it is one of the most rewarding, broadening experiences you can have. When it doesn’t? Well, you can be confined to a noisy and overcrowded building, living off food vouchers and trying to catch some sleep on chairs which are, I’m pretty sure, designed so that lying across them is the most horribly uncomfortable experience possible.
Five hours, and many more food vouchers passed. The plane showed up and we were on our way. The destination? Casablanca, Morocco to catch a connecting flight to Accra, Ghana, for a winter adventure, and to escape from chilly old England for a few weeks. Hopefully I’d get there, as there was no way the plane from Mohamed V Airport on the outskirts of the North African city would wait.
Finally, in the dead of night, our Royal Air Maroc flight landed in Casablanca. On the flight I’d got talking to a number of other passengers, and realized that there were many other people in the same position. Kwame and his buddy, whose name I never did learn, were also on their way to Ghana, to visit their families. Lynn was on her way to Agadir to visit an English friend living there, and another English guy I chatted to raved on and on about his adventures in Dakar, Senegal. He couldn’t wait to return there, should a plane eventually materialize. Fortunately, after consulting the customer support desk everybody was issued with new tickets, and we were all shipped off to a hotel near the airport. We’d get our respective flights the following day.
Having the delay in the flight turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Whereas the stop-over in Morocco was initially a manic, run-from-one-gate-to-the-other affair, now we all had the best part of 24 hours with which to explore the Mediterranean city, and for some of us, have our first taste of Africa.
The following morning, breakfast was served. Everything complimentary of course. It seemed as though the hotel catered for this kind of instance often. After eating, a few of us piled into one of the many old Mercedes taxis waiting by the hotel, and rode into the centre of the city.
My first thoughts on Casablanca? Chaotic. Wherever we walked, the place was a hive of activity. There did not appear much in the way of order, or perhaps it was just organized chaos? Either way, it seemed to work well for everyone. The unrelenting nature of the place was an assault on the senses for someone who, at the time, was more used to the organised, and perhaps slightly more bland nature of England. We wandered the narrow streets, checked out what the street vendors were peddling, and looked out across the waters of the Mediterranean.
Whilst we were there I happened upon an internet café, and decided I should probably send a quick email to my contact in Ghana, Paul Sefa, to let him know of the delay, and to expect our arrival 24 hours later than planned. The keyboard was totally Arabic, and the internet deathly slow, but a few minutes later the email was sent, and the problem of having no-one to meet at the airport and having nowhere to go was seemingly solved. We wandered around some more, Kwame bought some cheap, knock-off sunglasses, and we decided to get back to the hotel. Our bus was due to return us to the airport in a couple of hours, and if we missed our flights this time due to our own irresponsibility it would be our problem, not the airlines.
During the day we’d heard that the smaller, yellow and red taxis that were around the city were cheaper than the big Mercedes types. We flagged one down, got in and explained with the zero French or Arabic anyone spoke, that we wanted to go to “Mohamed V Hotel”. Round and round the city we drove, circling the place, with the driver seemingly having no idea where he was supposed to go. More than once he flagged down fellow drivers and pedestrians for directions, but none of them seemed any the wiser. As time ticked away it gradually became clear that we’d made a mistake. Indeed the taxis were cheaper than the Mercedes ones, but they didn’t operate outside the centre of the city. Mohamed V Hotel, situated next to the airport on the outskirts, was not within the limits. And by now we had precious little time to go before our airport shuttle. Panic set in.
A few more frantic moments passed. We eventually got the driver to stop, and throwing him my last wad of US Dollars we dashed to a Mercedes Taxi, gave the driver the hotel details, and roared off at highly illegal speeds down the highway to the airport. We arrived just in time, grabbed our bags, and caught the bus with moments to spare. Ghana awaited. We soared out of Casablanca and over the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas Mountains, across the Sahara Desert and beyond. But, we soon realized, we had to make another stop in Cotonou, Benin, to collect some more passengers. Another delay – albeit a mercifully short one, and one where we didn’t need to leave the plane. 48 hours after initially arriving at Heathrow we eventually made it to Accra, where at 5:45am I spotted Paul Sefa outside the airport with a sign saying “Welcome Ben” on it. Welcome indeed.
A few weeks later, back in England, and refreshed from a great couple of weeks I was sitting at home checking my emails. I’d been chatting over email to Roshina, a former classmate of mine from University. As it happened she’d moved to Morocco a few months previously, so I mentioned my spontaneous visit to Casablanca a few weeks before, and all the drama involved. Shortly after I received a reply from her. As it turned out, her friend had recently had the same problem. On the same day. On the same flight. Lynn, the girl I talked to at the airport in Casablanca was Roshina’s friend, on her way to visit her in Agadir. Small world, eh?
