An Empty Cornflakes Box

Its a boring three motorbike ride along a motorway from Marrakesh to Casablanca, but if you take it rather than the back roads, you get to spend the afternoon on the beach as your reward, more of that later.

But first The Central Hotel, Casablanca and for a start off it has definitely seen better times. It turns out that it was built over 80 years ago by the French and along with the tree filled square it sat in, it must have been a very pleasant place in its day. All the buildings bordering the square were of the same vintage and all showed signs of their age. The square itself was traffic free, but that didn’t stop me getting the Harley onto the pavement and through the square and right in front of the hotel in order to unload. Again Morocco surprised me, the hotel turned out to be very good, it was clean, very atmospheric and full of character. My first floor room had those great floor to ceiling old French doors with metal shutters that opened up onto a small balcony overlooking the square below and the docks beyond. It was like one of those places in an old spy film the sort of place Humphrey Bogart would turn up in, why they never made a film in this city I will never know.

Actually it reminded me a lot of a hotel in one of the Bourne films, where a massive chase and plenty of fighting started and ended in a car exploding or something like that, I’d have to play it again to get the sequence right. I really enjoyed the hotel and the room had an edginess to it which was hard to put your finger on, it was kind of tacky yet sexy, slightly seedy yet spotlessly clean and tidy. A room where loose women and assassins would hold up, where spies meeting to hand over microdots would meet, where politicians cavorted with their lovers and where I hung up my washing over the balcony doors and shutters to dry in the warm Casablanca afternoon sun.

Ok enough of the room back to the beach, the guy who ran the hotel virtually insisted I went there and I must say he did make it sound like a must see place. It wasn’t. The beach was absolutely packed with thousands of Moroccans and because of Muslim rules the women were in the sea wearing more clothes than I had worn riding the Harley up the motorway. The place was full of cheap looking restaurants, crowds of people and sadly rubbish.

However, I have discovered an absolutely must have piece of kit that no Moroccan worth his weight in couscous would be seen without it. “What is it”, I hear you say? Its a cardboard box about the size of a large cereal packet, that you cut along one side and open up into one flat piece of cardboard. Once you have this vital piece of kit, you must carry it everywhere you go, without exception.

It transpires that the cardboard forms a useful array of functions, placed on or over the head it can provide welcome shade from the intense sun and heat, it can hide identities by providing a modesty shield, it can be used as a fan to generate a gentle cooling breeze, or it can be used to swot away the many flies. But mainly its used to sit on. When sitting on benches, in cafe’s, on small motorbikes, on pavements or grassy areas, it forms a protective barrier between clean, crisp, cool white robes and the piles of crap and rubbish which is discarded everywhere.

So there is very useful travel tip, when in Morocco make sure you have with you at all times an empty cornflakes box.

CLICK HERE for my snaps of Morocco