Apr 7 - I can't think of a title

We left Marrakesh for Essaouira, a laid back town on the Atlantic, and met my new Moroccan best friend on the bus. She’s a very funny Muslim girl named Soumia. We ended up hanging out with her the entire time we were there, walking around, eating, shopping and laughing our heads off.

Me and Soumia

 

 

 

We found out that we could not get our tourist visas for Ghana on arrival and that the country had implemented a new policy that they would only grant visas to residents of the particular country that the embassy is in (meaning that we would have to go back to Canada). This is a ridiculous policy for a country that is trying to increase tourism as it will greatly limit tourists traveling overland that would like to visit Ghana.

Our problem is that we have already booked a flight that is leaving to Thailand form Ghana on May 5^thand obviously we are not going back to Canada to get a visa. So we decided to go to the Moroccan embassy in Rabat to try and convince them to give us a visa anyway. We took a bus from Essaouira but arrived late and when we got there someone rushed us onto one of the buses leaving to Casablanca. There were not enough seats on the bus so the driver started yelling and kicking people out of the seats which were reserved for us.  After a lot o yelling the bus driver grabbed our tickets and starting yelling us because we were on the wrong bus. While he kicked us off he started driving away with our bags still underneath the bus and Jacob had to run beside the bus while pulling our luggage out. We managed to still catch the correct bus although the driver definitely wasn’t happy and claimed that the whole schedule was now delayed because of us.

We got to the embassy in Rabat but unfortunately my charm and Jacob’s blue eyes did not help us – The ambassador rejected our detailed persuasion letter and insisted that we try getting it “in some other country.” So this is exactly what we will try to do – we will go to the Ghana embassy in each county that we visit and if worse comes to worse we will show up at the Ghana border and see how much the bribe will cost.  

We leave tomorrow night for Sierra Leone were we will be spending one week  volunteering at a remote beach village helping to build houses, schools, etc… We probably won’t have internet access for a little while but will update the block as soon as we can.  

Standard public Moroccan toilet

Me doing some laundry in the shower

Cat trying to get to chickens on other side

This cat decided to get on my lap at a cafe and refused to get off