Up and down
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Nederlands
From Tarifa in Spain you can see Tanger in Morocco, it’s just an hour away by boat. After a very long preamble, and a thorough preparation, I did just that. I took the ferry and sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar. After eleven years I finally set foot on African soil again. During the boat ride you can have your passport stamped right away and buy some taxfree booze. The latter is not quite unimportant as Morocco and Mauritania are muslim countries. One bottle will probably not get me all the way to South-Africa, so I thought to myself: ‘I’ll just go up and down another time’. So when the customs officer asked me a little bit later if I had a camera drone with me I said loud and clear: ‘Of course, what do you think of me?’ According to my plan my drone was confiscated right away, because those things are always prohibited in countries with totalitarian regimes. Because of this I was forced to return to Spain within 45 days with the machine. If I didn’t want to loose it, that is. Therefore I sailed up and down after the weekend in order to send the drone back from Spain to a friend in the Netherlands.
Smooth operation
At the crack of dawn I got out of bed to catch the nine o’clock ferry. My mission went swimmingly right from the start. I had walked to the ferry terminal, but the customs computer said that I had entered the country with my car. Subsequently I was obliged to leave with it as well. In the end they believed the fact that I was just going up and down to buy booze bring the drone back (you see how flawless my plan was) and let me go. But when I arrived in Algeciras with the bus from Tarifa some time later the DHL shop had just closed for siësta. On top of that it just happened to be fathers day that day in Spain, and a lot of businesses close their doors in the afternoon because of it. So I tried the post office. And I swear to god, they were open. All is well that ends well. Mission accomplished and I could head back to Tarifa and Morocco. Unfortunately though there was a bit of a breeze by that time. And we all know that foreigners seize every opportunity they get not to work, so all ferries were canceled for the rest of the day. ‘That’s just effing marvelous’, I thought while I booked a hotel for the night. At least I was able to have some pork for the last time in the foreseeable future. Because I will have to wait for that until I’m in in Guinea Bissau I think.
