Casablanca - "Here's looking at you, kid"

We arrived in Casablanca to see the Mosque at 10:30. We parked right outside it, and then went to have a look. It was even bigger than we first thought, walking up to the doors you felt like a little hobbit in front of them! (Carmen especially) After taking some nice pictures, we went to try and find the entrance, which we eventually did. The price though was 120 dirham each, again a lot more than we were expecting. We considered this to be too expensive, so decided not to go in as we had already seen the inside of a mosque before several times in Istanbul. But Matteo and Bianca went inside as Matteo had really wanted to see it, one of his must see places in Morocco.

Me by the tallest minaret in the world

Carmen standing by the huge entrance into the Hassan II Mosque

So instead we headed off to walk around Casablanca a bit whilst they were inside. We went over to explore an area that looked interesting and found out it was a festival celebrating Africa, which unfortunately you needed to pay to get into. It was not very expensive, but we still decided not to do it as the only thing inside was books (not written in English obviously) and there would have been little point.

We then walked around the streets and saw quite a contrast between some of the different areas that we walked through, even streets right next to each other had some very big differences between the state of them, some looking very deprived, right next door to a more normal sort of neighborhood. We saw this all over casablanca as we later drove through it as well.

Carmen sitting in front of Hassan II Mosque - beautiful!

After meeting back up with Matteo and Bianca we headed off in the van to try and find a place to stop to get someone to have a look at the vans battery. The battery was letting out a gas which smelled like rotten eggs, which had been happening for about 3 weeks and this was concerning them. We eventually found somewhere, but when arriving there the battery completely died and wouldn't start again. So they had to get the van started again, before heading off to look for somewhere else to go as they did not have the bits we needed to fix the battery either. This Bianca thought was down to more communication problems than not necessarily not having the parts.

We then went to another place and met someone who could speak Italian, and as matteo was Italian it worked out better and we actually eventually got somewhere where they could get the battery working properly again although they still couldn't sort out the smell problem, which was decided in the end to leave until they got back to Spain.

Finally we made it out of Casablanca, but by then was getting late, so didn't quite make it to Rabat as didn't think there would be anywhere to park the van for the night so we stopped in a place called Temara for the night and we stayed in a very small campsite.

We had a quite friendly campsite owner who said that as it was going to rain that night we could spend the night in a small caravan on the campsite for the same price as using the tent. So of course we accepted. We decided though to put the tent up inside the caravan as it had windows without any glass, so it was very breezy inside. It ended up being quite a snug cozy night in the end.

Our temporary accommodation for the night, with our tent inside