When I rolled into Morocco I was immediately greeted with a rude awakening of how they are there. I gave the guy at the exchange booth a certain amount of money and told him how much it was, but made the mistake of not counting it in front of him and he totally ripped me off. Then I rode into the town and noticed that all of the people were staring at me and I didn't feel entirely comfortable or safe. I got a room there and left the next morning.

I rode into another town and needed to buy something for my bike, so I got out my Arabic phrase book and tried to ask some guys on the street where a bike store was. They didn't understand me so I showed them my phrase book and they looked at it. Then another guy walked up with a boy and he told the boy to take me to a bike shop. I didn't realize at the time that the original guys walked off with my phrase book. The boy took me to a bike shop, but I forgot to tip him which I felt kind of bad about later. This was the first time I had been to a third world country since Mexico for ten days when I was like eight, and Mexico is more like the second world anyway. The bike shop was unlike anything I had ever seen before. The place I bought the stuff was just a hole in the wall about two feet by two feet. This town looked totally run down and neglected. It looked like hell actually. There were no shops or cafes or outdoor hang out areas. It was just just a bunch of big unpainted cement buildings and half cement-half dirt roads; and bored looking people walking around.

I road down south to begin my journey and stopped at a roadside gas station to get something to eat. There I saw a guy who talked to me in English. He told me Moroccans can all speak Arabic, French, and English. He was really friendly and outgoing, which I later realized was a super big trait about Moroccans, they are OUTGOING. I rode down some more and saw a young girl carrying a big pile of sticks on her back. I got off my bike to take a picture of her but she turned around and walked away from we so I just got a picture of her backside. I found a room on the top of a four story building in the first town I got to and had a look around at these third world buildings. They have a different system there where you can see the water tanks on top of all the buildings, and they all have flat roofs with terraces. I thought that was a good idea and wondered why it wasn't like that in the houses and buildings in the states. I went for a walk in the market place and saw how all the merchants have small booths and even some of them sit on the ground to sell their stuff. I remember I liked Morocco that day.

The next day I rode down to I think it may have been Rabat. I remember seeing big walls of the castle in the middle of the city, and realizing that all the towns I had been to in Morrocco had an old wall in the vicinity. Morocco used to belong to the French who built forts and castles around the country which eventually became the museums to these modern cities. Rabat was a big city, I think the second biggest in Morocco. I got a big room, nicer and more expensive than I wanted, but it was the cheapest I could find. It was in the city center on the corner of a block on the second floor.

I heard people yelling outside so I looked out of my window and saw a guy sitting on the ground yelling at a taxi driver who had apparently hit him. The driver was standing over him, and there were about fifteen people watching. I found it very odd that the guy just kept sitting down as he was yelling and didn't get up. He was obviously not hurt at all. That continued for about five minutes and I got bored and stopped watching and went for a stroll down town.

This was more of a city that the towns I was at before. There were people walking around and shops and restaurants. I didn't walk around much though as it was still pretty boring. I had a TV in my room and was watching the music video channel all night. The music videos totally cracked me up because they were so amateur. They were all filmed in video, and the stars didn't even seem excited to be in the video. I remember seeing one with a young girl who was doing some kind of American style imitation where she dances in the middle of a bunch of girls, but they weren't dancing in formation like in America. She had a baton she was swinging around and threw up in the air, but instead of catching it like they do at football games, she just kept dancing let it fall down right next to her. There was another video I saw that was a little more artistic of a guy sitting in a restaurant with his friends looking bored and singing something. The video opened up with him looking into the camera, and then it panned out and you realize he was looking in a mirror next to his booth. Then he went home and played with his dog. But that part of the video was really poorly done because the dog was obviously not his. The dog didn't look excited to see him at all and instead of petting it, he just smacked it upside the head a couple times and walked on. I don't remember much about the music, but I don't remember thinking it was that bad.

The next day I rode down through Casablanca. This was the most crowded city I had ever been to. It took a really long time to traverse because the traffic was so bad. At the red lights all of the scooters, who were about half of the automobiles, got on the sidewalk and tried to run the red lights just like I do on my bike; so I had to compete with them. I didn't feel safe there at all because a few times I heard people yelling out to me in an angry tone of voice, so I just rode as fast as I could pas them. When I got out of the city I continued down south on the highway, but a couple of cops pulled me off the road and told me it is illegal to ride on the highway. They asked me if it was illegal in the states and I said it was. I started riding on the smaller roads which was more pleasant anyway because I could see the beach and more neighborhoods and there were less cars to contend with. I remember seeing a lot of neighborhoods of large lined up stone houses near the beach. They were really strange looking though because none of the houses here painted and most of them looked uninhabited. There were quite a few of these neighborhoods. I thought at the time maybe it was some sort of government housing plan for the rich that fell through. I decided later though that that was just probably what the houses there were like.

The farther down the road I went the less I liked Morocco. I felt less and less safe, because literally every guy I came in contact with wanted me to get him to the states. I remember one guy I saw who ran a call center in the middle of nowhere. I could have sworn he said something like give me your money, like he was trying to mug me. So I said, ''What you want to go to the states? I can get you there''. And he got all excited and gave me his name and phone number. On another occasion when I was riding down the road, a man came running out of his house after me down the road screaming. ''Hey! stop! stop! stop!'' until I disappeared down the road.

I arrived in a town near the ocean on a hill next to a river. This was apparently an old French town because it was surrounded by an old colonial wall. I got a room in the center and went for a walk. I encountered an old French man who took me to his little restaurant. He had a life set up there. He said the woman working there was his wife, who served me one of their traditional teas. He must have been gay because he told me I should visit him in his house in Paris and bring young men with me. Then he insisted on going for a walk with me holding hands. He said Moroccan men walk down the road holding hands all the time. I decided to ablige him just because I'd never done that before. I sure did feel awkward though because I was still dressed in my full spandex bike suit.

After I parted ways with the strange old Frenchman a young girl approached me and invited me to her house. She led me down a dirt neighborhood path lined with brown two story apartment buildings that were fused together into one large building, with the occasional family shop in between. The area reminded me of the town in the planet Tatooine in Star Wars. She lived with her brother and older sister. The house was small; it just had a kitchen, living room, and bedroom. The energy about them was very strange. Her brother and sister welcomed me as if they were expecting me, and they fixed me a big Moroccan dinner. The way they eat dinners is quite strange. They make a huge piling plate of coos coos mixed with other vegetables, and everybody makes balls of it with in their hands to eat it. They offered me to stay at their house that night so I went to my hotel with the girl to get my stuff, but to my great surprise the people at the hotel didn't let her it. I didn't realize it at the time, but they must have thought she was a prostitute.

The next day I went for a walk down to the beach about a quarter mile away with the girl and her brother. The beach was beautiful. It was wide with white sand. I was surprised to see that we were practically the only people on the entire beach. I saw how the waves were big and told them they should open a surf board making business, but they didn't seem interested. The whole time hanging out with them was strange because they never had anything to say. I did all the talking, and if I hadn't, I don't know if there would have been any words exchanged at all. They were so uninterested in dialogue that I was wondering why they invited me to stay with them in the first place. That night they invited me to sleep in the bed in the one bedroom, which was the only bed in the whole house. They said they were going to sleep in the living room. I could hear them arguing in the other room in French, and from what I understood, the girls sister and her brother were trying to get her to come and seduce me so I would take her to the states. Then after about ten or twenty minutes of arguing, the girl came in and got on the bed and just kissed me on the lips. I told her that I wasn't going to marry her, but if she wanted to sleep with me that was OK. She said no, and I felt bad so I gave her a stupid speech in English about how America isn't all its cracked up to be. I told her some bullshit about how we all live in houses that look the same and we just work all the time, and about how her life is cool because she has all this free time on her hands to start a business of her own. In a way that part was true. Those people did have a great opportunity to start something great like make money making surfboards and getting those people into surfing. And that was just one example of the many business opportunities that exist. It seems like they just have a lack of imagination and motivation. It doesn't seem too unrealistic that someone in that country could loan a few bucks to somebody with a cool idea.

The whole experience of being with them and seeing how pathetic their lives were took my motivation away to ride around Africa and got me thinking about Italy and all the cool ruins there. I told them that I was going to come back though. I can't remember exactly why. It might have been because they were acting so weird I didn't trust them and thought they might do something bad like rob something from me or get me in trouble with the authorities. Or maybe it was just because I felt so bad about breaking their hearts by destroying their hopes of getting to the states. The girl and her brother insisted on seeing me off at the bus station in the next town over. Because they wanted to come with me, we had to take a taxi.

We went to the towns taxi yard where there were like 50 old Mercedes waiting to take people.The ordeal of getting our taxi was mind bogglingly confusing. I couldn't believe what was going on because there were so many taxis there to take people. What happened was we told one of the taxi drivers who was waiting there where we wanted to go and he told us how much, so we put my bike in the trunk. But by the time we were ready to get into the taxi a whole family had entered the taxi and the driver was getting ready to drive them away. So we reminded the guy of the agreement we had and that my bike was already in the trunk. He kind of stood there with a confused look on his face, then eventually told the family to get out, but they didn't want to because they thought they got there first. So we had to tell them that we were in fact there first and that we were putting my bike in the trunk when they arrived. After some deliberation they finally left. When they dropped me off at the bus station at the next town, I gave them money to take a taxi back to their home and they waved me off.

I had to make a transfer in Casablanca which was a total hell hole. The bus station was crazy too. I went out to get something to eat and a guy walked up to me trying to sell me hash. Then he said he just wanted to get me stoned for free. I was stupid and followed him into an old abandoned store or something about a block away where there was another guy there trying to sell me some. They closed the metal sliding door and a person walked by outside and tried to get in to save me because apparently he thought I had been abducted, but the gate was closed and he couldn't get in. I smoked a little with them and then told them I didn't want to buy any because he had originally told me he just wanted to get me stoned, but I should have because when I left the guy followed me and kept badgering me telling me I owed him money. I sat back down at the outdoor restaurant and the guy kept bothering me and the waiter was looking at me like I was a criminal. I finally gave the guy five bucks to make him go away. I went back to the bus station and then another guy came up to me and said he was a cop and told me I owed him thirty bucks so he wouldn't take me to jail for 24 hour interrogation. I told him I didn't have any and he said I obviously did because I was acting stupid and was stoned and shaking from fear. I was inside the station and felt safe enough so I told him to fuck off and luckily he buggered off. There was a really drunk guy who was trying to bother me so I ignored him and he eventually went away. While I was in the bus I was glad I didn't continue south and felt like I was in hell. Mind you, this was the first third world country I had been to so my negative feelings were related to the general problems that those countries have. They showed a movie about muslim dessert war lords on the ride back which was funny because it was so blatant steeped in battle and death. Just about every scene somebody got murdered. I guess in the end it wasn't that much different than the average hollywood action movie, it just looks a lot more ridiculous when it is in a low budget movie. When I got off the bus I went straight to the ferry station and waited for the ferry to come and get me out of there.

Later on I found that most of the people that had gone to Morocco hated the place too because they were harassed so much. I did meet a couple of American girls who loved it though because they had gone up in the mountains where the people are mellower.