Asilah - map

In Meknes I bought a train ticket that would take me all the way to Tangier. My plan was to spend a day or two in Tangier, and then take the short trip south to the Atlantic coast city of Asilah. On the train ride north, I noticed  that the train made a stop in the City of Asilah, so I decided to disembark there, and save myself a later trip.

I had a rough map of hotels, so I selected one from the map and it turned out to be fine. It was right across the street from the medina, and very close to a row of restaurants. The first afternoon I spent wandering the streets of the medina. This city was a tourist destination for Spanish citizens and many Spanish owned vacation homes in the city. It was unusually clean and litter-free with all the city walls whitewashed.

The medina walls are right on the coast



The medina streets of Asilah were very clean and orderly

The morning of the second day I woke up and felt strange – weak and nauseous. I laid in bed for an hour before making an emergency run to the sink in my room to vomit three times. That felt terrible.  I spent all morning in bed and not feeling good.

Earlier in Fes my guide had told me that he had started his morning by vomiting, and I figured that he had given me his germs. Now it was three days later and I was sick. I was concerned because the current germ circulating the globe was “Swine Flu”, and it had claimed hundreds of lives.

In the afternoon I made a food run from my hotel room, and bought some bananas and some tangerines from a sidewalk market.  I wasn’t hungry and that was all I thought I could eat. I went back to my hotel room and slept for the rest of the day.

The next day I did a little bit of walking around, but I was still weak and a bit dizzy. I again had a meal of bananas and tangerines. I walked to the the large beach just to the north of town, but it was rainy and windy, so the beach was empty.

The port area of Asilah

The third day I went to the train station to catch the morning train to Tangier. I looked at the train schedule, and it showed a train leaving for the city of Tetouan one minute later than the train to Tangier. This seemed strange to me, since I knew Tetouan was off the train line and had no rail station, but I wanted to visit Tetouan more than Tangier. I asked the ticket dealer about this train, and he said this was actually a bus that was operated by the train company. I bought a bus ticket to Tetouan, and missed another chance to visit Tangier.