We boarded the train to Fez with some trepidation, and none of us more so than Vito. The curse of ‘il culo de camelo’ had struck hardest with him and he wasn’t relishing the thought of sitting down for 7 hours. Added to which, the grippe now had him firmly in it’s grip (so to speak) and 7 hours of air conditioning wouldn’t do him any favors.

At first however it didn’t seem as though this was going to be a problem, as the air conditioning was all but non existent. The windows opened about a quarter of and inch, letting in a tiny bit of warm air. It was going to be a long trip… Vanessa responded to this in her customary way – by going to sleep – much to Vito’s annoyance. The rest of us read up on Fez in between drinking warm Arabic cola and hideously bad coffee.

At least we had the compartment to ourselves…. This lasted until we got to Casablanca, about half way, where a couple of people joined us. One of them seemed to work for the trains, as he promptly got up and fixed the air conditioning (in the guard’s compartment) from tropical to arctic. His friend, following the second cardinal rule of Morocco, that all strangers (particularly gringo looking ones) must be quizzed, started asking us the usual questions, where were we from, where were we going, was it our first time here, did we need a guide…. Actually he seemed to be a nice young man, but he did have a friend who was a guide in Fez (‘just to practice his English you understand, not for money’). We were soon to learn that it was impossible to catch a train anywhere in Morocco without coming away with a couple of recommendations… we did the best thing, took his friend’s name and phone number and thanked the guy for his hawk… I mean help. Over the course of the next three hours or so various Moroccans drifted through our carriage offering services of one kind or another along with some general chit chat. We left with several names and numbers in exchange for which we used our new standard ‘In Sha Allah’.

We arrived in Fez around sunset and negotiated a taxi to the Old City, which for anyone not familiar with it takes the shape of a giant medina-suq with around 9500 little streetlets and alleys to get lost in and a great lack of cars and motorbikes which was perfect for us. The taxi dropped us just inside the old walls where we quickly picked up a little guide. The book had warned us about touts and faux guides, often in the form of young boys, offering their services to take you around. In this case we decided to take one if only to ward off the others, and also because the book had warned us how easy it was to get lost in Fez and we wanted to put down our bags before we did so.

Faux guiding is illegal in all of Morocco and in Fez particularly there have been some pretty big crackdowns recently. There is even a story in the guide book about one young tout doing 3 months hard time for his efforts. As such, the guides are very careful not to look as though they are guiding, which helps then when the police are around but makes it a little hard to find them if they get too far ahead of you.

Our first hotel was completo so our guide took us too a few more. We finally settled on one in the main street. A little more than we wanted to pay and no private bathroom but we were a little sick of carrying our packs around. We said goodbye to our little guide friend, much to his disappointment as he wanted to show us to a restaurant as well… a decision that we came to rue as well. We found a place for dinner in a little gringo courtyard populated by about 100 cats, which Vito happened to be allergic to, making for a very relaxing meal for him. The food turned out to be about the worst we’d had so far and one of the more expensive. Fez wasn’t off to a good start…

This bad start continued when we arrived back to our room to find that they had commenced road works right beneath our window, which wasn’t so much a window as some bars with a couple of shutters. This continued well into the late hours of the morning, making for a rather irritable troupe the next morning, particularly Vito who was still grippe grabbed. Needless to say, we moved hotel the next day. Our new hotel was situated on the crossroads of no less than five mosques, but after the previous night even their competing dawn call to prayer sounded like a lullaby..

The next morning Nato, Kato and I ventured into town to get money (no ATMs in the old city..). When we returned, while waiting for the Italians, we had what we all agreed was the worst coffee so far.. and not in Morocco, in the world. We had the initial and all important conversation ‘you have coffee?’ ‘yes!’’real coffee? Not nescafe?’. What we failed to do but should have was launch a UN style search for a real coffee machine. In the absence of this, we could have gone to war on the basis that they were harboring coffee of mass destruction.. which they served to us. Looks like there is something to be said for a pre-emptive strike. I won’t go into details, but if anyone is going to Fez, I will give you the address so you can avoid it. Or bomb it if you so desire.

That day we wandered around the huge sprawling medina, defying the advice of the guidebook and every one of the guides standing by the side of the road telling us ‘you’ll get lost!’. Indeed, but we figured there were enough boy guides to take us home if it got too much, and anyway getting lost is half the fun. Turns out it’s not so easy to get lost anyway, as there are a series of helpful signs pointing you towards major attractions. We did get a little lost but managed to find our way back to where we wanted to be without engaging the help of a guide. Along the way we visited mosques and mausoleums, markets and more markets, tried to find a non-existent fountain and visited the fantastically stinky tanneries where we watched the tanners going about their business and inhaled the combined stench of dead animal, cow urine, pigeon faeces and a swath of other disgusting things that go into making the luxurious leather of Fez – the only upside to this cacophony of stench was that it was the first thing in three days that managed to penetrate Vito’s grippe. Nato rated it five stars for stinkiness, even worse than the long drop toilets at Uluru and even worse than his much revered garden-clearing ‘torte’ of 2000.

Vito was well and truly over it by now, markets, mountains, vache, pan, nescafe, cats, tajine, cous cous but most of all grippe. We all agreed to head to the new town that night and found a great café serving none of the above things (except a little grippe) where we had an excellent dinner. We couldn’t have been more pleased.

That night we were serenaded to sleep by the sounds of about 100 cats trying to make ferocious sticky cat love love to one girl cat, who seemed to have other ideas about it …. And awoken a few hours later by the symphony of 5 competing calls to prayer (one guy in particular sounded like he’d been drawing his influence from a little Barry White). We drifted off to sleep again, wondering how many Muslims position their beds facing Mecca to save time and sleep..

Next day we spent a few hours on our rooftop terrace enjoying the sun and watching the intricacies of the previous night's cat love. It seemed to go on for hours without much sucess and doesn't really explain why there are so many cats in town...

Then we bid farewell to Fez – not a moment too soon for Vito - and headed back to Tangier.