Ceuta (Septa) Trip - August 2016

Here's a map of the region I visited pulled from Google

Ceuta (Septa) Trip - August 2016

      Recently I traveled to the North of Morocco, because I needed to leave the country in order to renew my visa. For these visa trips over the past 11 months that I have been in Morocco, I have traveled to Amman (for a conveniently-timed Fulbright enrichment trip), Milan, and Madrid. This time, I decided to stay in North Africa and check out the autonomous Spanish city of Ceuta (or Septa, in Arabic). Check out the map above to see where it's located- as you can see, it's bordered by Morocco on one side and separated from the Iberian Peninsula on the other side by the Straight of Gibralter.

Here is a street of Tetouan at night 

      Ceuta is a "low-tax" zone and Moroccans living in surrounding cities, such as neighboring Tetouan, are known to cross the border frequently to do some shopping. And, like every city in Morocco, stores seem to have lots of promotions going on this time of year. In doing my research for this trip, the official Ceuta tourism website boasts of this notoriety as a shopping destination. I also noticed in this research that there is not a lot of information out there about this tiny enclave/exclave (I think in this case both are correct).  For example, I found only a handful of places to stay in the way of hostels and hotels, and fewer restaurants. (Maybe this is due to my lack of expertise in Internet-research...or their lack of Internet presence.)

Anyway, as I had decided to travel by land for this particular excursion, I took a train more than 50% of the way, to Asilah, and a bus the rest of the way to Tetouan. I went with a friend and we purchased tickets on the 1:30 AM train, which was supposed to have us end up in Tetouan around 9 AM. (Tickets for this journey one-way cost us 175 MAD, or just over $18 USD). In fact, the train ended up arriving to Rabat (our starting point) at 2:30 AM, but we actually ended up at our destination not too much later than originally intended. When we boarded the train, sleep-deprived and irritated for having waited an extra hour outside in the middle of the night, we were shown to our seats in the dark train. Our seats were in a certain compartment on one of the cars, but we found a family asleep in our assigned seats. The father swore up and down that he had tickets for those seats, but when he produced them for our less-than-helpful attendant, it turned out that they were for the exact seats in the same compartment...in a different car. To make a long story short, the family refused to move and as it was nearing 3 in the morning we decided to suck it up and take their slightly crappier seats in the other compartment.

Here is a picture of a beautiful mosque near the border to Ceuta 

This was not a sleeper  car, so we were forced to sleep sitting up between jerks of the train as it stopped in every train station. At one point in the night I came out of my groggy state to realize that the train was completely stopped, and completely silent, save for the incessant sunflower seed eating going on in the seat next to me. Outside the window it was pitch black, and you could see only the cigarette cherries of the train workers and various passengers who had stepped off the train. I don't know if this was a scheduled break, but I just tried to go back to sleep. This happened about three more times, and I was too tired to care much about what was going on around me.



So we arrived at Asilah sometime in the wee hours of the morning and boarded the Supratours bus to head to Tetouan. We ate the homemade sandwiches I had brought along for breakfast. I think I fell asleep with my eyes open at this point but at least I had my glasses on.

       

 

We arrived in Tetouan a while later and headed to a cafe near the bus stop. We ordered some coffee and used some wifi to find a place to go in Ceuta. Then, we walked toward a petit taxi, which took us to a grand taxi (about $1), which took us to the border between Tetouan and Ceuta (17 MAD for each rider) (or Morocco and Spain). Getting into Ceuta was really smooth, and there was tons of foot-traffic and actual car traffic at the border. It seemed that the cars didn't move once during our entire process of passing border control.

The first thing we did was go to Plaza de Africa, because that is supposed to be the major city center in Ceuta. It was almost completely deserted, but it was Spain and it was so beautiful. It's right on the water, and has a pretty cool Andalusian-style church dating from the 1700s, Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Africa. We went to a tapas restaurant, which we later learned was a chain of restaurants, at about 10:30 in the morning. Everything was pretty cheap, a few tapas and 4 beers cost about 5 euros per person.

Then we walked for a few hours and went in just about every shop we saw. There were a lot of familiar names, but all of the clothing seemed more...decorated than what I was used to seeing in Morocco, or the U.S.. Everything just seems to be overloaded with detail and noise.

We lunched at a Chinese restaurant and had decent food and a really nice view. After this we headed to get some ice cream and sat outside eating it with a bunch of smokers speaking Arabic. It was getting late in the afternoon so we decided to begin the long journey home. 

Me at the first tapas place, bright and early!  

I was stopped at the border trying to go in to Morocco, and after talking to about six different people they finally gave me a visa. (On a separate train trip within Morocco I was accused of being a spy, which I find hilarious, so maybe I just have a suspicious look or something.) This is so wierd...but apparently they don't like it if you don't even stay the night in Ceuta, and they really don't like foreigners using this border as a way to renew their visa, as apparently this is common. I should note that I have never had anything like this happen when I go in and out of mainland Spain, or any other places I have gone, and I have heard of these issues with other travelers, so this is definitely unique to the border at Ceuta-Tetouan.

The view from our seat at the restaurant. 

The trip home was long and painful, and when I finally got home around 4 the next morning, I decided to never do that again. At least not in one day.

Until next time!

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