Visa stuff and Tiznit

Breakfast at the main square

The great mosque in Tiznit

Until I got the Mali visa, everything had been going almost suspiciously smooth: a fast ride to Almeria and there only a 1.5 hour wait for the bus to Algeciras, no problems finding cheap hostels in Tanger and Rabat and no difficulties in arranging to meet Houcine there. No stomach problems or any such thing. Also getting the Mauretania visa was easy enough.

In contrast to the Mauretanian embassy, I was the only person applying for a visa at the embassy of Mali. The visa application form was much shorter and easier to understand than the one for the Mauretanian visa. Nevertheless, I made an error and gave 18 January instead of 18 February as the expected date of entry into Mali. And this date is now the one given in my one-month-visa. This means that the visa was valid for three weeks from the date of entry and that I have to be in Mali by 15 February at the latest. Once in Mali, it should be possible to get a one-month extension but having only two and a half weeks for the trip from Rabat in Morocco to Bamako in Mali still means that I have to hurry up a bit now. I thus decided to leave Rabat the following morning and travel directly to Tiznit in the South of Morocco.

Tiznit is the last larger town before entering the Western Sahara. It's nice here and a good place to have a rest between the 12-hour-trip here from Rabat and the 20-hour-trip onwards to Dakhla, the last stop before the Mauretanian border. Tomorrow, I will enter the Sahara and then not see much green until I reach the Senegal River.