Casablanca, Morocco

We reached Casablanca with plenty of time before the ship's scheduled departure time. Our driver drove into the port area, spoke with a port official who gave our driver directions. We drove around a barricade narrowly missing a old tire which served as an additional barricade. We then drove a short distance and were stopped by another port official. Here, we were told that we were in the wrong area. The driver made a U-Turn and headed back out of the port area. We drove for about 10 minutes and tried to enter Casablanca's Port Area 1. Here we were stopped by a yet another port official. After much discussion, the driver told us that he could not drive us into the port area. He pulled over and had more conversations with the what was now several officials.. He finally came back to the van and confirmed that he could not drive us into the port area but other cabs drivers could. I need to add that the port area is huge. We could see our ship but knew that if we had to walk to the ship, we would never make it before the ship departed.

Luckily, we were traveling with seasoned travelers. Dave had a copy of the Viking Daily which had the telephone number to the ship. He called and said that we were at the gate and the officials would not let our driver take us to the ship.

As Dave was talking to the ship, we were told that we had to exit the van. So we gathered our belongings, exited the van and picked up our luggage.

There was a very aggressive cab driver who said that he could drive us to the ship along with two other cabs. He began trying to grab our luggage to put it in his cab. We refused and walked over to the group of port officials. The port officials were all very friendly and jovial. I would have much preferred them to be efficient, helpful, and responsive to our plight. But at least they were not impeding us while we, loaded down with all our luggage and purchases from Marrakesh, made our way through the port gate only to gaze longingly across the vast port in the direction of our ship.

By this time, Dave had received information from the ship that they were sending a shuttle to pick us up at the port gate. We waited several minutes. Finally, a huge bus pulled up to take only the eight of us to the ship. Just as we were about to depart, the lead port official boarded the bus. I thought, is he going to throw another obstacle in our way and will we ever get back to the ship? We later found out that he just wanted a ride to his duty station which was near our ship.

Surely, we would now delivered to our ahip. But no, we were dropped off at a non-descript building. We entered the building and had to be processed by immigration.

After immigration, we believed that we were finally home free. But as we exited the building, all we saw was a large, white ship that had clearly seen better days. We quipped that the Neptune had really aged in the short time we were away.

The Neptune was parked in front of the first ship that we saw but it was docked a ridiculously long distance from the immigration building.

We were so excited to see the Neptune that we stopped to take photos.

After all the difficulties with the Port of Casablanca, we narrowly made it back to the ship in time.

We had dinner in the restaurant with Jim, Lynn, Art and Donna. We commwntes that it was hard to believe that we actually had only left the ship yesterday morning. We packed a lot into a very short time.

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