Saturday 14 March 2020 – Moulay Bousselhem to Martil

Up earlyish to another grey start and to get Plan B underway, however a check with Balearia now showed no scheduled crossings until 28 March. But the midges were a real nuisance so we'd move anyway and let the day take its course.

We took the motorway all the way to Tanger-Med, a nice fast road and the tolls are not expensive. But we weren't really surprised to find that the port was indeed closed and we were not able to find any information either, so we took the road up and around the headland towards Tetouan, pausing for some lunch and to sort out a stopover. The obvious place was a campsite at Martil, the holiday part of Tetouan, so we broke new ground and dropped down to the Mediterranean coast of Morocco.

Our route took us past Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the Morocco mainland, which with it's own ferry connections to Spain was the original place to cross but was again a target for illegal emigrants trying to get to Europe. As such there was a high security presence with several Auxiliary Force vehicles taking up observation positions along the way and a police roadblock on every access road to the town.

Hills between Tanger-Med and Ceuta

Ceuta

Entering Martil

We continued past; now this was totally different to anywhere else we'd been in the country, definitely a holiday resort coast lined with hotels and holiday complexes, some of them even having been built! We suppose we shouldn't have been surprised to find it was very much in the Spanish style but was very quiet, being out of season. We found the campsite easily enough and squeezed into one of the last remaining pitches, meaning to stay two or three nights to catch up on washing before heading off further south.

A little research seemed to indicate that the ferries were still running from Ceuta, although a new ticket would be around €200 – not for us. But later still we heard from a fellow Brit onsite that the ferry companies were honouring Tanger-Med tickets on the Ceuta route, but no-one knew just for how long.

Plan C was thus formulated. We'd get up extra early tomorrow, forget Sunday Breakfast and make our way up to Ceuta to attempt a return to Spain. If it failed then we would have lost little and would return to Martil, but we were starting to get a little worried about the actions of various governments, including Spain and France, introducing lockdowns. Was travel going to be affected? We felt we would rather be stuck in Spain or France.