Having now seen how awesome the sunrise view is from our place I woke up early and headed up to the roof and attempted to get a time lapse of the sunrise to go with our sunset time lapse from the evening before but this one didn’t come out as good. The focus again turned to where we could track down some breakfast, in this case more of an American style breakfast. The options for that were basically non-existent in Tangier but we did discover Cafe de Paris which had mediocre reviews and was featured in the Bourne Ultimatum so obviously we had to head right over. It actually wasn’t bad, but not great either. Afterwards we tried to walk past the King’s Tangier palace which Karim had pointed out to us the day before as we were driving. We were ultimately unsuccessful in tracking that down so we headed home to get ready to travel to Asilah to catch another sunset.

Asilah is a small town on the coast south of Tangier which we had been led to believe was a gorgeous beach town. We walked all the way to the Tangier train station from our place in order to see more of the town and then we took the train 40 minutes down to Asilah.

For reasons passing understanding the Asilah train station is about 20 minutes outside of Asilah. Continuing our trend of walking everywhere we started walking down the small road that led back around to the beach so that we could follow the beach into town. Walking down the beach was rather disappointing. While it could have been a nice beach, like most African beaches it was totally strewn with trash. …and populated with random camels for the amusement of tourists. I had limited cell reception but I was able to send a quick message at this point that would really pay off in the long run. We made it into town and tried to have lunch at the first restaurant that we came to that looked rather nice. Naturally, we were kicked out because they were closing. Luckily the place next door, Seven Seas, was open and reasonably nice.

While we were eating I got a reply to my earlier message. My friend had been good enough to look up the best beach in the area for us but it was a further 20 minutes south of town and there was no real road to get there. We decided to make the attempt anyway. We started walking down the main road in the direction of the beach with the hopes that we would see a taxi. As we were walking a random guy who lived in the town pulled up alongside me and asked if we needed directions to the medina, no doubt inferring that we were tourists from my confusedly looking around for taxis. I asked him if he knew the beach we were trying to get to and if he’d take us down there. After some price negotiations we were in business and on our way to Paradise Beach.

Driving across the countryside, unpaved roads and down a cliff in the guys little VW Golf or whatever he had was an adventure in itself although the views here were pretty great as well. At the end of this adventure he deposited on a massive beach where there wasn’t another person in sight. …almost. Naturally some random old man who was eating a sucker and had no shirt had to come over to invite us to his village. After getting rid of him we finally had the place to ourselves and were able to get some great sunset shots as well as attempt to recreate the Remote Year logo in the sand like we had seen everyone else do… our success was limited.

Afterwards our new friend took us all the way back to the train station… or rather he let us out on the side of the road and pointed us to a gap in the fence that we could climb through to get to the station. Despite some free loaders being in our seats on the train (later we would realize we were on the wrong train entirely) we found some free spots and made the trip back to Tangier in good time.

After all the travel is was strait to sleep when we got home.