The world's fastest trip to Morocco.

Yes, we are in gibraltar. After a humbling attempt to go to Morocco, we realized that we still have a lot to learn about travelling and always having a back-up plan for if things don't work out as planned.

We arrived in tarifa 3 days ago, scoured out the ferry and bought 2 open round trip tickets. Found a campground nearby with a beautiful beach and got everything prepared to catch the first ferry of the day at 9:00am. After a nice quick crossing, we arrived in Tangier with plans to take a bus to chefchauen as soon as we could. We found the bus station with some difficulty and while we had stopped at a couple atm's along the way which we couldn't get money out of for some reason, we weren't too concerned until we learned the bus only took cash and we had a total of 5 euros and 30 US dollars on us. We tried 5 more atm's and spoke with a few bank personel trying to find out what was going on. Even now, we still don't really understand why we couldn't get money, one bank told us there was a connection problem and others said they didn't have an agreement with our bank, key bank, another bank told US mastercard and visa aren't accepted in Morocco (probably a language translation issue). On top of this the whole rest of the developed world outside the us uses a chip and pin system in their credit card which is much more secure than our magnetic strip system and this has caused us minor problems in Europe, but we've always been able to get money. So since few places in Morocco take credit cards and we weren't even certain the card would work, (our visa has failed to work a couple of times) and the fact that we couldn't get money from an atm and we didn't have enough cash of any currency, we decided our safest option was to return to Europe that day since we had our return ticket already. We figure our total time exploring this new continent added up to about 3 hours, most of which we were either lost or looking for money.  We decided to drive to gibraltar to fulfil our need to get out of the schengen zone for 2 days.

Not quite the trip we were planning, but no harm was done except to our egos and we've learned some good lessons about the need for backup ways of getting cash and carrying more in the first place. We've learned a ton about gibraltar too, tunnels, monkeys, sieges, pubs, and all. And yes, our atm card works just fine here. Plus we got to visit the UK, without actually going there.

Tomorrow we leave gibraltar to start making our way back to Paris, probably stopping at el chorro along the way.