At 4am Laure heard prayers. We woke up naturally around 6.30am, and we were very hot and sweaty. The sun was shining outside, and the sky was blue. We only got up when the watch alarm beeped though. We got ready, and tried to spend as little time possible in the toilets which had now become rather smelly!

The receptionist downstairs was sleeping in his cabin; the big entrance door was locked, but fortunately someone knocked on the outside, so the receptionist woke up and we could leave. It only took us about 30mins to get to the station, but we stopped for breakfast at a cafe along the way. The square Djmell was much quieter, pretty deserted, and there weren't many tourists about.

We bought supplements and boarded the train. There were quite a lot of people for part of the way. We had to change in Sidi Kacem, and it was there where we realised that we no longer had a plastic bag that contained our camera. We tried to do something about it with the staff, who told us we had to phone back later when we got to Asilah, to see if they'd found it. The train to Asilah was crowded, there were even people in the corridor. We weren't too much in the mood for talking so we read. The landscape was pretty much like Western Europe, very green. We saw a sort of fayre in the middle of nowhere; people selling hundreds of pottery dishes and the like.

Asilah again was a very beautiful town, a quiet seaside resort, very picturesque. We had to walk from the station to the hotel; the station being beside the main road to Tangier, on the Northern edge of the town, and we decided to take a short-cut across the beach. The temperature was very pleasant, and we met a young Moroccan man who chatted with us a bit. He knew where our hotel was, and said it was really expensive, and he was right. Laure called up Sidi Kacem station but was told that they hadn't found our camera; we began to wonder if in fact we'd left it at the cafe in Marrakech.

Asilah, nice houses, beautiful sea, much more pleasant than Southport!

We arrived at the hotel (Ouad El Makhazine) and the receptionist said the room was 280dh. We said nothing at first, we were too surprised, as we thought the price was only 180dh. A porter took us upstairs to our bedroom which was the best we'd had on the whole trip, certainly the most spacious. There was one double and one single bed, sofas, three windows, a colour TV with several channels, a bathroom with bathtub and a pillar in the middle of it and hot water. We went downstairs again to enquire about the price of the room and to explain that we didn't need that big a room. The guy wouldn't hear a thing. Laure was going to ring another hotel when we discovered that breakfast had been included in the price. When we pointed out that we didn't want breakfast we had 60dh off the price, so the room only cost 220dh. We decided to go for it because we didn't really want more adventure, and the room was very nice, and we hadn't had a decent hotel room in Morocco yet. The receptionist had kept mentioning the restaurant; did he really think we were going to eat there?!

A 15-minute walk took us to the sort-of cafe/restaurant quarter of Asilah; people hardly spoke French there (more Spanish). On the way there we spotted the bus station, and we decided we would get the bus to Tangier in the morning rather than the train. We found that couscous was really cheap and readily available, so we had one. At that point we were rather careful with our cash because we didn't have much left and we didn't want to have to draw any more money out in Morocco. Also we couldn't find a cashpoint. The hotel was supposed to have taken credit card but the machine was "broken" so we had had to pay in cash. The harira was again different, it had noodles in it. The couscous was really nice and big, a lot of chicken and a lot of bread. It looked like a mountain on the plate and we couldn't actually finish it. A meal for two was 75dh.

We returned to the hotel. On the way we bought postcards, and two purses as gifts for friends back home. In the room we lay in bed watching TV, we had more of a choice of channels this time but there was nothing worth watching, and so after a while (of watching the German-language music shopping channel) we went to sleep.