The promised day had arrived! Our cars were due on the boat out of Casablanca to Dakar.
In true Moroccan style the day turned out to be a master class of chaos, cock-ups and palm greasing.
At first all seemed straight forward enough: the port police cleared us and a couple of other cars to head directly for the Customs’ scanners. After that it would simply be a question of paperwork.
We joined a queue of trucks waiting to be scanned and alerted the officials of our presence. It didn’t take them long to realise that cars are considerably smaller than the freight lorries the giant x-Ray machines were designed for. Only the tops of our roofs would register on screen.
A manual inspection would be required and of course that meant finding a different customs post at the other end of the port.
In convoy, weaving our way round the lorry filled port roads, we were pulled over for not wearing seatbelts by the obligatory cop looking for some lunch money. Ibrahim, our assigned fixer, dismissed the official with what sounded like very colourful language and we carried on.
At the next customs post it was clear they had little interest in us. We were directed to park the vehicles on the docks round the back and come back when we had more paperwork.
We headed to a third customs post where only the flash of a little cash roused them from one-key-a-minute tapping on their grubby computers.
A lot of debate later a scooter taxi appeared and flew off with our paperwork and fixer. I spent the next hour hanging around a fish-smelling truckers’ caffe and being suspiciously eyed up and down by every passing patrol.
Eventually Ibrahim and the scooter driver returned, forms in hand with a variety of fresh stamps and signatures. That’s when he realised that whichever dimwit had processed the forms and pocketed a small share of our bribe budget had probably not worked since last week and deffinitely not changed the date on his official stamp.
So Ibrahim and my new found taxi driver friend decided it was time for lunch; something very fishy and smelly.
Re-energised, our fixer went off to correct the forms. His taxi driver decided it was time to suggest I employ him for the rest of the day to keep me company. I politely declined, although given his suddenly poor grasp of French, this took sometime to sink in.
At last, with corrected forms in hand we returned to one of the previously visited offices. With a bit of searching we found the Customs Sargeant who was to inspect the cars, extracted him from his sandwich and talked our way into his patrol car for a lift back to our vehicles.
The check, which took all of 5 minutes, consisted of noting that the chassy numbers corresponded and musing at our intention to drive in these ridiculous cars to Cameroon. The fact that each of our wrecks was in considerably better shape than his patrol car didn’t seem to occur to him.
We tipped the dock-side security guards – a little more generously than planned because of a little confusion over which currency I had in my pocket – and returned to the Customs’ Chief to finalise the formalities.
We only had to wait for a short period for him to return from his prayers before he could accept our final bribe and sign-off our paperwork.
It may have taken all day but at last our cars were destined for Dakar!
