We marched back outside, incensed, punching a few ticket touts in the face on the way. Now what did we do? The man was right, there was only one option-a grand taxi. As opposed to the town-based petits taxis, grands taxis provided intercity transport, and although cheap by English standards, it would be expensive for two of us because you always had to pay for the full six seats. There were loads of them lined up outside the station and we approached one tentatively to ask how much it was to get to Casa.

'Four hundred dirhams,' he told us. The ticket man had just told us it was twenty-seven dirhams per place, which made just over a hundred and sixty for the whole cab. We laughed at the driver, always the best response, but for the first time he laughed back at us. 'There are no buses or trains,' he smiled, disconcertingly cheerful; 'how else will you get there tonight?'

'What a bastard!' Simon said, impressed.

'We are not tourists, we live here,' I explained, which sometimes helped. 'We are just poor students...'

Eventually we got the price down to three hundred, a concession he probably made just for the sake of having a bit of a haggle. We clambered in, tired, and he set off; I tried to sleep on the journey but it was too uncomfortable in the bare, ancient Mercedes, and the ride was interrupted by a police roadblock and a mechanical problem. I thought this breakdown may be a ruse to demand more money, but he fiddled around under the bonnet and soon got it running again. The engine was probably held together with string and camel spit, I thought, nervously eyeing the empty spaces where his wing-mirrors should have been.

Unfortunately, in our panic about getting to Casablanca we had forgotten about waiting till the last minute, and so it was that we rolled up to Casa bus station at half-one in the morning, three and a half hours before our bus left for Essaouira. 'Right,' I said, 'we'll just sit in the CTM station café until five.' It wasn't until our decrepit taxi had farted off down the street that we realised the station was closed.

This was an unexpected setback. We looked around us carefully. The bus station was not in a nice part of town, wedged in a small dark back street in downtown Casa, and the road stretched off in two directions with not a light or a sign of life in sight. It was very quiet.

We huddled against a wall and consulted the trusty guidebook.