'Bus'tling through Mediterranean countryside

We took an overnight bus from Madrid to Algeciras, on the southern coast. I woke up once to find the bus following the tail lights of a truck through a valley pocketed with fog. Two men beside me were conversing in Arabic; Nick was asleep and, four rows back, so were our friends Chris and Henrietta.

It was still dark when the bus dropped us at the Algeciras harbor, and we rushed to catch the next ferry. It was huge, with a car deck underneath and a plush passenger deck, and, when it cleared the harbor, it began going so fast that, out on the observation and smoking deck, I felt the skin of my face stretch back around my eyes.

We passed Gibraltar. (I was mildly surprised to find that Gibraltar isn't a giant rock balancing on one corner; it is, sadly, just a peninsula.) Over the next half hour, as Africa slipped into view before us, the sky grew light.

We landed in Ceuta, a town that is Spanish territory because it was the African outpost of the Moors during the 800 years they ruled Spain -- during the reconquest that ended in 1492, Ceuta fell to the Christians along with southern Spain, and the Moors retreated into Morocco with some embarrassment. A few turned to piracy on the Barbary coast.

We walked across the border with no problem and were hustled into a light blue Mercedes taxi, one among the hive of them that idled by the border. And off we went, barreling down the coast with Nick in the front speaking his grade-school French, and we three in the back, beat from traveling.

The land there is beautiful. It's the Mediterranean coast, and soft green mountain stretch up along it. We saw sheep and shepherds, the men in robes with pointed hoods, and donkeys and a pair of camels, and small towns of flat-roofed buildings that stood white against the green hillsides. Everything was very green and very white. A soft rain was falling, and I nodded off.

I woke as we pulled into Tetouan. We paid the driver in dirhams, worn colored bills, and walked down into the bus station -- dingy and crowded like the station in San Antonio -- where a busy-looking barefoot man in a smart faun-colored jacket showed us to the bus window we needed.

The times and destinations were written on the windows in Arabic and French, and the bus we needed wasn't running for hours.

We decided to look for another taxi (taxis are cheap), and found ourselves being tugged along after the barefoot man in the smart jacket, who waved off sharking local drivers and hustled us through the station, over a hill and down the street, almost colliding with a man jogging up the hill behind a cart full of snacks. The snack-man honked a bicycle horn at us and waved, and our guide bundled us into another light-blue taxi, took a small tip, and disappeared with his moustache as we headed off.

The taxi went higher into the mountains, and it grew cold. Rain was coming in one open window.

It took 40 minutes to get to Chefchaouen, which means "Look, three mountains." We were deposited with our backpacks onto a stone street in a plaza full of unfamiliar trees, their trunks painted white, and we limped towards the center of town. We were only 15 hours from Madrid.

Rachel Pearson is a graduate of Port Aransas High School and The University of Texas at Austin. She is living in Madrid, Spain. She may be reached via e-mail at rachelmpearson@gmail.com.