Duped!

Having spent 55 days overseas now, in addition to previous trips, we'd like to think that we are pretty seasoned travellers. But today we managed to fall for the oldest trick in the book!

We got friendly with the bus conductor on our way to Chefchaouen (views, above) after he was so helpful showing us how to store our luggage. We got to talking on the bus, where he told us about himself and his family. He then recommended a 'fantastic' hotel for us, which was much better than the one we had been planning to stay at, but, of course, it was up to us, had nothing to do with him and he wouldn't profit from it at all.

All you clever readers can obviously see what happened next: we arrived at a dodgy looking hotel in the medina where he just happened to be hanging out. Not only was the price higher than he had originally quoted us, there were some very unsavoury looking characters smoking kif (the local marijuana) on the terrace right outside our bedroom.

Although we managed to extricate ourselves from that hotel, we were now hopelessly lost. So we asked someone to direct us to one of the hotels in our guidebook, only to have him show us to a completely different one and later to have him come and hassle us for tips (even though he'd doubtlessly already received commission). Despite being a little more expensive than we'd expected to pay, this hotel had REAL TOILETS, that had been CLEANED in the LAST DECADE. So we decided it was a lesson learnt and stayed in our lovely new hotel - and check out our hotel's traditional internal courtyard!