Day Totals: 8 hrs, 17.7 kms



Dusk is setting in as I approach Agadir, but I've still got a thirst for adventure inside me . As I pass through Ben Sergao, the town where I rented my own place for the first time back in 1997, I feel the urge to take a stroll down memory lane. It’s true that I revisited it officially back in 2008, but a place as significant as Ben Sergao could certainly use another revisit.

I get off at "Stop Number 2"  The teleboutique is still there… as is the dairy shop where I’d go to get an omelette or glass or raib… I head up towards my old 40 euro a month room at the end of the alley… the photography shop somehow has survived this digital age as has, of course, the café on the coner.

It’s an odd feeling, looking up at that room, where kids used to throw stones at my window… the room where I spent hours and hours sorting out my thoughts trying to figure out what I believed in and what I’m supposed to do with my life… It was an exciting time as I started to break free from the life I’d lived as a child and teenager and discover all on my own who I really was and what was important in my life…

I discreetly take a picture of the building and another of the alley . A couple rowdy kids (probably the children of the kids who used to throw rocks at my window!) spot me, and call out “Thieves! Thieves! Rob this guy!” I guess that should make me nervous, but hey, this is my neighbourhood… this is the place where I was reborn as a new man, so if any place is to be considered my true “hometown” it’s here in Ben Sergao. So there’s no way I’m going to be put ill at ease by some rascals in my own alley.

A couple of them come up to me and start singing in a language I can’t understand… Berber, perhaps? No, it’s Korean, and they’re singing “Gangnam Style” the song that has garnered a billion hits on Youtube.

My, times have changed.

But a lot has stayed the same. Even though Ben Sergao hosts Margane, Morocco’s equivalent of Walmart, the market of Ben Sergao looks exactly like it did 16 years ago, with vegetable stalls made of scraps of metal and plastic—and gas lamps still used, since they still don’t have electricity…

I enter a little grocery store just to see if an old friend, Abdullah is still around . His brother, Brahim immediately recognizes me, and we immediately start chatting as if it were just yesterday that I left this town. We reminisce on old times and of how things have changed.

“Ben Sergao is a lot more dangerous than before—a lot of crime going on here” is not something I was hoping to hear…

Finally, I head on my way, wandering through a couple of neighbourhoods that didn’t exist back then, including a large section near the coast that is being turned into a whole new residential/tourism zone. Right now it’s still dark and dreary with just a scattering of houses, hotels and cafes.

And that brings my 3^rd “Adventure Day” in the South Coast Region to a close.