Here's a non-bike (or S America) related one for you:

My mate & I had arrived in Tangiers (a few years ago), as we are walking to catch the train to Fez, a guy starts chatting to us on the platform and ends us sitting with us on the train. He is (aparently) a moroccan living in Madrid and is buying local goods to sell there. He is v helpfull about morocco and offers lots of useful advice on moroccan custons, where to go etc and even writes our names in arabic in our books. Once the train is moving, another guy looks in to our compartment and asks if there are any free seats. Again, chatting away fine, no problems.

We tell them we are heading to Fez and (this is where it starts) 1st guy says Fez is way too hot, not that great etc. He's going to Asilah where theres a local festival happening. 2nd guy is also going there to visit relatives (aparently). Anyhow, as we had no fixed plans and were getting on well with them, we opted to visit Asilah for a night and got off the train with them.

To cut a long story short, they got us into a guest house (which they were obviously affiliated with), then 1st guy was going to (you guessed it) the 'house of the Berbers' to buy stuff to sell. We went along to watch the 'master' at work only for me and my mate to be split up onto different floors of this 4 storey building and given the hard sell on carpets etc. Meantime, 2nd guy had gone off to pray! When we left and hadn't spent anything, the 1st guy was well pissed off as I assume he wasn't getting his cut from the Berbers. It aslo turned out that A) they weren't staying at our guest house- they buggered off but not before the bastards arranged to meet us later on and B) had taken our money (overcharged us) and paid the guesthouse woman for only one of us so we ended up in a shouting match on the roof the next day as she obviously knew them so we didn't pay her.

Anyway, there was a lot more to it than (drugs were produced etc) that but just wanted to share how easy it can be to put your trust into someone who initially appears helpful but potentially we could have gotten into a much worse situation which thankfully didn't happen. Unfortunatelly, it took a bit of time to trust anyone else there after that. We met some nice folk in Asilah later who told us those guys regularly worked the train line preying on backpackers freshly off the ferry in Tangiers.

We didn't have any more major hassles afterwards but that but I guess thats Morocco (or more specifically Tangiers) for you as the rest of Morocco was great.

(ps I know someone on here is bound say it was stupid to talk to or trust strangers etc but we don't consider ourselves to be nieve and if you don't trust or speak to anybody, well what kind of holiday are you going to have?)

Hope thats of some use to anyone.

__________________
Mike


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