All the computers which I encountered in Morocco had, except for one, French/Arabic keyboards. The Arabic keys were only the punctuation and symbols keys but that created enormous difficulties as I never ever found out how to type ‘@’, it took me ages to work out how to do a full stop and I had to rely on my address book to send emails. Anyone not in my address book could not get emails from me.

Tangier from the roof of the hotel

The French configuration was also difficult with several letters transposed and, as a touch typist, I found this very hard and was still typing ‘q’ instead of ‘a’ at the end of the trip. I assumed that my recipients would be able to read typoese and corrected or not depending on my mood and the number of people waiting to use the computer after me.

Like everything else in Morocco, the cost seemed to be flexible and depended solely on the amount of small change either I or the people on the reception desk had in our possession; sometimes it was even free …

The hotel at Ouarzazate
Note the bank of solar panels on the right side of the picture

We arrived at Ouarzazarte in a sandstorm and when I came to use the computer in the lobby I found that the keys were sticky in more ways than one so I upended it and shook out the sand, followed by a good wipe down with an antibacterial wipe. It didn’t help much but at least I felt that I had done my best.

I began to suspect that what most of the incredibly slow computers I used needed was a good cleanout, deletion of cookies and temporary internet files and scanning with an up-to-date virus scanner. I reached this conclusion after I noticed that I was receiving French spam in my yahoo account, a sure sign of spyware in the system.

Mobile phone towers seen from the Tiz n’Tishka Pass in the High Atlas Mountains

Interestingly enough, the mobile phone network was excellent. There are a lot of very high hills in Morocco and many of them had mobile phone towers perched on the top.