When you arrive in Ceuta from Algeciras, you come off the ferry straight into town: there are no formalities, since you are still in Spain. The Moroccan border is 2 miles or so outside town, and takes 1-2 hours to get through. Most of this is simply waiting for papers to be inspected once you have filled them out.

As you arrive you are welcomed by what appear to be border officials, who lead you the appropriate offices and tell you which papers to fill out, and how to fill them out. If you are bringing a vehicle into Morocco, you need a 'vehicle temporary import permit', which you are issued with on showing them the following documents:

We had two problems with the border police: firstly, my V5 registration document looked different from that of my friends (the Licensing Authority in the UK had just changed the format and layout of the V5 a few months previously, when I had bought my bike) and the police didn't like this, since this was the first time they had seen the new layout; and secondly, Patrick's insurance, although he insisted it was valid for Morocco, did not have the word 'Morocco' anywhere on it, and so the police refused to accept that it was valid. For reasons best known to himself Patrick had also omitted to bring a green card, although he had brought an expired green card from 1995 for another vehicle he owned..

The first problem we managed to get around by patiently showing the police inspector where each of the pieces of information on the old V5 document was located on the new one; but the second problem required a little more creative elaboration. We managed to convince him that Morocco, along with some other important countries such as the United States, Canada and Japan, were on a list of countries approved by the European Union for insurance matters. The policeman said that giving him a photocopy of my green card with its list of countries including Morocco would be sufficient for Patrick's insurance to be valid... The logic of this escapes me now, but it made perfect sense at the time.

After completing all the paperwork, there only remained Customs to pass. At this point the border 'officals' started demanding money, and althought they didn't threaten us directly, we got the feeling that if we didn't pay then the Customs inspection would be rather more thorough. A Swiss car passing through Customs ahead of us had half of their belongings strewn across Customs and three or four Customs officals examining everything. So we gave them a few hundred pesetas and were waved through Customs after some insistent questioning on whether we were carrying any tear gas.

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