Taxis, buses, donkeys

Morocco is a pretty large country, but can get pretty sparsely populated on the edges. In the densely populated areas, i.e. the routes between Marrakesh, Rabat, Casablanca, Tangiers, and Fez, there are regular trains and buses. But in the frontier regions, particulaly the dusty towns near the Sahara Desert, traditional transportation tends to..... breakdown, for lack of a better word. Fortunately, a combination of Moroccan entrepeneurship and good samaritism, (or its Koranic equivalent) have combined forces to allow people to move from village to village with an adjective that comes very close to reliably.

The first line of defense is the long distance taxi. I don't know how this institution began, but it is by far the most interesting piece of the Moroccan transportation pie. In all towns, regardless of size, there is an area that can best be described as the taxi depot. There, a host of Moroccan dudes stand idly by their impossibly old and improbably held together Mercedes while shouting the name of the city they are headed. After you find your driver, it is simply a matter of waiting for 5 other passengers (4 in the back, 2 in the front with the driver) heading the same way.

Of course, once the journey is underway, the taxi driver is free to make extra money by picking up anybody he sees on the side of road. I don't know if there is an upper limit to the amount of people allowed into one Mercedes, but can personally testify to at least 12, including the driver.

There are also huge Volkswagen vans prowling the highway system that will stop for anyone and charge an amount of money ranging between 0 and 20 dirham, which is worked out according to a rule system so arcane, I assume it takes a whole life lived in Morocco to understand.