Casablanca is just a four-hour flight from Lagos. But it's a world away.

Instead of paralysing traffic, we move quickly on a multi-lane highway towards Rabat, not a pothole in sight. Instead of sprawling tin and wooden slums, the expressway is dotted with cranes atop new multistorey housing settlements stretching out towards the horizon. Instead of yellow Lagosian danfo taxis clustered at informal stops hindering the flow, Morocco's roadside amenities and its péage would not be out of place in Europe; neither Casablanca's surly immigration officers.

As you leave the city instead of bush and mounds of garbage there are ploughed fields, acres of which are under a different sort of plastic, greenhouses producing for Europe's tables just 14km away across the Gibraltar Strait from Tangier. For a while the 350km road from Casablanca to Tangier hugs the TGV rail line opened in November 2018 after 10 years of planning and construction, cutting the journey to a fuss-free two hours.

Morocco's $2 billion TGV -- Al Boraq - was financed by loans of a billion dollars from France, and another half-billion from Gulf states. (Image supplied)

Traditions remain. Women in jellaba and men in Obi-Wan Kenobi-style pointy-hatted amama tend sheep...