7-01-2011 (at 1am in the morning from a tent….!)
7-1-2010
So it’s been a while since I was able to type a proper update! (annoying mac has no battery life) Let’s see what has happened since the first…
New Year’s Eve we spent in Marrakesh, at place Jamaa El Fna. After one of the other teams paid 100 Dirhams (about £10) for a snake charmer (about 20x more than normal tourist rate), we ended up in an old hotel that looked stuck in colonial Africa since the 20’s. (oh, and we tried some great goats head!)
At around 11:30, all the stalls closed and kicked us out… only to return as partygoers a few minutes after… by 12:15 everyone bar a few tourists, drunks and police were gone…
On the first, we hung around Marrakesh. Around 2am in the morning the hot water boiler in the apartment exploded. That turned the apartment into a sauna, which promptly turned into a swimming pool. After a few frantic moments, we flicked the fusebox and then closed the water mains – which meant we got to sleep… albeit a little humid. In the morning, the taxi-driver-slash-apartment-dude came by and tried fixing the water… managing to close the hot water partially so that as long as we only used cold water it would not leak. A few hours later the plumber arrived, who promptly explained that the hot water pipe coming out of the boiler was plastic… and this melted so there wasn’t much he could do bar shut off the boiler and replace the pipe (with another plastic one). Charming!
We ended up camping that night, and the camping site just outside Marrakesh was really not bad! They even had warm(ish) showers. The downside was that the Mercedes bonnet emblem, along with the poppy I had wrapped onto it, got stolen! Doh!
On the second we headed towards the south, and ended up camping Tiznit – north of Layounne (sorry, really can’t remember how to spell that!). The surfer dudes found the place, and it was crawling with surfers… the van parked next to us had an Italian plate from Torino… so I headed towards the aroma of espresso and had a chat… typically, when in the absolute middle of nowhere, you end up meeting 3 people from a hundred meters down the road from where you come from! These lived in piazza Massaua… pretty much where my grandma lives!
The day after (the third) we drove a whole hour or so… and ended up in Wasai beach, just south of Layounne. Again, a slow day, but a welcome one! On the way there, we snapped 2 tow-ropes… by trying to salvage some firewood from a dead tree on the roadside… I had a video of this; and I’m hoping it’s on a tape I’ve saved… as the day after, while driving south my camcorder got “pickpocketed” from my car… while stopped at a police/military checkpoint! Grumble… I had it on the dash recording, and my passenger window was open about 3-4 inches… barely enough to fit the camcorder through apparently… but somehow someone managed… So now I have 7-8 tapes I recorded and nothing else. Dave and Olly have lent me their camcorder, so hopefully tomorrow I’ll manage to catch the landmine field crossing… fingers crossed it’ll work!
Anyhow, the evening of the fourth we ended up in a campsite called “Le Camp du Bedouine”… on the way there the Volvo team hit sometime and buckled their alloy rim… leaving them with an inoperable wheel. A quick swap and we were en-route again. About 5 minutes from the campsite, their exhaust detached almost totally, thus dragging on the floor and wrapping itself around the rear suspension. This meant they couldn’t really move… luckily, someone had a hacksaw handy and the surfers removed the offending exhaust. So the already loud Volvo (who’s exhaust was never really attached) now was truly groundshaking!
The fifth saw us drive almost all day to Dahkla, which is as weird city as any. A true melting pot of cultures, you find clothes in Western style right next to Berber Jalabas, Senegambian boubous and Saharoui Kaftans and head-scarves. The road to Dahkla was fantastic though, a thin winding single-lane carriageway that follows the skeleton coast (called so because of the hundreds of shipwrecks along the coast). While we didn’t have any real breakdowns, we did some pretty impressive drifting in the sand with the W202 and the Isuzu… totally covering the merc in sand… Sadly, the windows were open, so also the inside got coated in sand! I’ve got a few pictures of this I’ll upload asap!
The sixth (today) was a real rest day… waiting for all the teams to catch up, lick their wounds and share war-stories. The Volvo team got their wheel bashed out and their exhaust welded on (for around £50), the Brava got a new set of tyres and I bought some water and a headscarf (in the traditional indigo colour). For dinner, we popped into town, where we had camel-meat skewers (2 minced and 2 diced). These were quite good, and the camel meat was less tough than usual.
We also met “Freya”, a European who has lived outside Europe all her life and was extremely helpful. She gave us a few pointers, offered tea and pickles to some of the guys who were homesick and helped us out with general information for the region. Not too sure about some of the information, as she seemed to omit all the kidnappings in the region over the last couple of years, sticking to the ones where people were killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time… oh well, fingers crossed we’ll get through without too much trouble… Also, she told us to head for the border later in the day, while we need to be there first thing in the morning as we need to get the military escort asap!
The plan for tomorrow is to get to the border with Mauritania (a 6km strip of land which just happens to be a minefield…). The border needs to be done first thing in the morning, so that we don’t have to drive at night and we can stop somewhere near an army outpost. The plan is to sleep at the border for the night, do the border early in the morning, and get the military escort over to Nouakchott around lunchtime getting there before sundown. The day after we’ll drive to Nouadibou… and then onto Mali with some luck! We probably won’t do Senegal/Gambia as Senegal is being annoying with the border and asking for 150-200 euros for the entry… Corrupt as everywhere else so far… but with a few zero’s too many for my budget!
Anyhow, better catch a few z’s and stop thinking about how everything can go wrong…
Nighty-o,
M.