Gidday mate..It seems like a long time since I’ve said that. These days its bonjour or a nod of your head as you walk past. When I do say my usual greeting, I get a blank stare as if I have spoken some strange dialect or a long lost foreign language. Thing is, this part of the world used to belong to either the French or the Portuguese and along with Arabic they are the languages spoken by pretty much everyone. The further south we go in Morocco the more French people we see and fewer of them seem to speak English. Sometimes it actually quite funny. We often meet French people who don’t (or won’t) speak English. Sometimes they will just carry on talking and talking even though we are indicating we don’t understand at all. It usually works out for them and they often walk away looking satisfied with themselves having had a good chat with the Englishman. Yes, the Englishman and his English wife… We have been campsite hopping, moving from place to place staying at campgrounds. We have just left a mega campsite with 100’s of campers. It was 90% full even though it’s the off season and 90% of the campers are French and 99% are in RVs. We were the 1% outside under canvas. Just like clockwork every night at 6:30pm the RV dwellers all head indoors and the entire place falls silent. All that is left is the glow of the flat screen TVs tuned into the array of satellite dishes that are on every roof. We on the other hand remained outside and have the place to ourselves. Luxy starts to play on the roadway and between the campers and we are able to chat to the security guards. It’s not like any campground I have stayed in. It felt like we were living in a French retirement village. We did however meet some nice people at the mega site and thanks to Stuart and Boo for a wonderful afternoon tea. We also spent some more time with our friends from Estonia, Ivar and Kairi. We are looking forward to seeing more of them and their lovley dog on the way back! A storm meant we had to move but (the silly thing is) for 5 Euros more a night, we have a lovely apartment in a resort up behind the campground. The reason for the long stay in Morocco is because we are waiting for some credit cards to come from New Zealand, Germany and the USA. It’s actually been harder than we ever imagined to bring them all together and to us. Having an address and being able to wait there or sending things in advance to a hotel and hope it will still be there when we arrive. With the credit cards, we didn’t want to take any chances so we are getting them sent by DHL. But other items are being sent in advance of us arriving. It has meant an extra 2 + weeks here before we can head south. We sure didn’t want to risk having something this important to the trip getting lost again and Morocco is a much better place to ‘hang around’ in. It has meant that we have spent a lot of idle days though. When you travel by car and set up camp using the car, to move sites in the camp or use the car means an entire pack up. The weather has been nice for the last few weeks and lazing in the sun doing lots of nothing has been a nice break. A massive thanks to Nicola and David for allowing us to use their address for this job and to Nicola for the running around to make it all happen. So, I have looked through both our cameras and phones for photos to remind me of what we have been up to so I can write some more in this edition and guess what? They are just photos of Luxy and campgrounds so rather than drone on about nothing much or fill a couple more pages with cat news, I will leave it here so I can get this finished. Today we leave Agadir and the resort accommodation we have been in for the last 4 nights and head for The Western Sahara. Our next town stop will be Dakhla. We will follow the coast all the way and we expect it will take us 4 days, about 400kms a day. When we reach Dakhla we will have to wait for the last package before we cross into Mauritania. The next few days will be more interesting driving as we cross the disputed territory. The Moroccans are technically still at war with the Polisario people and a cease fire has been in effect since 1991. The Moroccans occupied the territory after the Spanish left in 1975 starting the war and although there has been no fighting for decades, still our first war zone!! We expect that in the next 1600 kms we will be stopped up to 50 times at police and military check points so maybe I will have a bit more to talk about next time. Thanks for following!
Paul Edwards
16/2/2017 01:48:18 am
That's a nice write up mate.....Mr Charisma lol. Some awesome looking 4WD RV trucks there too. Who would of thought you'd be RV paupers in Africa?? Funny stuff.
tractor
17/2/2017 02:39:10 pm
Awesomeness! I share your posts & pics with my work mates and family. Take care out there and stay safe. Comments are closed.
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it's Our Epic Trip...David & Christine are from New Zealand and are embarking on a trip around the world the slow way, on foot and by personal vehicle. This could get interesting! Archives
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