Furthest East - welcome to Figuig.

Chris Scott has produced what many consider to be the best guide to off-road travel in Morocco, in English, anyway. This tome is packed with useful information and we made good use of it on the previous trip. There's a route - ME6 - that goes from Figuig to Bouarfa and we decided to follow that, but in reverse. This makes deciphering the waypoint notes a bit tricky as all the "lefts" become "rights" and the "befores" are now "afters". Quite a challenge to make sense of them as some of what look like obvious features aren't mentioned, and others that are can only be seen in the rear view mirrors.

Anyway, a well plotted trail that gave us an easy -compared to the previous day - transit.

The shot above shows the "shady tree" at the oued at Km53 if you're southbound. Chris has included lots of interesting little asides in the route descriptions, and we were intrigued to find out what he meant by "you pass some weathered granite boulders that have their uses" at Km70. We stopped to check around in case we'd missed them...

Our estimate of where we were was about 150 metres out based on our odometer. Just around the rocks visible on the left of the picture are these:

Don't look much from this viewpoint. Just big rocks...

...but if you've got clean mirrors, you'll see these as you go by. Hobbit Houses. As we explored, we disturbed a jackal (Desert fox?) who promptly legged it before I could get a picture.

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If you've been paying attention, you'll see that we're now pointing the wrong way. This shot is towards the south-east. We've had to turn around at a large lake that's formed following the construction of a dam. We explored the shoreline but eventually it was clear that we'd have to backtrack and find another way around the lake. This wasn't difficult using the compass and the binoculars to spot the new piste on the far bank. We just followed the west bank until we could cross the oued easily. As we drew level with our previous high point, we could see the dust trails of a number of 4x4s that'd followed the same trail as us and found the same problem. I counted 4  of them milling about. There were actually a lot more, as we were later to find out.

On the far side of the dam we came very close to the Morocco-Algeria border, and no doubt our progress was being monitored from somewhere on the peaks around us. Sue suggested that "if we were to just sort of reach over the berm for just a few feet, we could claim our Algerian sticker. I'm sure no-one would see...". Yep.

The border berm is difficult to miss, so no excuses for just "getting lost while out for a stroll". Would've been a good idea to do this in Northern Ireland. Might've saved some former colleagues some embarrassment. Maybe.








The final run into Figuig was easy apart from the arrival in our 6 o'clock of the aforementioned 4x4 gang. From the dam we'd seen 4 before we got bored watching. After 3 of them had roared past doing warp speed and covering us in a dust cloud so thick we couldn't see a thing for several seconds....a glance in the mirrors showed the headlights of at least another 6 inbound. We'd been considerate and moved well over to the right of the piste to let them pass, but this put us downwind of the dust and it was literally choking us, not to mention flying blind for a dangerous length of time. I moved across to the left - upwind- side. Now they were approaching us in our dust. Made no difference to the breakneck speed, though. Now, I think I have what's been called "mechanical empathy"; I don't floor the gas pedal on a cold engine, gang-bar switches with a swipe of the side of my hand, hit spanners with hammers, use screwdrivers as prybars...that kinda thing. So when I see a bloke come flying out of a dustcloud at 60+ mph and I know - coz I can see what he can't - that theres a half metre deep gully ahead and he ain't got no wings....I wince. Not for him, for his car. I reckon you could hear the crunch in Marrakesh as his dampers bottomed out and if he's got any teeth left they haven't got fillings in 'em.

We caught up with them at a police checkpoint outside town. We handed over our fiches - all our details preprinted (Thank you, Tim Cullis) which put a big smile on the face of the Feds - the Fast Frenchies in a line ahead of us were still licking pencil stubs and filling out forms as we passed on. By 6 we were nicely settled into the campsite next to the hotel. Miller time!

This is really pleasant. Quiet, we're the only guests, good wi-fi - which is why you're reading this - and hot showers. We think this might be a couple of days R&R coming up.

                                    This is the view of Algeria from the pub. All it lacks is beer......

                                                                        Unlike us! Salut!