Falls mainly on the Tourists. Apparently. The last post you got from us was halfway up – or down – that country and now we’re in the top half of Morocco, so a bit of catching up to do.
It’s tempting to rewind and give you all a blow-by-blow of What Daphne Did on
Sunday – Monday – Tuesday etc but, let’s be honest, that’d be as boring as your
rellies slideshow of their holiday in Barnstable.
Nothing wrong with Barnstable….nah
– you’ve read all that before.
So, no recap on where we’ve been and what we’ve done. Except
for this bit:
- To complete the stuff about the campsite Chopera…lovely place. Full of interest and tapestry of life. The debate about where we ate was decided by another deluge and we headed for the site “restaurant”. This was co-located with the bar. A typically Spanish affair, with tiled walls and floor which makes cleaning up easier, but does nothing to deaden the sound of a family of Irish “Travellers” on holiday. This group of characters hailed from Limerick. We know that from a brief interrogation of one of the junior members who, at the time of the inquisition (it is Spain, OK?) was almost 100% engaged in trying to shine a laser pen into his sister’s eyes. When I suggested that it perhaps “wasn’t really a toy, your laser pen” I got the only eye contact made during the entire conversation..”It’s me beamer, ain’t nuthin’”. That’s alright then. His name was Liam; wants to be a doctor…when he’s not blinding his siblings. We’d noticed his sister – about 18 months old and toddling around the bar – seemed to have no knees, stomping about in quite an odd fashion, a sort of rolling gait like someone who'd wet themselves. Then we watched the rest of the family, who all seemed to move in the same way. The patriarch waddled – and that’s the only way to describe it – in and perched on a bar stool and – well, sorry, but I have to say that this is probably the ugliest individual I’ve ever laid eyes on. When this guy fell out of the Ugly tree, he hit every branch on the way down, then landed face first on a picket fence…The guy who coined the phrase “ a face like a Bulldog chewin’ a wasp” must’ve had this bloke in mind. Scary and fascinating at the same time. I really wanted to take a portrait photo of him but I doubt either me nor the camera would've survived the experience. I’ll let Sue pick up on what she remembers:
“It was then that we appreciated that the very loud ‘manly’
group propping up the bar were connected to the wife and children group at the
other end of the room. TV blaring, loud verbal interchanges, much gesticulating.
After a while we realised that this was not typical Spanish repartee, but
Irish. One chap had been in the wars and was propped up on crutches – bright
yellow. There was the Granda of the group, who looked has if he’d thump you if
you made eye contact. There was one chap who was so drunk that he kept falling
asleep on his bar stool, and every time he woke up he started thumping the
stool next to him and shouting ‘ guttup guttup’ to a toddler who spent the
entire evening waddling up and down the room with the bottle of milk in her
mouth bobbing up and down. We got the impression that she was looking for
someone to sit her on their knee and feed her the contents of the bottle. When
she did fall over, her ‘uncle’s’ shouts of
encouragement did little to help her “Guttup”. A boy of around 12 – another of her
uncles, apparently - was on hand to plonk
her back on her feet and give her a gentle push to get her going. I suppose it's possible that the reason she kept falling over was that she was blind. Mike wrote about the ‘beamer’.”
- So that was Sunday. We made it to the bottom of Spain on Monday night and spent a frustrating 2 hours searching for a campsite. The problem with using satnav POIs is that quite often they’re just plain wrong - see the previous re gas stations in Portsmouth – or if not wrong, then out of date. Which explains that for Plan A, after an hour’s diversion to what looked like an ideal nightstop, MsGarmin guided us unswervingly and without error to the best campsite in Cadiz that was closed. For Sale. Not operating; except as a collection point for windblown garbage. Plan B was more successful, but after an 8 hour drive, another unplanned 40kms ain’t welcome. At least it’d stopped raining for a few hours. We met a nice couple with a 5-star campervan who were heading the same way as us, but with 3 months to do it in. Jealous?....nah…course not. Kerry and Tim – good luck!
- Tarifa and Tangier on Tuesday, hurrah!
- Wish it’d stop bloody raining though, if only for long enough to get the bedding a little less damp. We hadn’t planned on crossing until we’d cruised the shops in Algeciras, so decided to take the time for a small diversion so we could say we’d stood at the bottom of Europe.
Well, Tarifa in the
rain is about as exciting as anywhere else in a downpour (see previous re Wigan)
and we didn’t hang around. Looking at Europe’s
bottom, that is. Straight to the ticket office in Al-g to discover that the 1400 ferry we were kinda expecting to use - and would give us 3 hours
of shopping time – wasn’t running this year but we could catch one
at 1200. Wasn’t this even better? No hanging about. Well, yeah, except
that leisurely cruise around Carrefour turned into a mad dash to get the
“necessaries” (mainly beer) before we missed the boat, literally, and then
we’d have to wait until Wednesday as there’s no way that the 1800 sailing
was going to work for us. Driving in Morocco in the dark? We may be a
little adventurous, but not suicidal…We made it though, with time to spare
as we really knew we would. It didn’t sail until nearly 1 o’clock.
As we got off the boat, cleared the Moroccan bureaucracy- pretty painless by normal North African standards - we finally got to take off our wetproofs:
The road south beckons.....
So now you’re almost up to date, or rather you would be if
I’d managed to get this post out yesterday morning. As it was, the campsite we
used at Chefchaouen had decided that wi-fi wasn’t going to be part of the deal.
In addition to that, enthusiasm for sharing our feelings about the continuing
monsoon was hard to find.
We (note the diplomatic language, chaps) left
the “tent door” open and while enjoying supper were ignorant of the deluge then
soaking the mattress. Nothing better to brighten your evening than a soggy
bed….nuff said. Maybe sometime this millenium the bloody heavens will run out
of wet and give us a chance to stop “dripping” as the Marines might say....
Until
then, our Sense of Humour is coming out of a glass. Bismillah!
Been gorgeous at 56N!
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