14 April - Ait Mansour gorges

Another slow connection, so the pictures for this post and the next will have to wait until later - Inshallah!

It’s still bloody windy. That’s mainly the reason why this post will be a bit “compressed” in terms of a diary, because we just haven’t been able to do anything in the evenings because of the howling gale that whips past the campsite every night. I’d hoped that, when the sun went down, things would get a bit quieter – hurricane-wise – than during the day, when it seems to be blowing 40 knots all the time. This gets a bit wearing after a while, but if we’re mobile it doesn’t much matter. It’s only when we stop that it becomes an immediate issue….is the open door into wind? If so, will it blow the gas flame out? Parking for lunch now has an extra element to be considered – not just a great view, no other traffic, no inquisitive local colour…now it’s “and where’s the wind coming from?”.

The argan tree lunch stop. No goats. They climb them for the fruit and spit out the (valuable) nuts, apparently.

Anyway, back to the saga. We travelled up from Smara on the tarmac to Layounne, then back into the wilds around Sabkhat Tar. You got that bit, I hope? Escaping from that area the following day took ages. The scale of the map hid the enormous size of the salt lake, and we spent all morning getting back to the road, having gone right around the eastern side of it.

Every time we crested a ridge we expected to see some sign of our destination – the tarmac – but it was just like one of those convex hills you might walk up – and up – and up – and the summit seems to be ever just out of sight. The track was interesting and quite demanding at times, with a varied content – some dunes, some gnarly rocky descents, some fast sections of sand where we hit 60 mph, where other bits had us crawling along at 5.

Eventually making solid ground, we had a quick check over the truck. The “cap and condom” fix to the oily wheel appears to have worked. Either that, or the diff has run out of oil. A bolt that holds the kitchen in place has sheared off flush with it’s nut, so not much we can do except hope it doesn’t all fall apart – the kitchen, that is. I was quite pleased that I’d managed to design a system that was only held in by two bolts. Easy to take out. Easy to bust, too. A redesign required, methinks. I greased the door catches as they were beginning to get difficult to open. Sue is now moaning that the bedding is getting greasy marks from when we hang them over the doors to air. Can’t bloody win! The fridge was dead when we parked yesterday; a fuse had blown in the split charge system so this was a quick fix. What I must do, though, is have some kind of remote telltale on the dash that the fridge power has failed. Warm beer would be a disaster!

At Tarfaya, we took to the tracks again and looked for somewhere to sleep. This was an aborted attempt. The wind – given that we were on the clifftop – was “fresh”, and we’ve had enough of that, and the air was cool and damp. We wasted 40 minutes on this experiment, then cleared off inland, looking for a gentler breeze and drier air.

Eventually we made it to Tan Tan, now from the opposite direction from which we’d seen it on previous occasions.

On the way, we’d picked up the coastal highway and had a good sniff of ozone – and local garbage.

At home, picturesque views of the sea are generally policed by a local government parking attendant who’ll ensure that not only you’ll Pay Per View but also take your litter home with you. The locked gates deter the flytippers and even though we might object to having to pay, at least we don’t have to pick our way through old beds and dead dogs to get to the beach. Here, no such controls are in place, so the view is free. So, apparently, is the right to dump the contents of your picnic hamper on the ground before you go home. Or your old shoes, tin cans and any other detritus you might feel is surplus to your requirements. In short, everywhere we looked there was rubbish. We’ve got used to the fields of “blue flowers” – plastic bags – that grow downwind of every town – but when you get up close and personal with this stuff, you don’t want to hang about.

Refuelled with diesel and in need of a beer, we left the road just north of the town in an area we’d explored last year. The wind didn’t drop until we’d made an early night of it and closed the hatches at 9pm. 

Another minor fix - a tent peg reinforcement to a bent strut.

I threatened Sue that I’d be waking her at 5 to see the Milky Way. Back home, it’s visible as a barely-definable smudge in the night sky. Here, it’s as if some giant hand has taken an aerosol and sprayed a pale grey stripe across the sky. It’s really clear and bright, as is everything else up there. We brought our Radio Times Sky at Night pull-out-and-keep souvenir with us, and used it to identify the things that Prof. Brian Cox talks about but nobody really has a clue where to find them. And when you see it all as clearly as we did the other night, you realise how much more is Out There.

We spent today (Thursday 15 th April) making our way northeast via as much scenery as we could join together. The first couple of hours was boring blacktop; boring in terms of “select 5^th gear and point it straight”, but as usual there was lots to see and comment on along the way. The three hours between Tan Tan and Guelmin was spent marvelling at the ability of the local truckers to pile more stuff on their vehicles than would ever be legal at home. We spotted, way ahead of us, what was either a two-tone double-decker bus or a removal van. White on top, blue lower down. As we got closer it revealed itself to be a Ford Transit van – or the Peugeot equivalent – finished in Grubby Blue, with a rectangular load on the roof retained by a white tarp. The load was bigger than the van, and with the beam wind, he was having to keep a lot of rudder on to counter the tendency to leave the road on the downwind side. This meant we spent an amusing – no, make that frustrating – ten minutes trying to get him off the middle of the road.

There wasn’t a single petrol station for the entire distance of 110 kms. There was one tiny village that seemed to exist purely to offer for sale diesel in 5 litre plastic former water bottles – every roadside establishment in the entire place was selling “gaswl”. The closest we got to seeing a “proper” service station was this:

 Overload truck

Into Guelmin for shopping – groceries and poultry for the next 3 days in the Wilderness. A successful foray, mildly upset by the reaction of a shopkeeper who noticed from 30 metres away that Mike was photographing the street in which his shop stood, amongst many others. While we couldn’t hear what he was shouting at us over Daphne’s grumbling 2500cc, it was clear that he objected. To what? That he happened to be in the focal plane of a tourist doing what tourists do? It wasn’t as if we were making a portrait of him without permission, for which he might well be justified in his objections. “Man with an ego problem”, we thought. We’ll take our money elsewhere, perhaps?

After a late lunch, hiding under an Argan tree (no climbing goats to be seen) We managed to tie some off-road tracks to the tarmac and made it to the Gorges of Ait Mansour for the night, via a dry river bed that made Mike grateful he’d invested in some bash plates for Daphne’s vulnerable bits.

These gorges are quite spectacular in all sorts of ways. There are two other gorge systems that are much more well known, but we’ve been to both and were reminded of the sort of Tourist Traps that places like this can become. Todra Gorge, for example, is a procession of souvenir stalls and touts. Not so here. If you wanted to sum up Morocco in ten miles, this is the place.

 Palm groves, sandy tracks, mountain scenery, mud brick buildings in villages clinging to the rock by their fingernails….Sue described it as “Disneyland”, as there’s everything here that you’d ….b*llocks! The bloody wind has just blown my beer over, and there’s only three left! Right, that’s enough of this for one night. There’s only so much I’m prepared to suffer for the sake of this blog, and I’ve just reached the limit. Good Night.