All Aboard

The Pont Aven. Brittany Ferries.

We made it without having to call on International Rescue, the Red Cross or the UN. Hurrah! A successful expedition, and all we have to do now is negotiate the traffic at Spaghetti Junction and we’re almost home. Another 619 driving miles will see us back in Moray. To put that into perspective, it’s 1007 miles from the top of Spain to the bottom. There are many advantages to living in the Highlands, but access to Europe and sun ain’t one of ‘em.

Northern Spain is a beautiful place and we saw a bit more of it yesterday as we drove the N623 through the mountains from Burgos to Santander. We’d have been more impressed, I’m sure, if the clouds had lifted just a little more to enable us to see more than we did. As it was, the limestone gorge that features large on this route is worth a study in itself, and the possibilities for some really stunning photography are there, just waiting for the bloody rain to stop. It just honked down for the entire drive. As we had no idea how spectacularly picturesque this route would be, the “hill fog” –read really low cloud with a visibility in tens of feet – didn’t leave us disappointed until we popped out of the bottom of it on the northern side and looked back…This valley has got to rate a 5-star rosette in any list of Europe’s “Must See” places, but we’ve not seen it highlighted anywhere we can recall. Think of the Grand Canyon in miniature, but with roads and villages at the bottom, waterfalls, rock architecture that was built tens of millions of years ago and all there to see for free. What we saw of it was through rain-streaked windows and, to our regret, we didn’t stop to take it all in –that which we could see. I remember reading an American author describing this kind of experience as if he was sitting in an Imax cinema watching a wrap-around movie, only the screen was his windshield, the “movie” was him and the film was standing still. If he wanted to experience it “for real”, like Imax tries to imitate, all he had to do was stop and get out. Next time, we will. We owe it to the landscape and ourselves.

Our chosen nightstop was almost uninhabited. It took us ten minutes to get some interest from the Management, who turned out, once they appeared, to be Romanian. We were the only customers, which probably explains the lack of staff at recepcion. Once we’d found someone to talk to, we were invited to pick our place –anywhere. The site probably had space for several hundred people like us, and was pristine – and I mean sparkling. Most sites at ferry ports tend to be a little Spartan, given that the clientele only stay for one night and arrive too late to appreciate anything more than a place to pee into porcelain. Camping Virgen Del Mar is in a much finer category. Recommended. A pity about the dogs though….

Later in the day a German couple in another of those 30-foot plus campervans turned up. We amused ourselves watching their attempts to reverse this battleship into a space designed for a corvette, and then the palaver of levelling, plugging, plumbing, hanging out the window boxes and generally converting a wheeled shipping container into a condominium. Once all this is done they undoubtedly have a Home From Home, but surely the point of leaving home is to….OK, I’ll stop there before someone else tells me “I’m rather negative”.

However, I can’t let this go without saying something about the Sport of Watching Other People Set-Up Camp. We know five-eighths of f*ck-all about campervans, so our opinion on their use counts for nothing. I do, though, recall watching a couple arrive at a campsite in the Netherlands many years ago. They emptied a bag of canvas and steel poles out of their car and then proceeded, not to try to put it together in the shape of a tent, but to set up 2 folding chairs and a table onto which they placed several cans of beer, which they commenced getting on the outside of. After ten minutes or so, a Dutch chap who’d noticed this pile of tent-in-kit-form came over and, to cut a long story short, put it up for them. Helped by three other similarly helpful experts from close by. Lesson learned. Wherever you are in the world, there’ll always be a Helpful Cloggie nearby….rest and be thankful. And if that’s screwed it up for everybody who isn’t Dutch and who hasn’t rehearsed tent erection before leaving home, I’m sorry (but no-one from the Netherlands is reading this….).

As last time, we arrived at the ferry port with plenty of time to spare and put the kettle on. Looking around it seemed that we were the only vehicle in the lines that wasn’t either a smart, shiny and expensive saloon or another of the above mentioned Battlebuses.

We haven’t seen many fellow travellers during our time in Morocco and put this down to the fact that we weren’t using campsites very often and were well off the beaten track most of the time. In fact, I don’t believe there are as many “people like us” this year. I think we’ve seen 2 other 4x4s with obviously - from the kit on board – the same idea as us during the last 6 weeks, and one of those was in the ferry queue at Portsmouth. This was Charles and Yvonne, supporting a Landrover Challenge event, which had, I think, two other participants. The rest had pulled out for reasons that seemed to be security-related. In other words, people are scared they’ll get killed by terrorists. Fair enough, if that’s your view, but we reckon there’s more risk to life and limb in some of our “safe” cities than there’ll be anywhere in Morocco. “But terrorists have come from Morocco” is apparently one reason for avoiding the place. It’s a true statement. So is “and also from Bradford, Birmingham and Leicester.” ...and, as far as I'm aware, the populations of those cities haven't started heading for the hills in terror. Yet. For what it's worth, we were expecting to see a few police/military vehicle checkpoints in the southern areas near the Algerian border but in fact there was a very strong and very obvious police presence throughout the country. At one point we were stopped and given the "third degree" (but very politely) on four occasions in as many miles. The security at Tangier Med port was equally tight with Daphne being given a Whole Body CT scan as well as a physical going-over. To believe that a visitor is at risk in Morocco is to completely ignore the evidence to the contrary. While we were involved in quite a few altercations with the local youths we were never threatened nor felt so. There's more to say on that point and we'll explore our feelings a bit more before we add to this aspect of a "post mortem".

As the queues of cars began to move, one shiny Volvo 4x4 wasn’t. I could see his lights flashing on and off as he tried to crank the engine, but wasn’t making any noise. Last year we towed a crippled VW Campervan onto the same ferry, so I was quite happy to offer the same help to this chap. Unfortunately, he was stuck; the computer chip in the Engine Management System had “detected a fault” with his parking brake. In the “interests of safety”, therefore, it had completely immobilised the ignition until the fault was reset. For which you need another computer. Brilliant. Added to that, the car had an automatic gearbox, so towing him on board wasn’t an option. Well and truly stuffed by the Smart Tech. Another good reason to stick to Meccano technology, apart from the fact that computers aren’t as responsive to big hammers as most of our 300Tdi. As we left the dock he was still where we’d left him, alone in the now empty carpark.

So now we're enjoying a sunny and calm crossing of the North Atlantic with Portugal somewhere off to the right. The ship's wi-fi isn't worth a damn - this is becoming a recurrent theme, innit? - so it may be that this post and the pictures that go with it won't make it off the deck and will have to wait until later. I guess, too, that the point of the blog is now blunted - we're almost home. We did think about closing down a few days ago; after all, who wants to read about a road trip up the M6? There's still a little more to say and obviously Daph is in need of a thorough overhaul, which might be of interest to the other Landrover geek who might still be reading this. We'll also try to add some stuff about the daily minutiae of life off-grid in places that are only just on-grid themselves. Not quite an adventure into the Dark Continent, but the closest we're ever likely to get - short of a weekend in Durness.