..and tickled by Tarmac.

After the clear and unmistakeable message that Daphne is beginning to suffer as a result of the hammering she’s been taking, we decided to miss out a section of our Off-Road itinerary to give us a chance to identify and hopefully remedy some of the faults that are slowly developing “down there” in Daph’s guts.
The surfaces we've been travelling over haven't been exactly smooth:

This didn’t exactly cause us any major philosophical trauma, perhaps compromising our aim of “Off-Road through Morocco” etc, since we’re not getting any money for this and no-one’s come up with any sponsorship deals yet (product development for Windswept Breweries not counted). But we’re open to offers!

We stopped just short of the N12 “Desert Highway” in the car park of the campsite just outside Foum Zguid to address an Oily Wheel problem. Having cleaned everything up, it appears the problem is with the little rubber/plastic “hat” that sits on the end of the “axle” - the bigger halfshaft (Mike’s description). It’s worn and the seal doesn’t. Seal, that is.

We replace it with another but this is also worn and gives up pretty quickly. Mike breaks open the Daphne First Aid kit and gets a new one from its sterile wrapper. This one does the job. For about 3 hours, then it splits.

Mike isn’t impressed. The photos we took later were going to include a mention of the supplier’s name on the packet, but he’s decided to give them a chance to remedy the problem when we get home. Not much help out here, though. We need a better solution than that supplied by A*******.

We manage to include a short off-road section today and came across these bizarre rock formations:

These reminded us of the Giant’s Causeway – basalt columns but not, if you follow me. These were made by the erosion of sedimentary rock, from the look of them, not volcanic action. Weird. A bit like the general landscape – the mountains look as if they’ve been formed by a giant’s hands, folding and twisting layers of wet cardboard and leaving them to dry, producing a landscape of looping strata that speak of millennia of tensions and stress.

This short30km - section put us back on the Blacktop again for a while, where the haards were of a different kind...

 

The fuel drip problem is exercising our imagination, too. We refuelled today in Tata and the same issue as before, in Zagora, is apparent. Daph’ has a small but smelly leak down the “rear end”, if you’ll excuse the expression. Given the “witness marks”, ie the areas that are now encased in a sticky sand/diesel mix, the leak must be small and located fairly high in the system. This is possibly in the fuel filler neck or pipe. Normally when the tank is filled to capacity, the area around and below the filler cap is sand-encrusted by the overflow. Now it’s clean, so the fuel isn’t getting the chance to slop out of the normal place; it must he lower down in the plumbing, somewhere. It isn’t a major problem, but these small things have a habit of growing legs and arms, so Mike wants to identify the solution. I see a messy few hours ahead at some point, together with liberal doses of cursing. In the meantime, we are well aware of the fumes and try to park upwind of Daph’s back end. Naturally.

So, it being Saturday night, we gave the local habitation a wide berth. Well, that’s a fib. At the time we were thinking about calling it a day, the wind was howling and we really didn’t want to do battle with it yet again, so looked for some decent shelter. It’s been up to 39 degrees C today and we’re kinda tired! With nothing obvious on this bare-arsed plain, we checked out the campsite in Akka. This was marked on the OSM database, but turned out to be “Camping Municipal” and closed. We eventually found, due to Sue’s eagle eyes, a pleasant palm grove not far from the road, where we’re sheltered from the wind and, I thought for a minute, with an Internet connection. Maroc Telecom was just teasing, however, so you’ll all get to read this post, together with the last one, at the next filling station, probably. And now that the wind’s dropped to a Mere Breeze, Sue is complaining about the smell - of fuel, obviously, but there might be other sources:

Only advice I can offer is “sit upwind”. Apparently I’m unsympathetic….She’s gone off to "take pictures". Although why you'd go on a photography walk carrying a shovel is beyond me.....