Day 36-38
5th - 8th January 2006, Morroco	previous entry next entry

Day Thirty Six 5/1. Bush Camp, South of Boujdour, Morroco

24°49.15'N 14°50.89'W. Miles today 317, Total Miles 4086

Spent a long day driving through the Western Sahara. With some pretty impressive scenery at times but at others, just nothing but a very long straight road. Drove through endless police checks. And you start to wonder, "Are they really necessary?" Thank goodness for the fiche we printed with all our details on it. I can't bear to think how long this process would take without them. In fact, we had to print more last night. Printing in the middle of the desert??? Stopped in a desolate town to buy a cold (ya dreaming!) coke. Within minutes, we were hassled by this group of kids demanding, "Un bon-bon!" It was all pretty harmless until they realised we actually weren't gonna give them any sweeties. Believe it or not, we didn't have any. And then one of them kicked the side of the car. Well, I have never seen Rob move so fast. He jumped out the car, looking VERY annoyed and chased the little shit all the way down the road. Poor little kid looked terrified but he should have known better. Never, never touch the car! Towards sunset we found a nice quiet spot to camp for the night, hiding behind some large lumps of rock. Drank a lot of beer and talked about our next few days and entering Mauratania. Was it wise to cross over on a Sunday, as we wondered whether it would be possible to change money and buy insurance for the car? Perhaps we might spend another day out here. Thought we'd sleep on it so had a scummy chilli con carne and watched a movie that Natty had brought us. Ever so civilised here in the Sahara!

Day Thirty Seven 6/1. Bush Camp, 60km North of the border, Morroco

21°53.33'N 16°51.59'W. Miles today 303, Total Miles 4389

Woke up with the thought that we would just go for it and cross the border on Sunday. If it was a problem, well then we would just see it as an adventure and would be able to advise other overlanders against it. So, this meant another long day driving. We have noticed a number of other vehicles on the road. There's a Plymouth to Banjul rally on at the moment, where people buy an old banger , (did someone mention sausages?) drive it down to The Gambia and donate it. The funniest collection of cars are in this lot, including a limousine, an ambulance and a Landcruiser housing a huge Dulux sheepdog! Poor furry thing is so gonna suffer in the West African heat. We stopped to chat to six crazy Dutch people who are travelling together to Mali for three months. Their route is pretty similar to ours so I am sure we will hook up again. The border closes around six pm, so we stopped about 70km before and found another quiet bushcamp behind some more rocks. I managed to whip up two amazing pizzas! Are you impressed?

Day Thirty Eight 7/1. Morroco Mauritania border

21°21.91'N 16°57.64'W. Miles today - Total Miles ----

Awoke from pure silence to the sound of loads of cars heading for the border. Ugh! But it's only 6am! Thought it was best we got going too, so were on the road by 8am. Got to the border at 9am only to find a very long queue and a sort of quiet chaos. Every man and his dog appeared to congregating around this closed door, so we followed suit. After 10 minutes, a hand appeared and gave out some passports. We then gave this hand our passports and hoped for the best! In the meantime, the entire Plymouth-Banjul Rally team (forty cars) had joined the queue as well as the six crazy Dutch. Three hours later, we got our passports back and were allowed to move on. And this was only to leave Morocco! We hadn't even got to Mauritania yet! The next bit of "road" is sort of in no mans land to the border, which is not that easy to find. In the book, it says, "just follow the tracks" but there are so many. Basically, they all lead to the border but it is a little nerve-racking as this is still a mined area, with evidence of burnt out vehicles lying all around and heaps of people grounding out in the sand. I imagine this whole border procedure would be a lot less confusing if one of us could actually speak French. But it also does work in your favour, for when they start asking for gifts, you can get away with pretending to not know what on earth they're on about. This infuriates them and in the end, they just give up. Anyway, all in all, with minimum French and on a Sunday… we managed to get our carnet (car's passport) stamped, change money, buy insurance (€20 for 20 days) and only pay €10 taxes. Everyone else was getting charged €20 per person. It is also illegal to bring alcohol into the country and we were sweating a bit about the half a case of beers we had stashed. Some were in the fridge, under the coke and eggs and I am sure that when they searched our car….if he just looked at our faces when they asked us to open the fridge….they would have seen the sheer panic across them and it would have been a dead give away but somehow…..he didn't and he didn't lift the coke nor the eggs. He then took one look at our complex packing system and couldn't be asked to search any further. Hurrah! We have beers for the next few days. Finally, we were waved through after many more pointless police checks. I glanced back at the queue still forming. It had taken us four hours in total. I wonder how long they would be there.

Day 36-38

5th - 8th January 2006, Morroco