Safe Return Doubtful

The rain over the weekend caused many problems around the country. Nearer the coast 37 people were killed in a flash flood that devastated the town of Safi. Nearer to where I am there were several road accidents, some of them with fatalities. Many smaller roads were completely washed out, and the major ones with flooded, and covered in sand and rock in several places. 

I had already decided to see the freak weather out at Camping Hakkou. Two brothers run it, Mustafa and Ahmed, and their hospitality was tremendous. The weather caused power cuts of several hours on both days, though that doesn’t really disrupt life in a campervan.

There were four other motorhomes staying, and we got to know each other over the few days. There was the older French couple I referred to in the previous post, in their 80s and quad biking, and two French ladies next to me, from whom I borrowed a ladder to try and sort my Starlink out, by resetting the router, though without success. The couple of motorhomes in the area below were both regular visitors, French and Belgian, and keen to give information on the area for hiking, though without the amount of standing water, options were limited. All of us were in the way to Merzouga, and all of us had decided to hunker down. 

On Monday I moved on, initially half an hour to the town of Erfoud to sort out an eSIM for my phone while I waited for a Starlink human support to get back to me, over the weekend it had just been robots, helpful robots, but ultimately useless. Having sorted the eSIM it was a further half hour south to the Sahara desert and the town of Merzouga, which normally is tourist driven group of hotels, campsites, restaurants, souvenir shops, camel rides, and quad bike hire stations, but with the weekend weather was in sleep mode. Perfect as far as I was concerned. the were a few other vans, but considering that there are probably ten campsites, a small number, and very shared out. 

It was 1991 I was last in Morocco and the Sahara, and those days the locals wouldn’t leave tourists alone, to the extent where was unpleasant. Fortunately, in places like Merzouga at least, those days are gone. Those running the businesses have learnt the hard way that visitors don’t respond to being hassled. Litter is still a huge problem around the roadside, but on the campsites, and within the grounds of hotels, the places are impeccable. I based myself behind one of the hotels, as it had the best views of the Erg Chebbi dunes, the main attraction of Merzouga. This is the far western edge of the Sahara, and the most famous of Moroccans ‘ergs’, a sea of red sand dunes which in places, close to where I was, raise two hundred metres in altitude from the desert. 

They are most spectacular at sunrise and sunset. I took a walk out just after arriving, and my return to the van was about a half hour before sunset. I met a German lady, about my age, a landscape botanist, who was staying in the hotel, and we stood on one of the nearby smaller dunes and watched the colours change. We had plenty in common. She was travelling in a rental car with her partner, but he had quite different interests, and had gone off on a quad bike hire. We both really didn’t like them, the noise they made and the fumes they kicked out. 

This morning I climbed to the tops of three nearby dunes that formed a sort of three domed circuit. I did expect it to be difficult, but it was even tougher than I thought. As I say in the video commentary, two steps forward, one and two thirds back. I probably made a poor route choice also. Some of the sand is still damp, and that actually makes ascending a bit easier. It was a great experience though, quite like nothing I have done before. I was a couple of hours out, show going on the ascents to say the least. 

I’ve changed my schedule as a result of the couple of issues with the van. The first one, Starlink, was ironically sorted out almost immediately after i purchased the eSIM. A Starlink human got in touch and succeeded in unsticking my reboot, and apologised and gave me two months free by way of compensation. Regarding the fridge, I have located someone who can repair it, I hope, in Agadir. I am headed to Agadir anyway, but I wasn’t going to be there for a couple of weeks. Instead, I aim to get there on Friday, get the repair done, and then lengthen my time around the Anti-Atlas, which is, I read, the best place to be for outdoor activity at this time of year. Agadir is three days of driving at three hours each day, slow because of the state of the roads after the rain. Today I drove three hours, two hundred kilometres, to Nkob, where I am currently at a campsite a few kilometres out of town. There should be a possibility of a wander tomorrow morning before continuing. 

My decision to change schedule seems sensible also as the weather is still a bit wild. Though it was calm and clear in Merzouga, up here on the Atlas mountain plateau, at about 1100 metres above sea level, it is very windy. So much so on the road across that I stopped for some long distance cyclists to check they were okay. It turned out to be an Argentinian family, a couple riding with their four year old son on a tag-along.

The wind was so strong that it was causing a minor sandstorm, extremely difficult as they were riding into the wind. I managed to get the little boy and his mother, and their bikes into the van, as well as much of the guy’s bags, and drove them ten kilometres, in the direction we were both going, to the town of Tazzarine, where they waited for him in a cafe. Having had help from what we used to call ‘trail angels’, at tough times when on long distance rides, I always slowdown and check riders are okay. I can remember clearly when I’ve been helped, whether a cup of tea and a bit of shelter when waiting for a ferry in Norway, or dinner cooked for me a wet campsite in Iceland.