Safe Return Doubtful

I’ve spent the last three days in a fairly uninspiring place while waiting to get the van fridge repaired. The campsite itself through, and the hospitality was excellent, and as a bonus also, I have met some interesting people. 

It was the Gite Souss, about 30 kilometres east of the ocean and Agadir, in a heavily populated area, flat, with the usual amount of litter around, which blows about so it’s pretty much everywhere. Inside the Gite though, about six old fashioned acres, it was impeccable. It is run by a local family, and there is an indoor venue there also. On the first day there I took a walk around the local area, but after that I confined myself to the premises of the Gite. 

There were three of four other vans there, some moving on, and some arriving. There were a couple of elderly French ladies, who admitted at the same time that I said my French was dreadful, that their English was. They had good humour though, and that was evident despite our difficulty in communicating. There was an English couple who smoked every hour or so, outside of their motorhome, but in the breeze so it blew my way most of the time. They watched the darts non stop and made it reasonably clear they wanted to be left alone, and not express the usual greetings of the day. 

On the second day the couple arrived that I had met earlier in the week in N’Kob. They were good fun, and keen to chat. In N’Kob they were having a break from their son and his family, who they were travelling with. The son, his wife and two toddlers, had a self-converted new ManTGE van (the same as a VW crafter), and they arrived also. We had a beer together and a good exchange of travel stories and van conversion trivia.. fascinating.. 

On Friday morning I took the fridge into Allocamp in the middle of Agadir. The African Cup of Nations starts on Sunday, and there are several games at the Stade de Agadir, which I passed on the way in. The road from the airport, and the few kilometres surrounding the stadium are completely clean of litter, and have hundreds of of gardeners working planting shrubs on the centre barrier and the verges. It may be considered as a bit of a false view of Morocco, a country that certainly has its problems at the moment, but it does show what can be done, and hopefully, it stays like this. 

By chance, the last time I was on the African continent was just before a soccer tournament also, in May 2010 leading a football tour from my school in Chile, to South Africa, Cape Town and Johannesburg.

At Allocamp, perhaps the only campervan repair shop in the country, they took the fridge off me, and I picked it up again the following day, this lunchtime. I am hoping it is repaired, it certainly is cooling, but I guess time will tell, and as to whether I was ripped off for the equivalent of £60, or got a bargain.. 

I did have an interesting conversation while waiting with a guy in the middle of a self-conversion, and doing it there, outside the shop in the middle of Agadir. And another guy, a friend of the owner, who lived in Milton Keynes, and drove regularly to and from, in his Sprinter van ferrying what he called ‘parcels’. He was amusing though, and thought nothing of the journey, which he does in two and a half days, he says, and, in an unconverted van.

I then drove a couple of hours south and a few kilometres inland to a beautiful village situated in a palm grove, and a campsite run by a French couple. It surprised me in that it is quite busy, with about ten others here. Aside from the Christmas week, it is high season here though. I’ll stay here for a couple of days and then spend a few days exploring the Anti-Atlas mountains, it’s just a rejig or my original schedule.