Heading South

Up at the crack of dawn – partly because Morocco is 2 hours ahead of Spain, so our body clocks are a bit out.  Who'd have thought you could have got jet lag from a 101?  After topping up the oil, we went on foot to look around Meknes.  First stop was the old granary, which was used to store the fodder for the Sultan's 1,200 horses.  It was immense, quite cleverly set up with underground waterways to stay very cool.  Half had been restored but the other half is still ramshackle.

 

Then on to the Ambassadors' Reception Hall, which was a bit naff actually, being basically a room with some fairly mundane tiles on the wall.  However, below it was a big underground area, in near darkness, which, depending on who you believe, is either another grain store, or the area where some of the Sultan's 40,000 European slaves lived, or maybe a prison.

 

We'd hoped to visit the Mausoleum, but it is shut to visitors on Friday mornings for prayers, but the shopkeeper next door invited us to view the city from his roof, including a bit of the mausoleum.  We expected to get the hard sell, but actually he was not pushy at all.  We did buy a couple of bits, but only because we liked them, and at a heavy discount without even asking.  I think he was actually quite pleased to have some visitors, as it's not the main tourist season yet.

 

We managed to leave Meknes without getting lost, and got on the motorway to Rabat, then on to Casablanca, and finally to El Jadida.  The motorway driving is fairly boring, but the scenery is still pleasant;  the fields around the motorways are full of red poppies and purple flowers of some sort.  It's still much more lush than you'd expect.  The motorways around here are all new, with toll booths;  the tolls aren't that expensive individually, but we are going through quite a few of them.  However, there are no motorways south of here, so end of toll fees.  Just south of Casablanca the motorway ended (they're still building that bit) so we went off onto normal roads, trundling along with all the lorries, donkeys, tractors etc.  We also stopped off at a huge supermarket, basically a French hypermarket parachuted straight into Morocco, to buy odd bits like drawing pins and cheese.  (The only cheese in the smaller shops seems to be Dairylea, although we did get some fresh goat's cheese from the campsite this morning, plus a goat's cheese cake, rather like cheesecake but goatier.)  They also had clean "occidental" toilets (as opposed to "oriental" holes-in-the-ground) – very welcome!

 

At one toll booth we stopped to stretch my legs (my right knee suffers a bit after a few hours – we could do with cruise control).  A boy wandered by on a donkey, and stopped to say hello, and ask if we had any "bonbons".  Abby bought a job lot of jelly beans on the ferry, which are lasting well, so she gave him a handful, plus another boy who was nearby.  A third turned up, but was too shy to ask, so the eldest boy gave him some of his.  Shortly after, the eldest boy gave me a big bunch of petits pois, which he'd been carrying around – maybe to sell, maybe for his mum to cook for dinner!  He wasn't angling for anything, but I hit upon the idea of taking his photo next to the truck, then printing it out on our little portable printer which we brought for exactly that purpose.  (It prints little 6x4 colour pictures in about 30 seconds, straight from the camera.)  Of course, he was pretty chuffed, and not surprisingly we ended up doing the same for the other two boys.  They were really pleased, and we gained some nice fresh peas for dinner, so it was quite a satisfying meeting.  Abby also chatted to some French tourists, who were impressed that she could speak French so well.

 

Oddly enough it's raining, so I'm sitting in the dark under the awning typing this, blowing moths off the screen.  We found the campsite tonight straight off, thanks partly to a little French book of Moroccan campsites Abby bought at the hypermarket.

 

When we left Bagshot, Tim, our friend, house-sitter and temporary custodian of the cat, gave us some hyacinths to take with us.  They've been gaffa taped to the shelf under the window, and are in full bloom now, and look and smell fantastic.  Thanks, Tim!  I should also thank Nev from mud-club for the convex door mirrors he magicked up for me – they make driving on busy African roads less hazardous!

 

I've been in conflab with Rog by mobile and SMS about the oil leak, and he's come up with some very good suggestions, so in the morning I'll have the engine cover off and see what I can suss out.  Apart from dripping oil, the truck's running fine;  it's a bit lumpy on idle at the moment, but the French people Abby spoke to said that's because the petrol here is "mauvais" (ie, crap).  Their car won't run at all on it, so they were waiting for a tow truck!  So this is the benefit of our 1970s technology!