10th June - Marrakech

You know, there's never a dull moment.  Sometimes it might actually be nice to have a boring day when nothing much happens.  But no such luck.

 

Last night I took a while to get to sleep, and when I awoke very shortly afterwards, it was to the sound of a diesel engine, shortly followed by somebody walking around the truck, whistling to themselves.  I was quite annoyed by the whole experience, as I didn't get back to sleep until about 01:30.  When Nicki woke up I expressed my annoyance and described what I'd like to say to whatever idiot had woken me up.  Nicki then commented that there was a truck parked behind us which was the same colour as Harry's.  And guess who it was?  There they were.  And guess who had woken me up?  Apparently Harry had seen our truck and had come to see if we were awake (we do tend to go to bed about 9pm if there is not much to do, so he probably hadn't come past that late).  I wasn't quite so cross when I found out who it was!  I was also slightly cheered to notice that his Mercedes truck was leaking oil, so it's not just us.

 

Harry shared Nicki's dislike of the campsite toilet (singular – there is one toilet in a campsite with space for well over a hundred vehicles, which is apparently sometimes full, and two of the three showers had rubble in the bottom).  There is allegedly a nice new campsite about 5km north of Taghazout, but neither of us have tried it.  Maybe they have decent facilities, who knows.  I'd say if anybody's going to Agadir, it's got to be worth a try, as the other two campsites in the town are dismal.

 

From our campsite, rather than go back to Agadir and take the main road to Marrakech, there was a potential detour through the mountains.  We decided to take this, just for the hell of it really.  As it happened, it was a lovely drive, if somewhat mountainous, through an area called Paradise Valley, a huge gorge fringed with palm trees and greenery.  The scenery was stunning, so it was a route worth taking.  However, we were just a little concerned that maybe the road wouldn't lead to Marrakech after all, because the map and signs were a bit vague.  Fortunately it did, otherwise we'd have had a major bit of backtracking to do through the Atlas Mountains.

 

Along the sides of the road were various little shops selling fossils and trinkets.  After seeing several, I stopped to have a look at one.  In fact, the stuff they had was really nice, and not tremendously expensive in most cases, so I beckoned Nicki out and we both had a look.  They had literally piles of ammonites, which they dig straight out of the mountains and prepare by hand round the back of the shop, but they also had trilobites and belemnites.  The local ammonites they had looked about Jurassic, and sure enough, the trilobites came from elsewhere, which made sense as they would have been extinct by the Jurassic.

 

What caught my eye as a one-time palaeontologist was some odd-shaped ammonites scattered around.  During the Cretaceous, the period after the Jurassic at the end of which the dinosaurs died out, 65 million years ago, the previously conservative ammonites went off the rails a bit and started experimenting with new shapes.  Rather than using a simple snail-esque coil, which had served them well throughout prehistory, they started to unwrap into question marks, seahorse shapes, straight lines and all sorts.  All in all it wasn't a great success, as they died out shortly afterwards, but I thought it would be worth getting one of these trippy ammonite fossils as you don't generally see them.  To my surprise, however, they were between 50 and 100 times as expensive as the "normal" Jurassic ammonites alongside them!  They are brought in from another area, and presumably the fossil sellers know they're a bit of a novelty.  Suffice it to say, I didn't spend hundreds of pounds on an ammonite, as nice as they were.  Given the shops are aiming at the tourist market, I wonder how many tourists are prepared to pay through the nose for something which isn't as visually satisfying as the common or garden ammonite fossils?

 

We did buy a couple of bits, although the boy who was selling wasn't very keen to drop any of his prices, and at one point the prices actually went up!  So we didn't get a real bargain, but we were happy with what we took away.  Maybe elsewhere I'll be able to find a psychedelic ammonite closer to the source at a more reasonable price.  Anybody know which bits of Morocco are Cretaceous?

 

A bit later on, still concerned with whether the road lead to Marrakech, we stopped to ask an old man with a stall at the side of the road for directions.  He (toothlessly) told us we were going the right way and tried to explain exactly how far we had to go, and was generally being quite helpful.  As we went to move off he gestured at his stall selling honey, so we thought maybe we should buy a pot to return the favour.  Nicki jumped out the truck, to discover his pots of honey were 100 Dirhams, and with 15 Dirhams to the pound a small pot was over £6!  She gestured she "only" had 50 Dirhams, expecting to be able to walk away, but unfortunately he presented her with a jar of peanut butter for exactly 50 Dirhams.  So we trundled off having bought the most expensive jar of peanut butter ever, then realised neither of us even LIKE peanut butter.  We have made a resolution to avoid all local traders, guides, helpers etc from now on, as it usually ends up being quite expensive!

 

Around lunchtime, we came out of the steep bits of the mountains and onto a large plain, where we picked up the main road to Marrakech.  Nicki was feeling a bit iffy, so we stopped and bought some nice fresh bread, which we had with some delicious cheese we'd bought at some expense at the big Marjane supermarket in Agadir.  You can buy cheese everywhere in West Africa, but lamentably it's always Laughing Cow ("La Vache Qui Rit"), so to have "proper" cheese was quite a treat.  The road onwards was quite dull, until we started to get into Marrakech itself.

 

The first time I went through Morocco, a couple of months back, we had a Lonely Planet for the country, and a nice Michelin map, but Abby took them back home with her.  When our plans changed, she posted them to Zebrabar, but they didn't arrive before we left.  So we took a book from Zebrabar's library called the Footprints Morocco Handbook, on the basis that they could have our Lonely Planet when it turned up.  The Footprints guide is actually quite a good one, especially as it tells you what to do and see on the journeys between places, rather than just in the major cities.  It's also rather less scathing and opinionated than the Lonely Planet, although the jury is still out on whose maps are least useless.  However, the edition we have is dated 1997, so some of what it talks about has changed, naturally.  It showed a campsite on the outskirts of Marrakech, but when we drove down the road (which had annoyingly been renamed in the interim, just to throw us off the scent) we couldn't see anything but hotels.

 

We drove right into the Medina area, the walled city, and asked directions from several people, but the replies we got were typically vague.  After doing a few circles and ending up back where we started, I started to lose the clutch in the truck…  A couple of days ago, as we got into Agadir, I had a similar thing happen, but I topped the clutch reservoir up with fluid and it has been OK since then.  This time, the fluid was too far gone, and air had got into the system, so very shortly afterwards I lost the clutch altogether.  Two things were in our favour:  we were in a fairly quiet area, by the side of the road, and I had a spare clutch master cylinder on board.

 

I tried to bleed the air out of the clutch, but it wasn't having any effect, pointing to the master cylinder as the most obvious culprit for the problem.  So I took apart the clutch assembly in the cab, with help from Nicki, who is not exactly used to wielding a spanner but does a great job anyway.  It wasn't a difficult job, but it still took an hour or so, in the 40°C heat, by the time I'd undone everything, drained the fluid, taken the master cylinder out, put the new one in, sorted out all the unions, etc.  One union was a pig to get back in, but went in the end, luckily, as it's not easy driving without a clutch.  Then we bled the system and hooray!  We had a clutch again.  Wouldn't it be nice if this were the last thing which went wrong?  Hahahaha!

 

We were parked near-ish to a hotel, but not in front of it, on a main road, as once the clutch had failed, we couldn't move the truck.  As I wiped the grease and clutch fluid off my arms, a uniformed attendant from the hotel came over, asked me how it was going, and then tried to get money off me from having parked on what he evidently regarded as his pitch!  The Moroccans really don't miss a trick in the touristy areas.  You break down, and they try to charge you for parking?  I was quite polite to him, but in fact I now wish I'd told him exactly where to get off.  A lot of people here see tourists as mobile cash machines, and it does start to get on one's nerves after a while, particularly when we think back to kind people like the Gambian government driver who went out of his way and drove off in front of us around Fajarah to show us the way to the Land Rover garage.

 

We still didn't know where the campsite was;  several people gave us directions which tied in with the guide book, but finally we learned what we'd suspected all along, which is that the Marrakech municipal campsite has been bulldozed in favour of a big hotel.  The man who told us this also told us that there was another campsite about 15km north of the city on the road to Casablanca.  So off we trotted, with the clutch now playing ball again, and after our hot, unproductive day were quite chuffed to find the campsite.  They have clean toilets and showers (hot water during the day only, because it's solar) but alas, the pool is drained, as per the other ten places we have visited who have supposedly had a pool.  It's as if they watch for our truck and pull the plug as we drive in!  We have an electric hookup so the air conditioning is on;  at 7pm with the sun setting it's still 34°C inside.