13th June - God Knows Where

The first job today was to change the clutch slave cylinder, which is an easy job, although you get covered in clutch fluid in the process. At least now I know where all the fluid had gone, as the old slave cylinder was leaking like a sieve. I had a quick root around the gearbox to try to find where low ratio had gone, but the main gearbox isn’t that easy to access, so I thought, sod it. I also found I’ve lost my brand new 11mm spanner, which I have a suspicion I left hanging off the underside of the truck after the pit-stop in Marrakech.

Note from Nicki: While David was doing the truck I headed off into the market to get some bits. It was quite a hive of activity, with the usual vegetable stands, Coca Cola signs everywhere and people begging for money. A sight I did not wish to see that early in the morning was a few dead goats hanging by their back legs, with their heads still attached… I personally don’t like to see the look on the face of the thing I am eating! I bought some bread and bananas and some popcorn to snack on during our drive later on.

Our campsite was within a short distance of the Cascades (waterfalls) of d’Ouzard fame. First we walked to the north side of the falls, where several little streams of water disappear down into a very large gorge. At the north edge, you can only stand at the top of the gorge, but the views are good. Then we walked round the top of the falls and down the side of the gorge. All down the path is blanketed with gift shops, restaurants and tea places, but all the gift shops sell exactly the same selection. I’ve been on the lookout for a psychedelic cretaceous ammonite since the very expensive ones we saw in Paradise Valley, but this wasn’t the place to find one. Thankfully, nobody here called me Ali Baba, unlike eleven different and unconnected men in the souqs of Marrakech, who evidently thought it was the height of sophisticated wit. Rather like all those irritating touts who say to you “lovely jubbly” and call their camels Michael Jackson. It’s very faintly amusing the first time, and then after you’ve heard it all day, it really gets on your nerves.

Half way down the side of the gorge we spotted a dog, which in itself wasn’t unusual, until I noticed something very odd about it. In the Wanderlust magazine we have with us, there’s a mention of the two-nosed Andean tiger hound, rediscovered last year after being believed extinct. I am not making this up – they have a photo of it in the magazine (April/May 2006, page 11). It’s basically a dog with two noses. And we found its twin on the side of a waterfall in the Atlas Mountains! Mindful that this might be one of the great scientific discoveries of the decade, I took some photos of it, but they didn’t come out that well (typical), and then the dog wandered off anyway. I’ll take a look at them on the laptop later and see if they’re any better close-up.

At the bottom of the gorge there were some nice views back up to the waterfall, and lots of tourists milling around (coach parties from Marrakech). After taking plenty more photos, we started back up the steps. Nicki counted all the way up, and got to 660 steps – that’s quite a few (although some of them are only small ones). Half way up we stopped for a drink, and Nicki didn’t have anything as they only had local-brand Coke, but I asked for “un tasse du thé” – notice the word “un”, not “deux”. So the man brought back two cups of Moroccan mint tea. Nicki stopped him before he’d poured hers out, but of course he still tried to charge me for two cups. I only paid him for one. Nice as they are, the Moroccans try to swindle you at every step, and it gets a bit tiresome after a while.

Back at the top we packed up and went to leave the campsite, although we had to wait ten minutes whilst the owner came back from the souk. He wanted to charge us for the salad we’d had last night – the one they brought me because they’d forgotten my tagine – but we said, we hadn’t asked for it, so in the end he just charged us for the one tagine and the night’s camping, which was a bit more reasonable. He didn’t seem unhappy with it so we don’t feel we ripped him off back.

Off we went through the mountains, although I think we were taking the end of the road the coach parties avoid, because we got lots of waves and even a couple of rounds of applause from children at the side of the road. The scenery was still fairly spectacular, although today was the first overcast day we can remember having, and nice and cool for it. The scenery is positively green in places, and once back on the flat plain we saw hordes of combine harvesters bringing in the harvest. They’re available for rent, complete with driver, helpers and bailing machine, but you wonder what the owners do for the rest of the year?

Our second stop of the day was at Beni Malal, described in our guide book as a small town with a significant market. It appears to have grown a lot since 1997, but we did get out to have a look around the kasbah, souq or whatever you want to call it. It sold mainly vegetables, particularly the whomping great melons we’ve seen a lot of in this area, but there were also some meat stalls selling whole goats, skinless but with or without head; or if you wanted you could just buy the heads separately. We stuck to green beans.

Because the truck hasn’t been entirely trouble-free during the trip, I thought I’d ring the RAC and get my breakdown coverage extended to Spain, just in case the worst happens on the way back. Normal breakdown cover only covers vehicles up to 3.5 tonnes (2.3 tonnes in the case of the AA, apparently) so I have a special “Arrival” policy, available from the RAC to Caravan & Camping Club members, which means they’ll still cover me on the basis that it’s a motorhome, up to something like 7.5 tonnes. So I rang the RAC, and spent 15 minutes on the phone, established it was an Arrival policy, got a quote (£36 for a few days of extra cover, which seemed reasonable), gave them all my details, and he said they’d send the paperwork out. Just before I hung up, I said I just wanted to be clear that I’d definitely be covered as I have a vehicle over 3.5 tonnes. No, he said, what he’d just sold me only covers normal cars… if I wanted European coverage for that weight I’d need a separate annual policy, for £80! What a waste of a 15 minute international phone call – did he think I had the special Arrival policy just for fun, or what? The whole point of the flaming policy, for which I pay through the nose, is that I DON’T have a normal car!

Further north we hit the town of Kasba-Tadla, partly by mistake as Nicki hadn’t noticed that the road we wanted peeled off just before we got there. So we backtracked, picked up the right road again and found El-Ksiba, where we planned to spend the night in a campsite. But, what do you know, the campsite is closed, although we couldn’t quite grasp why. There was an alternative spot where we could camp at the side of the road, which we were told some people use instead, but it was rather public, and also it’s technically forbidden to bush-camp here, so we carried on up into the mountain again, until we spotted a little lay-by hidden behind some trees, and that’s where we are now.

It’s actually quite a nice little spot, nestled in the tree-covered mountains, and a couple of hundred metres above us is the cloud line, so it has the air of a tropical mountain forest; Nicki said it felt like the Congo. I just saw a hummingbird outside, about the size of a bee, the first one I’ve ever seen.