9th June - Taghazout

Our appointment with the garage this morning was at a heady 8am, so we packed up everything apart from the doormat and the ladder last night.  When we arrived, we gave the mechanic a lift along a very circuitous route to the back of the workshop.  The truck was too big to fit into the workshop compound itself, so we parked it out the back and they worked on it in front of a café next to a huge taxi rank.

 

We left the mechanic to it and went for a wander.  We had a tea and croissant in a café, visited an internet café, and walked down to the main beach and back along it.  The beach was pretty busy, largely with overweight Europeans.  The beach was clean and looked as if it was raked by tractors frequently.  We saw jet-skis for hire, and somebody had parascending gear;  you could also hire sailing boats a bit further south.  We left the beach right in the most touristy area, where touts tried to sell us jewellery, and we even saw a news stand with English newspapers from yesterday (£3 for a Daily Mail or Independent, so we didn't buy one).  We picked our route back past McDonalds and Pizza Hut (the first we have seen in all of Africa) and back to the garage.

 

The mechanic had removed the exhaust manifold, and was busy getting the sheared bolt out.  However, he'd also found that the manifold had a crack in, which he was welding up.  With the exhaust manifold removed, I could see that the right hand engine mount, which was OK but a bit saggy last time I checked it out, had come apart just like the gearbox mount!  Fortunately I had bought an extra spare in Gambia, so asked the mechanic if he'd fit that too.  This is a job I wouldn't have relished on my own, and if anything it was more important than the blowing exhaust.

 

The garage shut between twelve and two, so we sat in the truck, ate lunch and read, with the door open.  At one point, a hand came round the door, and deposited, on our carpet, a Moroccan flag.  How random!  We debated whether (a) it contained a snake, and somebody wanted to flush us out of the truck and rob us;  (b) it was being planted on us and the police would catch us for some dastardly crime of being in possession of a Moroccan flag;  or (c) maybe it was lying around on the floor and somebody thought it was ours.  The last option seemed most likely, especially after I inspected it and found no snakes.

 

After lunch we went back off again, back to have another cup of tea in the same café, and sat in a different internet café for a while, chatting to friends on MSN.  Back to the garage, and the exhaust was finished, but three mechanics were wrestling to get the engine mount in.  I'm so glad I didn't have to do it myself!  Off we trotted again, and a local man, seeing we were tourists, pointed in the direction of the souk.  It sounded a reasonable idea to visit it, so we followed him, and started talking to him.  He was a Berber, who was visiting his father's stand in the souk.  His father sold spices.  He talked about a number of things, including that he spoke Berber at home, Arabic in school (several years back – he was 34), and learned French at school, then English.  His English was pretty reasonable, bearing in mind it was his fourth language.

 

The afternoon was quite hot, so Nicki trailed behind a bit in her flip-flops, and I tried to slow the Berber man down a bit so she could keep up.  He kept saying "it's only a minute away", although of course it was more like fifteen.  We followed him into the souk, and round past the furniture stalls, the tool stalls, the electrical goods stalls, and finally to his father's spice stall.  I was convinced by this time that he was just genuinely being friendly, and that he wasn't going to try to fleece us, but it turned out I'd underestimated the Berber spirit of entrepreneurship.  He made us a cup of Berber tea (quite mild and not heavily sweetened like other African teas, so Nicki much preferred it), while his father showed us what all the different spices were:  spices for weight loss, herbs for constipation, perfumed bars for deodorant, and of course stuff to put in your food to make it taste nice.  And then, he asked what we wanted.  We thought, we might as well take some tea, but we declined the weight loss and constipation remedy.  So, he got together a bag of the 4 different herbs they make the tea from, and wrote down a price.  TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DIRHAMS?  I nearly fell off my chair.  This is nearly twenty quid!   I was quite taken aback that he was actually trying to fleece us for such an unearthly amount, and thought rather than try to negotiate, it would be better just to decline the tea altogether.  So he came down a bit, and a bit more, and asked us to write down what we wanted to pay…  In the end, we paid him about 50 Dirhams (£3) for a big bag of tea.  Probably ten times the going rate, but at least it was nice tea.  Fair enough, you do expect to start the bargaining somewhere over the going rate, but his first bid was just up in the stratosphere somewhere.  I think he was aiming for the American market really (pay first, calculate exchange rate later).  The son wants us to send him a postcard;  I'm not sure I'll bother now!  Or maybe I'll send him a bill for fifty quid for the stamp.  I was a bit annoyed, as normally I'm not a bad haggler, but he caught me right on the back foot.

 

As we left the market, Nicki pointed out that there have only really been two places in Africa where we have genuinely got something just for the sake of hospitality:  Gambia (primarily Fansu's, where we got to see the baby naming ceremony, the Wolof Zimba dance, and were invited into people's homes, although other people were unconditionally kind too);  and Mali town in Guinea, where Moussa took us to his village and spent the day showing us round, just because he was such a nice bloke.

 

Back at the garage, all the work was done, so price negotiations started.  We had the choice of paying 1,800 Dirhams (£120) for the 8 hours' work including tax, with a receipt, or 1,200 Dirhams (£80) if we paid cash in hand.  We went for the second option, which I thought wasn't too bad, at a rate of about a tenner an hour, to have the work done to a good standard at a High Street type garage, as opposed to a back-street workshop (where it would have been cheaper, but I was a bit concerned about quality control;  apparently the mechanics do a good job, providing you stand over them and tell them exactly what you want at every step).  It would have cost around four times this amount per hour to have the same work done in the UK, as I would have needed to have done, although to be fair they might have taken a bit less time on it at home.

 

By this time we were nearing 6pm, so rather than drive all the way to Marrakech, half in the dark, we decided to camp at another campsite we'd been recommended at Taghazout, about 15km north of Agadir.  Nicki's comment was "it can't be any worse than the last place!"  Well, she changed her mind after she'd been to use the toilets, which, going by the look on her face, are not a facility I'll be using myself ("If mum was here, she'd be on the plane home by now!")  Given Agadir is well and truly on the tourist trail, it's a shame they can't sort out a decent campsite.  You'd have thought we'd have been far from the most discerning tourists they'd have, given some of the places we've been.  In our estimation a good toilet is one where the cockroaches have the decency to hide when you turn the light on, and the hole in the ground ideally doesn't actually give off visible scent waves.  At least this campsite is cheaper than the last one.

 

There's a bit of a breeze but the evening is surprisingly warm.  The truck-o-meter shows 32°C.