Akhfenir Bushcamp
We had a pretty long drive today. We left the last bush camp as 8am and we had a 500 km journey to make. However, lunch was much longer than we thought and we would not arrive at our destination before dark. So we stopped a bit short of where we wanted to go and found another campsite instead. If you look at on the map, it’s directly opposite the Canary Islands.
The journey itself was fine. We stopped every couple of hours at a service station for a pee break or to get some snacks and some coffee. The further south we go, the poorer it gets and we haven’t seen a western style supermarket for a few days now. However, we have stocked up on food for about a week.
We stopped off for lunch in the lovely little town called Tan Tan. It was a typical Arab town with everything happening on the street; all life was there on the street. Like a lot of areas in Morocco, there seems to be an increase in prosperity. There are lots of new buildings going up and they are investing quite a lot in making lovely pavements.
Usually, pavements in this part of the world would be a beaten dirt track that’s been trampled down over the years so that it’s almost like concrete. Until it rains, and then its like a skating rink. A really mucky skating rink, should you have to misfortune to slip. But they’re building these lovely paved footpaths now and Arabs are fantastic at decoration. Some of the pavements are brilliant with lots of designs and really good craftsmanship.
Our bush camp is located on the little inlet or cove caused by a sandbank or some form of natural breakwater. I’m sure there is a proper formal or technical name for this type of marine landscape but I don’t know what it is or cannot remember it now.
We can see the sea in the distance and hear the roar of the waves as they crash on the shore. It’s very windy too and the ground is very rocky. We all struggled to pitch our tents because it wasn’t possible to hammer the pegs into the ground due to it being so hard and rocky. I bent one of my pegs but I’m sure I can unbend it again.
There’s a guy who brought along special hardened tungsten pegs and they’re supposed to be unbreakable and unbendable. I saw them in Ireland when I was looking for some extra pegs and they were €45 for four. I didn’t buy then but I wish I had. The guy hammered it into the rock yesterday, at our last bush camp, and they was so good, he couldn’t pull it out again. They had to chisel the rock down until it was loose. It took them about a half an hour to do this.
I finally got my tent pitched but I used big rocks on the inside of the tent to hold it down because it was too windy to just leave self-supporting. It would blow away as soon as I left. Now that I’m inside, it’s flopping about like a mad thing but it’s safe and will stay in place, unless a hurricane comes along.
As I said earlier, it’s been a sort of nondescript day; just driving driving driving. But that’s really part of the overlanding experience. It takes a while to get your head around the fact that the journey is as important as the destination and just the fact of being on the road is an enjoyable experience. However it takes a bit of time to get ones head around this. I think I have now because I really love the sense of having no control. I don’t really know where we’re ending up and confident enough that the driver and the team here will be able to look after us and we’re perfectly safe so I can let go of my control and that’s very very freeing.
To lower the tone a bit, never a difficult thing to do for me. Because we’re out in the middle of nowhere there are no public conveniences, if one needs to answer a call of nature, one gets a little shovel from the truck, rambles away out of sight, and hopefully out of earshot, of our tripmates and duly answers that particular call of nature. There is an etiquette in these bushloos. We don’t leave anything visible. The convention is to dig a deep hole with the shovel, really a large gardening trowel, do the business, toss in the paper and cover it all up again, leaving a little branch or something sticking out of it to indicate that it’s been used as a bushloo. However, this can be a bit hard to do when there’s only rock all around and impossible to dig a big hole.
I had that dilemma just recently. I rambled around hoping I wouldn’t walk on a snake or a bad tempered scorpion, in my sandals. I found a little hillock where the sand had built up against a large bush and some rocks. Perfect, I could dig a deep enough hole and bury the offending evidence. Hopefully it’s like would never be seen again until the rapture or the end of days came.
I noticed some huge black beetles were scurrying around the little hillock so I’m glad I could add to the diversity of their diet. Maybe it’s Christmas day now in beetletown. Maybe they made a holy day of that special night when the twin white moons descended on their fair city and bestowed such bounty. Accompanying this visitation was the sounds of heavenly hosts, to beetle ears anyway, of banjaxed knee grunts associated with me squatting down and fervent mutterings of, Jaysus, I hope I don’t fall back into that feckin mess.
It’s possible! Religions have been formed on less….
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