Only one more camping night to go. Very happy about this. Sick of the lack of hygiene. Camping utenslis we have to use for cooking barely clean and covered with dust at the end of each day. Fingernails constantly black. No clean clothes to speak of and once-white underwear now grey and sweaty. It's truly horrid. Rachel and Brendan (guides) oblivious to the flith. Camping sucks so much. I never liked it and I never will. There is something seriously masochistic with people who actually like camping. However, consider myself very intrepid! Would never have coped with this ten years ago. Oh for my spotless Tokyo apartment and double bed with duvet!!
Half-day in Asilah with finally some precious free time. Asilah a small town about an hour out of Tangier with a laid-back medina in it's center. Of course it took me ninety minutes of our three hours of free time to find the internet cafe and then the Busabout website was down so I couldn't check my sector bookings anyway. Did manage to book a Virgin Express flight for 150 Euro from Lisbon to Athens however, avoiding all the backtracking I would have to do with Busabout via San Sebastian, Madrid and Barcelona. Very chuffed at myself. For some reason it is via Brussels with a long stop-over, so kind of takes the meaning out of 'Express' - it's going to take me 24 hours to get there! (But the other alternative is two weeks on the bus).
Back at camp for a quick sandwhich lunch again before driving the hour or so back to Tangiers. We stopped along the way for some more supermarket food. I spotted a granny-style wheelie trolley in the shop and snapped it up with the last of my remaining dirham (150), exactly what I had in my wallet. I bargained him down to 140 so had only 10 dirham left for an emergency. I finally had a way to carry the pottery and blankets from Fes. I am a superstar!! Nicole of course made a bitchy comment to my face about being a pack horse. Charming. Everything was somewhere hidden under the seats in the truck and I was no longer sure of what I had even bought. Not looking forward to packing!
Tangiers evening was fairly chilled.... just what the doctor ordered. Still cold showers and still can't get clean. However after seven nights on our camp stretchers I have found I can sleep like a baby, although they cetainly took some getting used to. They were really just thin pieces of green canvas smudged with dirt, onto which you attach four brackets hooked into metal poles on either long-side. Sleep comes easy though I think it's from sheer exhaustion from all the daily activities Rachel and Brendon manage to pack into one day.
Steak and potato salad for dinner, but I had no apetite... too exhausted. Angela attempted to make courgette patties for the vegetarians in the group but the frypans were useless and even I couldn't rescue them as Moroccan Okonomiyaki. More like Moroccan Mush. We had to throw it all out. Chocolate-stuffed bananas wrapped in tin-foil and baked on the hot coals (first and only campfire) and toasted marshmallows for desert.
Everyone spent hours packing all their stuff up before it got dark. By some complete miracle, I managed to fit all my stuff into my pack and the trolley. There was not an inch of free space anywhere and I reckoned I had accumulated at least another 20kg's. Idiot.
No comments:
Post a Comment