Day 5 Chefchaouen to Casablanca
Is there a more emotive route than one that includes the Moroccan blue city of Chefchaouen and the roaring forties Hollywood Casablanca?
It’s a shame that the reality is a series of roadside toilets and a supermarket stop at Kenitra. At least I got a good night’s sleep, having found my ear plugs last night. We’re slowly getting into a routine and finding where all the things are in our bags and organising them by what we need by the minute, hour, day and longer.
A key moment for me today was reaching this bridge, although I never knew this bridge existed until 5 mins before we saw it. This is the longest static cable bridge in North Africa, which is fairly fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree.
More interesting as far as I am concerned is that this bridge marks the fact that we are definitely past Kenitra on the road to Rabat and on to Casablanca. Critically, on October 30th last year the Oasis truck starting out on the same trip as this, crashed in Kenitra killing one of the passengers. There were a lot of lessons learned. Without any first hand evidence to corroborate any of these comments, it sounds as though the driver, who was not perfect, was forced off the road by another driver on a stretch of road which had experienced other fatalities not long before. The “swiss cheese” theory of things going wrong only when all the holes line up, appears to be alive and well.
However, this is a sobering reminder that this is certainly an adventure, not a holiday. This trip has never gone the same way twice and the group ahead of us are currently in minibuses and hostels, thanks to the delay in importing trucks into Morocco. We, on the other hand, have one of Oasis’ best drivers as far as Senegal when our local Zimbabwean, TK takes over and we are bouncing over North Africa’s longest static cable bridge in our big blue truck, called Fjola, eating delicious medjool dates. This is only one small fraction of enough snacks to last around 4 days of lunches.
At the camp, outside Casablanca, we did of course go for a run again through the surrounding area and sea fret.
Our warm down involved mint tea and a sunset again, I know, it’s super boring doing the same thing for two evenings in a row.
Supper tonight was an exceptional curry round the campfire. Mark realised he’d never seen the film Casablanca (I know, I was surprised too) so he downloaded the film and projected it on the wall for everyone.
Perfect night…… ❤️
