Day 12 drive down the Moroccan coast from Essouria
Today is the first of 4 days just driving and bush camping ~1,700km down the coast to Nouadhibou, our first Mauritanian stop. So it gives me an opportunity to introduce you to truck life in a bit more detail.
You’ve seen the camp fires and the flapping of washing up, so here’s the down low on a day in the life of the truck apart from that.
Breakfast and in fact all meals eaten while camping are laid out in front of the truck on trestle tables. The four gas burners are usually set up by the driver or tour leader. There is a tarpaulin that attaches to a rail down the length of the truck when it rains.
Once everyone is up, many hands make light work grabbing all the grey plastic boxes out of the truck, filled with breakfast staples or spices and sauces if it’s supper time, utensils, pans, kettles, cutlery and crockery.
To the side we set up a chain of make-shift tables: grey box lids on stools, with washing up bowls on top that you can see in the left of the image below. This means we can go from hot soapy water to a rinse and an awaiting flapper in one smooth process.
We have a jerry can at the bottom of the truck in the silver metal cabinet for untreated water and to the back of the truck just in front of the tyre in the image below is the tap for treated/drinking water.
When we’ve all got food, we sit around on stools that are stored in the dark side of the truck.
The dark side of the truck is also where all our tents, sleeping mats and rucksacks go. There’s a tonne of hidden other compartments that only the driver uses filled with various tool kits and a second diesel tank.
Inside the truck we have 20 seats that we rotate around and lockers that we keep to ourselves for the duration of the trip. There’s a fridge set aside for staple foods like milk that need refrigerating and a cool box that passengers can use for beer etc. Critically, there are also 20 USB A charge points.
One additional important safety factor is the buzzer to attract the tour leader’s attention in the cab. If it’s not an emergency e.g. you need a toilet stop, you buzz twice. If it’s an emergency, like you’ve just seen 3 goats in a tree and know that the tour leader wants a photo, it’s one long buzz.
Of course, if we stop by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, there will also be a camel available.
Speaking of random animals that appear where you least expect them and use of the emergency buzzer, here’s genuinely, a few goats in trees.
These goats specifically like eating argan nuts out of the trees. Apparently, according to the guide at the argan oil factory, if you buy surprisingly cheap argan oil, it has likely been ground from a nut that has gone through a goat first.
The goat herders specifically like mad tourists who will pay to take photos of their herd eating argan trees.
As an additional bonus for today, the driver got the map slightly wrong and as there were no good bush camping sites around 2pm today, we’re on the road until past 6pm to get to a guaranteed good site south of Agadir. So I’m on cooking duty tonight for the second time in a row, arriving after dark, needing to produce 20 servings of something edible, quickly, assisted by people who don’t know how to cook. I’m making Moroccan chickpea soup. Keep your fingers crossed.
