This is an excerpt of an email I sent during a trip to Morocco in 2003 with 3 good friends (Gustavo, Elisa and Bec)

21/02/2003

Gone are the days when “roughing it” meant no showers and no television. NOW it’s no showers and no internet. So… we have arrived in Erfoud, near the Moroccan Sahara in the south east of the country, but not without our fair share of hassles, and so let me digress on just a few.

In Ouarzazate, after a mad search for a rental car and securing the cheapest price in town, we decided to celebrate with a beer or two. Maybe it was the beer, or the illness that has carried from Barcelona, or the orange juice, harira, couscous, tagine (etc) but something had to give…and I did. After a feverish night, zero sleep and trips to the holes posing as toilets I finally drifted off to sleep around 7am. Only to be woken up at 7:15am by Gustavo and a man dressed in a fireman’s uniform. Surely I was hallucinating! No. I had to go… where??? in the ambulance to hospital. It seems Gustavo had been wandering around town looking for the “Red Crescent” (islamic version of Red +) and had obtained some medical assistance.

In hospital (which had the cleanliness of a youth hostel…well to be fair a clean youth hostel), I had to try and communicate through my Year 8 french what had happened, so after some fun charades, 1st word, 2 syllables ….vomit, they decided maybe they should grab the doctor who spoke english. It turns out I had a fever, and so would need an injection and at least every prescribed medicine under the sun, just to be safe. Luckily the doctor didn’t charge us anything and we gave a small tip in gratitude. Unluckily, the ambulance had disappeared and we had to wander aimlessly (with more charades) in the direction of our hostel for some rest.

    The 1 do and 10 don’t do’s of rental car driving.

After a day’s rest and a two hour delay we finally picked up our car, only to find the petrol tank leaked… So we thought we’d see how far we’d get and then change the car the next day. So off we set for a day trip, truely superb scenery and all the rest, a great day.

So I finally got to drive; for the first time in seven months; without a driver’s licence; in a 3rd World country; with a left hand drive; on the right hand side of the road; at night time; on the worst road with mountain hairpins that I have ever seen; in a car with a sticky clutch and a leaking fuel tank. Oh the joys of driving came flooding back!

But we survived… Next day, “new car or money back”, They took the car and “fixed the tank” (By attaching a cover to the underside to hide the leak and apparently making the hole bigger. So we went to the Ait Benahoudin Kasbah (fort) that features in Lawrence of Arabia, and was the stunning backdrop for qhat must’ve been the Moroccan equivalent of a Qantas commercial featuring “What a wonderful world”. Upon return we demanded a “new” car (better termed a replacement car). After syphoning out and transferring our petrol in 1.5 litres bottles and glueing on the centre rear view mirror, we finally had our “new” car: much better, apart from being smaller, without drivers side rear view mirror, seatbelt or speedometer, and headligts that (as we would discover) pointed straight at the ground with the strength of two handheld lanterns. Consequently, it was incredibly fun driving the last 30km’s to our destination last night. Sunset driving in Morocco is something out of this world, when roads double as bazaars, football pitches, velodromes and donkeys come out of nowhere, closely followed by vans ladened with at least (in all seriousness) 30 people.

But it’s not all bad. The trip was truly stunning and if anyone ever comes to Morocco, a trip down the Dades Gorge, with it’s incredible lunar and martian landscape, is an absolute must; All of the trips in the family Tarago couldn’t prepare me for such natural beauty. And a beautiful if somewhat ill-directed tramp through the Todra gorge yesterday topped it off. So now for some dunes, then off to “gorge” ourselves a little more before heading to the hustles and hassles of Fes and Meknes.

Okay so sorry it was long, but hope you are all well. And mum and dad, please don’t worry as everything is going well and the diarrhoea is really clearing up ;)

Lots of love

James