At the camp site in Fes we met Mark and Chris who were escorting a bus journey from Morocco to South Africa, travelling down the west coast of Africa and returning up the east coast. The trip would last ten months. Over the next day or two people began arriving from all over the world to join the expedition. There were 25 travellers in total and we counted at least seven women – two were from the UK. The cost per person for the whole trip was almost £20,000. Mark explained that years ago the travellers would have been students and back packers but today his clients were more likely to be in their 30s to 50s, plus a sprinkling of newly retired folk. They brought their own tents and would be divided into teams for shopping and cooking duties en route.
We left Fes to continue our journey south, stopping at Azrou a busy market town in the Middle Atlas Mountains, elevation 4,000 feet. Moroccan houses traditionally had flat roofs but in the mountain regions the houses had pitched roofs to cope with winter snow – although in Azrou they hadn’t had any significant snow in the past three years. It was mid November and weather was sunny – with a minimum temperature of 6° and maximum 25°.
The camp site was called the Emirates Tourist Centre and was, for Morocco, of a high standard. Each morning the guardian delivered a baguette to each vehicle. The site was not particularly busy and would have been nice and quiet were it not for a nearby donkey. We didn’t see him (and there could have been more than one animal) but our ears were assaulted by the most discordant sound known to man. It was a mixture of the bellow of a charging elephant, bagpipes warming up and the screech of a metal saw cutting a copper pipe. The noise went on throughout the day but, fortunately, stopped at night – when barking dogs took up the chorus.
On reading a post I wrote in 2017 at Azrou, I see I described the noisy donkey differently: “Think of ten drunken elderly aunts vomiting loudly every two minutes”. Either description was not as awful as the actual noise.
