Thursday, March 18, 2010
Just hanging around Marrakesh.
So far I absolutely love the city of Marrakesh. With its desert red-brown walls, chaotic traffic, mazes of street vendors and souqs peddling everything from carpets to fresh tajines and kabobs... the smell of diesel exhaust... the honking.. the snake charmers... and of course the reliable call to prayer echoing through the city 5 times a day. This city just has a warm and magical feel to it. Everyone I've met has been extremely nice and welcoming. Even the police who regularly pull people over to do random searches on the motor ways seemed to be more interested in just talking with us and making sure we were headed in the right direction and that we were enjoying their country...
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Update from Morocco
Ok, So I figured I really needed to start updating this thing or I was going to get way behind... and I may be too late for that already. I've only been gone a week and 2 days but the amount of things I've done and experienced in that time would take ages to write about... so I will try and sum up where I've been so far.
To start... the stats:
It took just over 4 days to travel through 5 Countries, 3 Continents, drive around 1800 miles, drink a dozen or so redbulls, and sleep less then 5 hours...
I landed in Manchester, England at 7 am after around 14 hours of travel from Detroit and very little sleep and went straight to work. I was met there by Jezza, who is quite the character from New Zealand. He is more or less managing the season down in Morocco and it was up to me and him to put the finishing touches on packing all of the gear into our 16 passenger bus and 15ft trailer before we made the mad dash to Morocco. Soon after touching down i quickly learned how to drive a right hand drive vehicle (which also has a manual transmission) and to drive on the left hand side of the road.
While I was at Water By Natures base trying to piece together tents and other last minute items another guide showed up named Emil. He is from Sweden and is joining Water by Nature for the first time this season as well.
We had planned to take off as soon as Emil arrived but were delayed waiting from some more shipments of gear from NRS and Carslisle and had to put of beginning our journey south till the next morning.
Rachel, who basically runs the office in England, invited us all over for dinner and drinks that night which we really happy to accept being to tired to really cook anything for ourselves.
The next morning the gear did indeed arrive and we were off driving all the way to the southern tip of England where we were to take a ferry over to France...
We made it through most of the first part of the the drive fairly uneventfully, mostly thanks to our Tom Tom GPS system...
Once in France Emil and I took over driving for the most part and since we were avoiding the toll roads in order to save a bit of money got to drive through dozens of small country towns and see a bit more of France then the truck stop restaurants I was expecting on the main motorway...
Other then almost running out of gas around 4am the first morning and a minor breakdown mid morning France was pretty uneventfully. I ate Pan O Chocolat(which was a must according to a very reliable source), lots of bread, cheese, and of course coffee and redbulls....
France was fairly pretty in the country side but the country as whole didn't impress me too much. People weren't all that friendly and were really hard to even get to talk to us... which is something I haven't experienced in a lot of places... especially when you make an effort to speak the language... so I'm not really planning to go back there anytime soon...
I drove the night shift again between France and a huge chunk of Spain... which included the drive through an awesome snow storm in the Pyrenees Mountains which left it difficult to see a few meters ahead of the van at times... which was a lot of fun trying to get the shifting right and maneuver the Goliath vehicle through the ups and downs and twists and turns of the rugged terrain. All in all a pretty good time... mostly because the other guys were sleeping and I could listen to what ever I wanted on my Ipod and just get into the zone of driving...
This was also the day I turned 25! Which I think sounds a bit old... and I think I'm going to keep saying I'm 24 since it sounds better to me... but in order to Celebrate we did take a pause from diving and stopped in a small village somewhere in southern Spain to wander around and get a bite to eat. We ran into the town drunk, the a British expat, and tons of school children along the way who all wanted to chat. The town drunk especially seemed to follow us everywhere and even showed up at the pub where we went to get lunch... It was a pretty entertaining afternoon spent in a small town that seemed to depend mostly on growing olives....
A few more hours and a huge detour later took us to the ferry terminal to Morocco... we had just made it in time for the 6:30 ferry to Tangier and rushed around trying to find out where to get tickets and then how to actually get on the correct ferry when we were told we only paid for a van and 3 passengers and no the huge trailer we were toting behind us... so after a bit more running around and a lot more confusion we were told we could still make the 6:30 ferry since it was running late... and running late it was... 8:00 turned into 9:00 which then of course turned into 10.... and when the 10:00 ferry showed up it was too crowded for us to even fit on.. so we ended up waiting till 11:30.... which was fine and actually helped us get a few more hours rest being pretty sleep deprived from the days of driving beforehand...
Once we made it onto the ferry it took about 2 hours to get across to Morocco and then another 2 hours to clear customs as they of course insisted to check through all of our equipment which was really entertaining to watch Jezza try to explain to the officials...
we drove for a few hours until we were out of the city and crashed at a rest stop for and hour or two before I took over driving again..
The driving in Morocco is much more civil and orderly then I expected it be... in fact drivers here are most likely more polite then any driver in the US... I was expecting something similar to India or Nepal...
I drove most of the way until we made it Marrakesh where we ran a few errands.. got out WBN phones hooked up.. picked up another guide, Tembo, from Zambia, got acquainted with the city and hung out the the guides from Splash who let us crash in their apartment for the night...
The next day we met up with Splashe's "Fixer" who set us down the right path to order some custom gear that we needed asap for some upcoming trips... having an interpreter a long really helps with expediting the process obtaining things at much more reasonable prices....
Once we got all the gear sorted we started to drive to the town where we were going to be based for the season... or so we thought. Since Tembo was the only person who has worked a Moroccan season before we relied on his memory perhaps a little bit too heavily on what town it was we were to be headed too... after 3 hours hours of driving up and down some pretty sketchy mountain passes we ended up at a town in the Sahara Desert... which is no where near where we wanted to be... after a bit a frustrated screams and U turns we ended up driving 8 Hours in the right direction...
We showed up into our town at about 11:30 at night and instantly people came out to greet us since they recognized the van and were really excited to see us back again... The only thing we had to go off of to locate our house was a picture jezza had seen before we had left the UK and oddly enough all the homes looked the same in this town... It only took about 10 minutes before we were being escorted to our house where the owner, Mohamed, who was renting it to us met us and invited us to stay with him since our place wasn't furnished or anything and tried to feed us and offer us tea.. we politely declined and explained to him that we were fine the way it was and settled in for a much needed nights sleep...
The next morning I woke up at 7am to find that all of the gear in the van and the trailer had already been unloaded by Mohamed and Mustafa (who is our fixer and translator) and stacked neatly into organized piles ready for us to sort into the garage located below our house...
Through out the day Mohamed repeatedly brought us food and tea and helped out with anything he could. The hospitality in this country is unlike anywhere else I have ever been. People always come up to us to talk and ask us to join them at their homes for a meal or tea. These are the kind of people who would truly give the shirt off of their back to a stranger in need and I have been overwhelmed by the love and graciousness I have felt from the people here. Morocco may have become my favorite country to travel to because of that fact.
We spent most of the day sort, cleaning, re-ordering and rigging all of the gear we had under the watch full eye of most of the town as they would stop and just watch us for hours and occasionally jump in and try to help us with the carrying of rafts or sanding and painted of the rocket boxes...
We capped the day off with another meal from Mohamed and were up another 4 hours later to head to the river to see if was actually going to be runnable for clients since all of the info we could get from the locals is that it was running really high. We also had to set up to campsites along the way which we use for our 3 day tips. We drove a few hours out of town till we caught a glimpse of the river... which was running huge. It was running about 2 meters higher then normal flows and about a meter over the recommended level. So we decided to do the sensible thing and run it anyways. The first day on the river was pretty full on class IV for most of the run. Tembo (a 16 year Zambezy Veteran) was captaining the paddle assist oar rig I was on and jezza was safety kayaking ahead of us. We were getting tossed around abit but seemed to be doing alright until about 3/4s of the way down the run when we got wrapped on a rock and Assan (another local who was helping us out) and I went for a bit of a swim through a pretty intense class IV rapid. Both of us made it out ok but had to hike for over a mile to catch up with Tembo once he got the raft unwrapped and caught the first eddy he could find. Needless to say after that we were pretty happy to make it to our camp for the second night soon after that...
The second day on the river was pretty uneventful... and had really impressive scenery... Most of the really intense rapids were actually below the water and I'm guessing that this section will become harder as the water drops but at times we were in gorges that were about 8' wide and pumping with water.
After that we had to paddle until we made it to the lake were we met up with the motor boat that was to tow us across...
Now, after another couple hour drive I'm back in Marrakesh for 2 days while we organize some more gear and meet up with some of our first clients of the season and head back up to the mountains in 2 days... and then a day later I think I have to drive to Spain to retrieve some more gear that is supposed to arrive from Ethiopia...
So, that is a very, very brief summary of what I have been up to and I hope to get some photos up and maybe another update up soon... but I have been on they go since I landed in Manchester and I'm already feeling pretty exhausted. All in all I'm loving this new job and having a blast here...
To start... the stats:
It took just over 4 days to travel through 5 Countries, 3 Continents, drive around 1800 miles, drink a dozen or so redbulls, and sleep less then 5 hours...
I landed in Manchester, England at 7 am after around 14 hours of travel from Detroit and very little sleep and went straight to work. I was met there by Jezza, who is quite the character from New Zealand. He is more or less managing the season down in Morocco and it was up to me and him to put the finishing touches on packing all of the gear into our 16 passenger bus and 15ft trailer before we made the mad dash to Morocco. Soon after touching down i quickly learned how to drive a right hand drive vehicle (which also has a manual transmission) and to drive on the left hand side of the road.
While I was at Water By Natures base trying to piece together tents and other last minute items another guide showed up named Emil. He is from Sweden and is joining Water by Nature for the first time this season as well.
We had planned to take off as soon as Emil arrived but were delayed waiting from some more shipments of gear from NRS and Carslisle and had to put of beginning our journey south till the next morning.
Rachel, who basically runs the office in England, invited us all over for dinner and drinks that night which we really happy to accept being to tired to really cook anything for ourselves.
The next morning the gear did indeed arrive and we were off driving all the way to the southern tip of England where we were to take a ferry over to France...
We made it through most of the first part of the the drive fairly uneventfully, mostly thanks to our Tom Tom GPS system...
Once in France Emil and I took over driving for the most part and since we were avoiding the toll roads in order to save a bit of money got to drive through dozens of small country towns and see a bit more of France then the truck stop restaurants I was expecting on the main motorway...
Other then almost running out of gas around 4am the first morning and a minor breakdown mid morning France was pretty uneventfully. I ate Pan O Chocolat(which was a must according to a very reliable source), lots of bread, cheese, and of course coffee and redbulls....
France was fairly pretty in the country side but the country as whole didn't impress me too much. People weren't all that friendly and were really hard to even get to talk to us... which is something I haven't experienced in a lot of places... especially when you make an effort to speak the language... so I'm not really planning to go back there anytime soon...
I drove the night shift again between France and a huge chunk of Spain... which included the drive through an awesome snow storm in the Pyrenees Mountains which left it difficult to see a few meters ahead of the van at times... which was a lot of fun trying to get the shifting right and maneuver the Goliath vehicle through the ups and downs and twists and turns of the rugged terrain. All in all a pretty good time... mostly because the other guys were sleeping and I could listen to what ever I wanted on my Ipod and just get into the zone of driving...
This was also the day I turned 25! Which I think sounds a bit old... and I think I'm going to keep saying I'm 24 since it sounds better to me... but in order to Celebrate we did take a pause from diving and stopped in a small village somewhere in southern Spain to wander around and get a bite to eat. We ran into the town drunk, the a British expat, and tons of school children along the way who all wanted to chat. The town drunk especially seemed to follow us everywhere and even showed up at the pub where we went to get lunch... It was a pretty entertaining afternoon spent in a small town that seemed to depend mostly on growing olives....
A few more hours and a huge detour later took us to the ferry terminal to Morocco... we had just made it in time for the 6:30 ferry to Tangier and rushed around trying to find out where to get tickets and then how to actually get on the correct ferry when we were told we only paid for a van and 3 passengers and no the huge trailer we were toting behind us... so after a bit more running around and a lot more confusion we were told we could still make the 6:30 ferry since it was running late... and running late it was... 8:00 turned into 9:00 which then of course turned into 10.... and when the 10:00 ferry showed up it was too crowded for us to even fit on.. so we ended up waiting till 11:30.... which was fine and actually helped us get a few more hours rest being pretty sleep deprived from the days of driving beforehand...
Once we made it onto the ferry it took about 2 hours to get across to Morocco and then another 2 hours to clear customs as they of course insisted to check through all of our equipment which was really entertaining to watch Jezza try to explain to the officials...
we drove for a few hours until we were out of the city and crashed at a rest stop for and hour or two before I took over driving again..
The driving in Morocco is much more civil and orderly then I expected it be... in fact drivers here are most likely more polite then any driver in the US... I was expecting something similar to India or Nepal...
I drove most of the way until we made it Marrakesh where we ran a few errands.. got out WBN phones hooked up.. picked up another guide, Tembo, from Zambia, got acquainted with the city and hung out the the guides from Splash who let us crash in their apartment for the night...
The next day we met up with Splashe's "Fixer" who set us down the right path to order some custom gear that we needed asap for some upcoming trips... having an interpreter a long really helps with expediting the process obtaining things at much more reasonable prices....
Once we got all the gear sorted we started to drive to the town where we were going to be based for the season... or so we thought. Since Tembo was the only person who has worked a Moroccan season before we relied on his memory perhaps a little bit too heavily on what town it was we were to be headed too... after 3 hours hours of driving up and down some pretty sketchy mountain passes we ended up at a town in the Sahara Desert... which is no where near where we wanted to be... after a bit a frustrated screams and U turns we ended up driving 8 Hours in the right direction...
We showed up into our town at about 11:30 at night and instantly people came out to greet us since they recognized the van and were really excited to see us back again... The only thing we had to go off of to locate our house was a picture jezza had seen before we had left the UK and oddly enough all the homes looked the same in this town... It only took about 10 minutes before we were being escorted to our house where the owner, Mohamed, who was renting it to us met us and invited us to stay with him since our place wasn't furnished or anything and tried to feed us and offer us tea.. we politely declined and explained to him that we were fine the way it was and settled in for a much needed nights sleep...
The next morning I woke up at 7am to find that all of the gear in the van and the trailer had already been unloaded by Mohamed and Mustafa (who is our fixer and translator) and stacked neatly into organized piles ready for us to sort into the garage located below our house...
Through out the day Mohamed repeatedly brought us food and tea and helped out with anything he could. The hospitality in this country is unlike anywhere else I have ever been. People always come up to us to talk and ask us to join them at their homes for a meal or tea. These are the kind of people who would truly give the shirt off of their back to a stranger in need and I have been overwhelmed by the love and graciousness I have felt from the people here. Morocco may have become my favorite country to travel to because of that fact.
We spent most of the day sort, cleaning, re-ordering and rigging all of the gear we had under the watch full eye of most of the town as they would stop and just watch us for hours and occasionally jump in and try to help us with the carrying of rafts or sanding and painted of the rocket boxes...
We capped the day off with another meal from Mohamed and were up another 4 hours later to head to the river to see if was actually going to be runnable for clients since all of the info we could get from the locals is that it was running really high. We also had to set up to campsites along the way which we use for our 3 day tips. We drove a few hours out of town till we caught a glimpse of the river... which was running huge. It was running about 2 meters higher then normal flows and about a meter over the recommended level. So we decided to do the sensible thing and run it anyways. The first day on the river was pretty full on class IV for most of the run. Tembo (a 16 year Zambezy Veteran) was captaining the paddle assist oar rig I was on and jezza was safety kayaking ahead of us. We were getting tossed around abit but seemed to be doing alright until about 3/4s of the way down the run when we got wrapped on a rock and Assan (another local who was helping us out) and I went for a bit of a swim through a pretty intense class IV rapid. Both of us made it out ok but had to hike for over a mile to catch up with Tembo once he got the raft unwrapped and caught the first eddy he could find. Needless to say after that we were pretty happy to make it to our camp for the second night soon after that...
The second day on the river was pretty uneventful... and had really impressive scenery... Most of the really intense rapids were actually below the water and I'm guessing that this section will become harder as the water drops but at times we were in gorges that were about 8' wide and pumping with water.
After that we had to paddle until we made it to the lake were we met up with the motor boat that was to tow us across...
Now, after another couple hour drive I'm back in Marrakesh for 2 days while we organize some more gear and meet up with some of our first clients of the season and head back up to the mountains in 2 days... and then a day later I think I have to drive to Spain to retrieve some more gear that is supposed to arrive from Ethiopia...
So, that is a very, very brief summary of what I have been up to and I hope to get some photos up and maybe another update up soon... but I have been on they go since I landed in Manchester and I'm already feeling pretty exhausted. All in all I'm loving this new job and having a blast here...
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