So Laayoune ended up being a great city at night Streets were full of people. Food and Coffee were cheap (3 course meal was about dollars? good coffee was 50 cents). Lots of fruit and amazingly colourful dressed people. And people didnt pester you trying to sell things for crazy prices. Sat on the bus today for almost 10 hours. Lots of checkpoints. I think 6, friendly police today, many smiles and hellos. Hopefully I can get some kind of ride to Mauritania tomorrow. Lots of camels here, maybe soon I will get to eat some of their meat and drink [View Full Entry]

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Well: not too much exciting stuff has happened. Got my visa for Mauritania in Rabat after lots of politics. Had a good time in Rabat but then spent almost 24 hours in Transit to make my way to Laayoune in the Western Sahara. Didnt spend any time in Marrakesh as planned because I met a new travel companion who had already been there. I decided that it was more important to travel with someone into Mauritania then to see the tourist city of Morocco. There is a lot of desert here, a lot of camels, a lot of police checkpoints, etc. [View Full Entry]

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So I didn’t go to Laayoune after all, as I went straight through on the bus to Dakhla. It took 16+ hours and was uneventful except for the numerous police checkpoints. Also this fruit vendor, Abdullah, who bought me a yop and then asked to exchange phone numbers. I was suspicious, but his near illiteracy made me think he was just extremely nice, which he was. He gave me a bunch of photos of himself (odd?), and we are now brothers. I arrived at Dakhla at 5 am and found a crappy hotel around 7:30 am that let me check in [View Full Entry]

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A blistery wind front roars through the town, and the sky is blotted out with clouds of orange and grey. One could call it a dust storm, but any storm in the Sahara is worthy of that title. The wind merely lifts all the particulate that's always present into frenzy. Maybe you just don't see it until the storm. The landmass of Western Sahara is a region sparsely populated but largely contested. This is nothing new, and is evident even by the language spoken here. The dialect is known as Hassaniya Arabic, and only has about 3 million speakers. Its origin [View Full Entry]

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It's been a long bit since my last entry, and a couple of thousand kilometers travelling too!!! and boy, it seems like a long time ago. I ended up spending 9 days in Essaouira, a lovely group of people, and a great bunch that went through it too. Troy, the greek god of street art, Michelle the reading maniac who got through any book you placed in front of her, Taz, the Hostel carer with an always ready smile and measured comment to anything, San, up for a laugh anytime and a savvy English take on things anytile, Linda, quiet but [View Full Entry]

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We leave the beach at Taghazoute early in the morning, having sardines and baguette for breakfast. We thumb into Agadir, just miss the morning bus to Laayoune, and have to wait 9 hours for the next. Standard. Get some pizza, check the internet, people watch a bit in the bus station, and the 9 hours are over. The bus travels through the night to Laayoune. Occasionally I woke up to see us driving through arid valleys with strange tunnel-agriculture schemes dotted around. It became more deserty, and by dawn sand took up most of the landscape. We spent a day in [View Full Entry]

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Dakhla doesnt appear in this platform, big sourprise that is... well, so the 24 hours bus was a piece of cake, as expected. I think by now I can sleep in any position, so a bus with air conditioning seemed pretty nice. just took my sheets and towell out and I was ready to roll. in the end it was more like 28 hours I think? although it was partly my fault? cause in every police control they checked me out (only white in the bus...). first three a cop bothere to come in and find me. last three the bus [View Full Entry]

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We stopped briefly in Layoune to do some food shopping, this is Western Saharas capital, from there we camped out near a beach and had guy with a gun came by to tell us we are camping in land mine area so everyone was a bit careful going to the toilet that night, it was also Di and Tonys 5th Anniversary so we celebrated a bit. Next day we stopped at Boujdour to do some more food shopping, Dave and me finished up our last dirhams by buying bananas and oranges; moving on we found an excellent camp site near the [View Full Entry]

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The Western Sahara has recently been on the news again with the civil war largely forgotten over the last 30 years. My contact with the Saharawi caravan has largely been out of curiousity. The Polisario Front is well known as an African Liberation movement that resisted the Spanish during their colonisation period. Now today it is a NEW master... Morocco. In 1975 seeing a vacuum the Morrocan King ordered by claim of histroical right the invasion of Western Sahara territory. The Polisario Front went back underground and they continued their resistance struggle against their new masters. Alt [View Full Entry]

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Sorry for the length of time between updates. There isn't much for internet cafes when you're bush camping in the desert! We've got a lot to update on so we'll try to split it up into a few entries. The next part of our journey took us through the disputed territory of Western Sahara. We won't go into the historical details of the dispute, but the result is that there are police checks every couple of kilometers (or so it seems) and the ocasional mine field. Surprisingly though, the road is all tarmac and in very good shape the whole way [View Full Entry]

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