The cyclists celebrated their first stage yesterday evening with dinner and music.
Apart from the cyclists, who all occupied rooms in the hotel, there was only one more camper from Stuttgart.
Brahim remarked, that he loves this silence here in the desert. You only hear the wind and some leaves rustle. Marrakech is so loud, also at night.
The temperature at nighttime was very moderately at around 20°C.
I have been lying in my roof top tent and staring at the amazing clear night sky, the millions of stars, the milky way and the moon, all so clearly visible. This is just so special and I feel so privileged to be able to experience this. In the Atlas Mountains, we already saw a beautiful night sky, but it was often disturbed by some light somewhere in the distance. Here in the desert, however, there is no artificial light for many many kilometres to disturb this gorgeous night sky. Stunning.

Back to the day thirty-six of my expedition. The cyclists were up as early as we were and got ready for their second leg of cycling and navigating through the desert. There must have been about 25 or 30 at the start this morning.
We did our usual routine having breakfast while breaking down camp and loading everything into the cars again. Trevor has a tight fit of all his gear in the back of his bakkie, the South African name for a pickup truck, they gently call ‘Noddy’. The name comes from a British children’s cartoon from the 1950 of a little man in a little red car, and here they are, two big people in a big white car, called ‘Noddy’.
Everything got strapped tight in my car, as the piste today will probably be bumpy and sometimes rough again. Especially the egg box got a secure place, so that we all don’t have to eat scrambled eggs for supper and breakfast and lunch.

The piste led us out of the canyon, where the camping and hotel is located and from where the cyclists departed minutes earlier. The first challenge of the morning was to find the right piste across Oued El Ma’ader. This dry riverbed spans a good 2,500 meters North-South and is quite deceiving. It looks flat, but actually has many ruts that make driving across them difficult. We failed to spot the piste to take us across easily, so we had to find our own way. I knew which valley on the others side we needed to enter, so we went hobbling across in an almost straight line. After a good morning massage, we made it to the only tree in the next 10km, marking the entrance to the valley. We continued into the valley with stunning scenery and partially rocky and sandy pistes.

Then came a number of fine sand dunes within the valley that needed to be overcome. Eeyore struggled twice due to being underpowered, heavily loaded and tyres that were not deflated enough, but he managed. We were at awe by the beautiful scenery in the morning sun, that we stopped when we could to snap a few epic pictures. Trevor often followed me in a few hundred meters distance again in order to let my dust be blown away or settle a bit. At picture taking points or after a while I stopped to wait up for them, to make sure he made it through difficult passages and that they took the right turns on the piste.

A little later, we saw a massive yellow wall of fine sand in front of us and knew this would be crunch time! We climbed it easily, however, arrived at the top with very little momentum left. We did not expect, what we saw there. It was the end of the valley and this dune was so massive, that it stretched for several kilometres to come, fortunately all slightly downhill. With the car slowly sinking into the soft sand and the accelerator to the floor we swam down this dune, bouncing a bit to the left and a bit to the right. What a ride! I was hoping wholeheartedly that Trevor and Charlotte would make it through this with their white Ford bakkie, as I could not have stopped and certainly not turned around, going up this dune again to rescue them. After long minutes of surfing down this dune, we finally reached the bottom and hard ground again. We had arrived in a monumental valley. We stopped and with eagle’s eyes we stared into the mirrors to wait for the white bakkie to appear. Will he make it?? Minutes passed and then finally the redemptive view of the white Portuguese car also swimming down this massive dune. We both made it to the bottom with flying colours.

We continued driving on the hard valley floor, where you can easily reach speeds of up to 60km/h, just watching out for washboard corrugation or little perpendicularly running ruts that can make your car nose dip and bounce heavily. My dashcam then often thinks I have crashed, sounds an alarm, stores this particular file securely and would call an emergency number, if I had not disabled this last feature. Fortunately.
The entire time, we had not seen a single soul, except for an old Land Rover Defender driving past in the far distance.

We came into a small remote village. All buildings and streets were decorated with Moroccan flags. Today is a national holiday here. The Moroccans celebrate the ‘Green March’, that was a strategic mass demonstration on November 6th, 1975, coordinated by the Moroccan government and military, to force Spain to hand over the disputed, autonomous semi-metropolitan province of Spanish Sahara to Morocco. The demonstration of some 350,000 Moroccans advanced several kilometres into the Western Sahara territory these days.
We met the cyclists again in this remote village, who apparently had a checkpoint there and blocked our track. We turned around and chose a track around. The wide valley offers many pistes and you have to chose them carefully, as some suddenly swerve off into a direction you might not want to go to.
We made good way, driving fast and producing big plumes of white dust behind us.

Shortly before Oum-Jrane the piste was blocked by a line of rocks and a sign, reading “Zagoura” redirecting us to the right. We followed the directions on the sign and eventually drove parallel to our envisioned track, passing many patches of freshly plowed ground. There were also several irrigation system pipes visible. Clearly, this patch of desert was being used for farming. Brahim explained later, that there is water in the ground here and the area around Zagora is know for its production of pasteque, watermelon. The once produced closer to Zagora are of better quality and are being exported to Europe, the medium quality is sold locally and the mediocre quality, produced on these fields here is exported to neighbouring African countries.
When we entered the last few kilometres of piste, now it was mainly rough rocks, we came across a French couple with their IVECO Daily camper. We stopped to ask if they needed any help. He explained quickly that all was good and only a nut on his steering had come loose. He now had fixed that. We continued and came across two more French campers waiting for their friends in the third one. After a few more kilometres the fun of offroad driving in Morocco came to an end and we joined the tarred Route National 17, leading us into Zagora.

It was shortly after midday and we decided to drive up Djebel Zagora, a 1030m high mountain giving the town at its foot its name. From the top you must surely have a lovely panoramic view over the city and the valley around. The track was very rocky and rough. Clearly, they had been working here recently. A normal car would have not made it this far. Not even a Kia Picanto, many tourists torture over unsuitable pistes and mountain passes, would have made it this far. We stopped half way at the ruins of a hotel construction. A bit of a lost places experience. This also offered a lovely panoramic view, as well as some needed shade. We could drive the cars into the unfinished building. We had a delicious lunch with a fantastic view over the city.

Back in the city, we searched for the famous sign” Tombouctou 52 jours”. Often copied, but this sign is the original. First the sign stood at the original crossroad from where the caravan towards Timbuktu left in the good old days, indicating the number of days (52) until the caravan reaches the famous city in nowadays Mali. I have been next to this sign at its original location twice before and took pictures of me and my parents in front of it.
We found the new location, parked and got out to take photos of me, Brahim and of Trevor and me next to the sign. Bucket list: checked.

Next task on our list, find a butcher that could sell us some nice lamb chops for the braai tonight. Many shops on the high street were closed, however, several shops on the main market were open and we sent Brahim off to buy us some nice BBQ meat.
While watching Eeyore on the parking, a chap came past me and wanted to know where I was from. He tried all kinds of countries, first in Europe, he even mentioned Andorra, later countries from South America followed and then from Southern Africa. There was a lot of head-scratching in between. He clearly couldn’t make any sense of this all. When I finally told him that I was from Côte d’Ivoire, there was much more head-scratching, he was speechless and I left him wondering how this all fit together.

The camping is beautifully located in the palm grove of the town. We found a nice spot next to some large palm trees, that gave us much needed shade during the afternoon.
Brahim went into hard negotiations with the proprietor about the price for the night and the possibility to BBQ tonight. Thanks very much Brahim, that pays for the nice braai tonight.
We took our leisure time and caught up with correspondence, after two days basically without being online, there was a bit to do, or went for a dive in the swimming pool, or wash your vehicle to be white again, or sat in a shady spot to write this blog and go through the pictures of today and prepare the blogs for today and tomorrow.
Several French and Belgian RVs arrived. Man, these are real houses on wheels. Double axles, with huge satellite dishes on the top, hardly fitting into the normal spots on the camping anymore. The sun is setting and we start preparing for our braai with real South African braaibroodjes. Happy Days!