Sorry – no map today
as Nellie went on strike. Will try to sort it out later but meanwhile
have asked TomTom to record the route. Now all we need to know is how
to transfer it into here!
A reasonable night
although not entirely undisturbed, as this is after all a 24/7 service
station as well as a leisure complex. The security man turned up about 9.00 pm and we tipped him
with Dh50 and he sat outside the van all night!
But as there are no
services for us after breakfast we just got ourselves under way again
towards Fes. The N8 is a generally good road by Moroccan standards
and we made good progress through the Moyen Atlas mountains, a much
smaller range than the others but just as picturesque as well as
twisty and hilly. Once again not a lot of traffic outside of the
towns; at Azrou we rejoined a route we used a few years ago then onto
Ifrane, notable for it's very distinct French architecture as against
the usual Arab “design” of brown boxes! The King apparently has a
palace here and it was the one place we encountered serious roadworks
where the main thoroughfare was being widened from 2 to 4 lanes and
resurfaced – if of course it ever gets finished as there was a
distinct lack of activity!
We'd set the satnav to
take us to the Diamante Verte campsite, just on the outskirts of Fes
but we'd heard that it had been closed although we couldn't ascertain that fact
with any certainty; we know that there are (were) touts in Fes trying
to direct motorhomes to the other campsite, International, telling
people Diamante was closed. So in an effort to clear the conundrum up
we followed TomToms' directions which took us on a quite tortuous
route via small roads and villages before turning us into what can
only be called a giant building site, and we mean town-sized it was
enormous, but the road was in no fit state for us. We estimated, if
it still existed, that the campsite would have been somewhere in the
middle of all the building so assumed that it had probably been sold
for building land. Campercontact no longer lists it (we'd used an
older version for directions) so our conclusion is that it is indeed
now closed.
So we reprogrammed the
satnav to take us to Camping International, which wasn't far away,
and found ourselves on a somewhat chaotic journey through the very
busy modern outskirts of Fes, fighting for roadspace with the dozens
of petit-taxis. Then at one set of lights a guy on a moped pulled
alongside us and asked in excellent English if we were going to “his”
campsite, i.e. International. We didn't quite admit to that but in
effect he hung around us whilst we made our way and of course
escorted us in when we did in fact get there – sure he was on
commission! Not sure of our next plans we booked in for a couple of
nights, resisting his persistent efforts to provide a day trip into
the medina tomorrow; having been there before we declined and found
ourselves a nice pitch.
Camping International
is a wooded site with five distinct clearings each with an ablutions
block, all clean and tidy if not quite up to European standards, but
we've seen and used worse. Being shady we used the electricity
hookup, which was included in the fees. The site was reasonably full
and on a later exploration with Jamie we noticed one area given over
to an ACSI long-term rally and another absolutely chokka with a large
group of Dutch, obviously yet another guided tour of which we've seen
several during our time in Morocco. Only one other Brit as far as we
could see – where are they all this year?
A late lunch then for
some reason we were both feeling very tired and just crashed out for
the rest of the day, having checked that the habitation
air-conditioning still worked fine. It was dark when we surfaced so a
quick bite to eat and a quiet end to the day. We'll have two nights
here then push on to our last intended visit at Chefchouen, the
“blue” city.
Are you aware Spain might be closing their borders
ReplyDelete