DAY 224

Monday 20 February 2012

Nicole came back form an early morning walk along the beach to find her parents chatting with Frank and Katrin, the couple we’d met in Tarifa. Their kids Josephine and Titus busied themselves with sword fighting, playing with the chickens and sporadically climbing onto their parents. As it turned out Katrin and Frank had visited the states several times and even stayed once at the KOREAN BELL the very spot where Charles and Dian were married!

We all exchanged stories and travel tips over breakfast, and they told us of a beautiful drive through “Paradise Valley” that was not to be missed. Dian, thinking they might be yearning for some good, hearty, German bread offered it to them, but could not see from her angle that there was mold on the other side! Frank said they had not had that kind of uber healthy bread since they left home, and he did not say this wistfully.

Noticing an interestingly shaped stick on the ground, Dian (ever the beach comber) bent down to pick it up, but was halted by Katrin whispering, “Do not touch that, it is Frank’s. It’s art!” She grinned and we were reminded that before in Tarifa when Dian came back with buckets of beach treasures, Frank had teased that she was so kind to pick up the rubbish, to which she retorted, “This isn’t rubbish, it’s art!”

Back on the road, we were waved aside by a cop on a motorcycle, just the thing we didn’t want to see, knowing our Moroccan insurance was not going to be very helpful if we got into a scrape. No matter, though! He was just at the beginning of a long line of government cars being escorted through the windy back country. One could barely make out the fezzes, djellabas and suits through the tinted back windows.

At last we’d made it to Agadir, where we made the unwise choice of buying some provisions BEFORE looking for a camp. To make a long story longer, we had trouble finding camping (even free camping) in Agadir. After at least two hours of driving around, asking around, and blank stares abounding, we finally pulled in to the one and only camp in Agadir…which was full and about to close. To give a vibe of the camp, their brochure was heavily advertised by the 23 hour casino down the road. The man at reception, perhaps thinking he could get some good casino PR through a young person like Nicole, squeezed us into a spot between two other jumbo-campers (again, we were grateful to have such a small vehicle). To put it lightly, the camp was terrible: unfriendly gatekeeper, no place to plug in to electricity, though we were paying for it, disgusting bathrooms (smelly, dirty, no soap, no TP, no lights in the women’s side), you get the picture. The only good thing about the place was a friendly French couple, Christian and Nicole, who offered to let us use their electricity if we moved closer to their plot. We chatted a bit, and when we mentioned Paradise Valley Christian smiled and said, “Ah, ‘heepies.’” We were terribly exhausted, so pretty much instantly after saying goodnight to them we zonked out.