🇲🇦 Morocco

Our plan for escaping the cold weather in Europe for this year was to discover Morocco. Living in Germany, this meant a bit of a drive through Belgium, France and Spain. We met some old friends along the way which meant the journey was a bit longer compared to driving straight through. We arrived in La Línea de la Concepción on Monday, 2 February, bought our tickets from “Carlos” (a tradition as we were told) and proceeded to our campsite which was next to Gibraltar. We took the opportunity and visited the rock for a couple of hours. At this point, we had no idea what was about to happen….

On day 2 of our Morocco journey we drove south as far as Tazentout. Since we were really fed up with the bad weather, there was no question that we wanted to get to sunny and warm weather as quickly as possible. It was a bit too far to reach our unofficial first goal Zagora in one day, so we checked the map for acceptable distances and then picked the best campsite we could find on Park4Night. That is how we ended up in Tazentout at Camping L´Escale de Ouarzazate.

Zagora, we finally made it! And, spoiler alert: it held all its promises and fulfilled all our wishes. We arrived and recognised a few things from some YouTube videos of other van-travellers, which was a funny experience! The Main Street was super busy as you would expect, shops, cafes, restaurants, schools, street vendors – and of course garage after garage with lines of campervans, overlanders and motorhomes waiting to get their work done.

Long before we had a van we were following a couple of “van-life” folks on YouTube. Most of them are no longer on our subscribed list, but one particular channel somehow managed to keep our interest for a long time. It is that channel that gave us the initial idea to visit Morocco. We saw in their videos that all kinds of RVs are going to Morocco and reassured us that you don’t need a monstrous overlander truck with massive tires to get anywhere interesting.

As I have alluded to in our last blog, we did an excursion into the “real” Sahara Desert, to Erg Chegaga. No, that is not the name of yet another Star Wars character, but simply means “Dune Chegaga” (actually, erg = “sea of sand”, but I hope you will allow me to call it a dune).