Day 19. 5806 km. 103 hours riding We started from Timisoara and did not stop for 17 days. Until we reached Gibraltar. A huge rock, full of Romanians – and supposedly monkeys, but we did not see any of those because they were all perched on the top of the rock and we had to pay to climb up there too, so we didn’t think it was worth the money. Romanians, however, we saw plenty, it seems that in any pub you hit you can order in Romanian, and somebody will understand you.
Beyond the big rock… the Promised Land! Africa! But we’re not yet ready for it, we’re stealing another day to let our clothes dry, the same clothes we had thrown in the washer for the first time since we left, and to take care of all the little things postponed along the way, and to stretch our weary bones under the Atlantic sun. We flirt with the idea of sending someone else in our place, let them take pictures in Africa while we chill in the shade of a palm tree. For instance, we could send Lau and Aiste – they seem to like the idea.
We’re finally setting off. We don’t make it too far. We stop in Tarife, where it’s more expensive to cross the “stream” with tickets bought on the spot than on the Internet. So we decide to cross on the Internet and make reservations for the next day, thinking we’re going to spend the night in Tarife. We find a camping area and we’re ready to leave, when it hits us: we had left our tents in Gibraltar; based on the information we had gathered the lodging is supposedly very cheap in Morocco and we can fit two bottles of water in the place of the tent. Now we’re thinking: do we need a tent to camp? Nooooooo. We would sleep in the bushes, but these bushes are also full of tourists. We have the sleeping bags, we have a tarp, so we put together a roof and settle down between two shrubs, in a camp site on the beach.
A cold bath, fried sardines, rolled jacket under your head, sleep. I sleep very poorly –I get bitten by all kinds of bugs despite the anti bug juice which seems to work for only a few hours. The kids in the tent next to us run around on their scooters until after midnight – maybe it would have been better to camp in the bushes after all.
04:40 The bearded one is snoring next to me, barricaded in his jacked and with the bike gloves on, to protect him against mosquitoes. I keep scratching and scratching. A huge black beast is crossing the camping spot next to us– maybe it’s looking for some lost souls to chew on while howling at the moon? It does not seem to care about us, maybe it’s the gas smell coming from the Kawasaki. It’s too close to the alarm going off thus it’s too late to even try to get some sleep, so it’s better to answer the daily emails and to look out for the ghosts of the night.
In the morning I find out that the totemic beast not only hovered around us, but it also paid us a visit: it slept between us!
Tomorrow it begins!
04:40 The bearded one is snoring next to me, barricaded in his jacked and with the bike gloves on, to protect him against mosquitoes. I keep scratching and scratching. A huge black beast is crossing the camping spot next to us– maybe it’s looking for some lost souls to chew on while howling at the moon? It does not seem to care about us, maybe it’s the gas smell coming from the Kawasaki. It’s too close to the alarm going off thus it’s too late to even try to get some sleep, so it’s better to answer the daily emails and to look out for the ghosts of the night.
In the morning I find out that the totemic beast not only hovered around us, but it also paid us a visit: it slept between us!
Tomorrow it begins!
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