Josh & Penny have 3 kids and miss being able to travel!
We flew from Casablanca to Dubai and arrived in the UAE at about 2am. When we originally moved our flight we assumed that we’d be able to find something reasonably priced in terms of accommodation but we had not taken into account the dsf…
We were expecting our bus to Casablanca to take a whole day, maybe 7 or 8 hours, but it only took 5, for which we were extremely grateful… Now I’m going to be honest with you… This is going to be a pretty short entry. Most people will tell you, if they have been here…
The bus ride from Fez to Chefchaouen was fairly uneventful….the usual lunch stop in the middle of nowhere where you can’t quite figure out what there is to eat but you know that there must be something because there’s men carrying around giant cow ribcages.
So having just made our bus to Marrakech by 5 minutes we were feeling pretty good… Our series of on the fly decisions and last minute departures and arrivals seemed to have worked out perfectly and we both lay back in our chairs to enjoy the ride, each of us separately dreaming about how awesome…
To get to Dade’s gorge we had to take a bus from Ouarzazate to a place called Boulmane De Dades, and from there, a grand taxi into the gorge and the village of Ait Oudinar.
The next day we made our way from our hotel, which was twenty minutes by taxi from Ouarzazate, into the city itself to find the bus station, but before we do that, we wanted to share this photo we forgot to include yesterday: Anyway, our lonely planet city map was, as always, completely inaccurate and…
(Sorry for the delay, we’ve been away from internet for a while…) Our next day of driving took us through the desert towards Erg Chigaga – a 40km stretch of towering sand dunes in the Sahara. We had originally planned to visit Erg Chebbi, a beautiful and more accessible collection of Saharan dunes, but also…
We left Tafraoute early in the morning via 4wd and made our way through the desert to the south…
Once we got off the Tafraoute bus, we stood around waiting for our bags and I was icily rude to the tout who was asking me about what accommodation we were staying in (obviously planning to tell me it’s full/burnt down/infested with rats and take me to his cousin’s hotel).
We left Marrakesh early this morning and we spent the entire day on the bus. It was a CTM bus which is the Moroccan equivalent of grayhound so it was quite comfortable. Unfortunately that means there were no chickens, goats or otherwise interesting stories… It doesn’t make for very exciting reading so thought I’d use…
There was no heating. But I’m probably getting ahead of myself. My wife likes to encourage us to eat organic, try vegan/vegetarian cafes when we see them and visit the occasional Eco retreat, which is my fault really because I took her to one for our first new years eve together. My mother, bless her…
I can now confirm that if we hadn’t got a guide for our hard core hike, our frozen skeletons would definitely have been discovered weeks later. Instead, our warm bodies were sitting in front of the fire that night at the guesthouse, eating delicious tagines and chatting with the other travellers.
As much as we loved Marrakesh – and there really is nothing like it – we were pretty excited to get out of the city and get some peace and fresh air in the High Atlas Mountains. Our plan to get there seemed fairly straightforward… get a taxi to the bus station to buy our…
So for day two in Marrakech we decided to visit some of the historical highlights of the old kasbah, which turned out to be a very short walk from our riad. Kasbahs (for those that don’t know) were the fortified quarters for the royal family and their guards, designed to be easily defended in the…
So after a mammoth thirty hours of travel we arrived in Marrakesh.. Adelaide to Dubai was the easy bit, although our plane was delayed and nearly missed the take off curfew… Dubai to Casablanca was slightly irritating as we had some turdy kids behind us kicking the chairs the whole time and we’re too polite…
So we leave for Morocco in exactly 48 hours and I’m still waiting for my bag to pack itself. Once we get there (via Dubai), I expect our posts will be far more exciting and action packed. If we stop writing suddenly, it just means we have been kidnapped so please send money urgently… also…
So we’re back in Australia and planning our next trip. I’m just anal retentive and need the blog equivalent of a full stop. Thanks to everyone for reading… hope you enjoyed it.
I had done the research on activities in Mulu National Park a couple of months ago, so my recollection of the Garden of Eden walk was along the lines of “cave….walking….beautiful….something…..isolated….swimming”. It all sounded very nice and I was determined to do something great since we’d come all the way to Mulu.
Back in Sandakan the next afternoon, we hadn’t showered for three days and I was feeling a little fragile after trying to combine boat trips, hikes and shared toilets with food poisoning. So we booked into a nice hotel…it was only $50 per night but it felt incredibly luxurious. We commented at least a dozen times to each…
Now I have some computer access, I’m going to take you back in time to Uncle Tan’s jungle camp. After we’d seen the proboscis monkeys and orangutans in their sanctuaries, this was our chance to see them in the wild (as tiny pinpricks in the distance, most likely, but in the wild nonetheless). We were…