Camera: Canon EOS 1Ds MKIII
Lens: Canon EF 16-35 mm. f/4.0L IS

Upon approaching the bridge across the wadi I could easily tell that many things were out of the ordinary today. The bridge that normally runs above and across it connecting the two banks of the wadi was submerged under a constant flow of water, mud and debris. Old cars and beat-up lorries were parked allover the place on each side of the wadi in a chaotic mess. Local Moroccans stood speechless and stared in awe in the now very heavy downpour, a state of mind that seemed so distant from their usual loud and gesticulating behavior. Everything were certainly far from being normal today. Traffic had come to a hold, only a single lorry passed the flooded bridge, giving us the opportunity to establish that it seemed that the tarmac on the submerged bridge was still there. So we those to cross it.

These last three days getting out of the Western Sahara and back north into Morocco has certainly been a bit different, not much has really passed as planed.
The other day, on the first of the last three, we begun the day by driving on the Atlantic coastal road, in sunshine and fine weather, and made a lunch-break in a nice spot only a stone-throw from the ocean, under a blue sky with a few scattered clouds. After that memory it all is a bit blurred to me, I did not bring a GPS or other logging device with me, and I apparently have lost track of in which order we did overnight camp. My best guess on the order of event will be that after the lunch at the sea, in nice conditions, it all got very wet with another passover from some heavy rainclouds. We had a long day on tarmac going north, and the weather were really awful for the rest of the day. And so we all agreed to spend the first night on this entire trip in a camping-ground and not wild-camp. The camping-ground in the northern outskirts of Marrakesh where naturally pretty much flooded with water from the rain.

But for the first time, in almost three weeks, we all sat indoors sheltered from the outside at a table and had a nice dinner served for us. We all enjoyed this precious moment, and the luxurious shelter from the rain. The next morning gifted us with a few hours without rain, and it mainly stayed dry for as long as after midday. In the late afternoon we reached the piste leading to the classic Plage Blanche drive. Again we would learn that rainfall on theses grounds in Morocco will leave them wet and slippery for a very long period of time. We struggled on the muddy piste in order to make good progress towards Plage Blanche, but then suddenly the piste disappeared, the heavy rainfall had simply washed it away, leaving just a deep wound in the terrain. Our only option were to head up the valley from where the water had rushed, to try to find a passage towards the beach, not an easy task in the dull grey weather with such poor contrast.

After some time we had to quit, darkness crept in on us and we had to make camp for the night. We would not have enough time to get onto the beach and make camp there. I had spotted a potential crossing when we drove into the valley, and I suggested to Paul that we could head that way to scout while the others set up camp for the night. We would try to establish if it would be possible to get onto the beach the following day, or if we simply had to backtrack to the tarmac we had left earlier.

After a windy night we woke to a cloudy morning with scattered rainfall. We made it out of camp early and followed our own tracks back to tarmac. Reaching Plage Blanche would be a risky adventure, and most likely an impossible mission. When driving on tarmac we later crossed the wadi that runs all the way down to the beach where you would have to cross it to get onto Plage Blanche, we could see that we had made the right call, the wadi had risen way above its banks. For the rest of the day we drove in heavy rainfall, through flooded villages, on flooded roads and over flooded bridges. The only luck we really had was to get onto some stretches of road just in time before they were closed by the police and military because of the substantial flooding.

Our last wild-camp in Morocco was supposed to be at the beach-break from the Atlantic Ocean, some two hours driving from Tanger Med. Again we did not make it to the beach, the gravel-road leading down to it was to soaked and muddy that we had to turn around and make camp in a small quarry. The night-sky were again filled with clouds and we had some scattered rainfall before calling it an early night. On the last day in Morocco most of the travel-party were eager to get out of camp, so we left camp early and headed towards Spain and Ceuta. When we reached the border-crossing the sky had again regained its blue color, and temperatures had risen to a more normal level. We were blessed with a taste of summer while waiting for the ferry that would bring us back to Algeciras and Europe.
Its strange how a few hours with sunshine and blue skies quickly will make you forget three days of rain, that´s one of the nicer gifts that modern homo sapiens has.