A night to remember...

We had a good night of sleep at the Apartment-club. We had quite a few things we wanted to fix before we left the camp... Repacking the car so it is more balanced was not a small task. The area around our car looked like an disorganized landfill. We took of the wheel to angle-grind the wheel-arch. I got quite a few looks and people taking my picture as I was angle-grinding in my suit, top-hat and expedition sun-glasses. All this messing about made us rather late out of camp.

Another day of driving trough Morocco - still not quite used to people who do not seem to care if you crash into them, their car, their donkey or their entire family. It is also interesting to see the volume of the loads some of the cars are able to put on top of their cars and trucks. Often stacked twice as high as the truck itself. We also stocked up on some alcohol - a greek lady had an entire bar filled with the stuff. It was somewhat expensive but we got some beer and a bottle of rum.

We went up into the Atlas mountains. Now the fun really started. The hearse climbing up hairpin turns like a champ. It did not have the acceleration of the Honky Tonk car, but really showed of as the little hearse that could. Well, actually it was the rather huge hearse that could - get up the narrow mountain passes. The road was not always there. Either the asphalt had been chewed away by nature making it a whole lot worse than anything we had encountered so far or it had been dug away by road workers. I got to say that I got more and more impressed by the performance of the hearse.

We stopped by a very high waterfall with a fall of 110m as light was fading away. We had still most of the stage left before we could go to sleep in camp. We decided to eat some local food at a local restaurant. Clay cocked lamb and chick stew. It was delicious. There was a guy selling different trinkets and clothes right next to the restaurant - Kristian and Per, and some of Honky Tonk ended up buying some headscarf-thingies - getting the real beduin look and getting ready for the sahara.

The road took us on a real good climb. All together that day we climbed up over 6000m according to our GPS. At what we thought was the highest point in the mountain we released some chinese lanterns - colored paper mini hot air balloons. They drifted of into the distance as some UFOs.

We got to camp some time after 3AM. The drive trough the mountains had taken its toll on us all. There was little time to sleep so we set up camp real quick. This was the first test-run of our tent-on-top-of-coffin-rack. That part worked out fine. Kristian was too tired to make a real bed in the car and crashed in the back seet. Me and Per got up on top of the car and went to sleep. We soon realized that it was way to cold. Our sleeping bags were just not hot enough. Per ended up retreating into the cabin of the car while I opted for an lot of extra clothes. My clothes were in my bag, which was in strapped in at the back of the car. I finally got the bag out in the darkness, but in the process I also got our table out. When I tried to force it back in a huge chunk of it broke loose. And as it fell out again the tray or beer fell down and hit something sharp - causing one of the bears to rupture and make a nice beer fountain all over the stuff we keep in the back of the car. I really could not do anything but start laughing like a mad man by my self. In the dark. Behind the car... After that I got back up into the cold tent and finally fell asleep - rather exhausted.