Thursday 16 February 2006

Day Five – Of Mules and Men


Another five hours or so of amiable ambling to the village of Tagmout, where we’re again sleeping on the floor in a village house. Rumours of a potential shower facility persist.

Now, before you start thinking that we’re too intrepid doing this, I should perhaps point out that we’re fairly nesh when it comes down to it and have rather a lot of support. In fact, we’re travelling through the mountains with almost enough people to put together two football teams. First, there are the two guides: tour leader Mohamed and Abdou, who speaks more French than English and giggles like a schoolboy or sings fluting love songs in Arabic as he hops down the rocks like a mountain goat. Then there are the seven muleteers (including the aptly named Mr Happy, Mohamed Ali and the improbably named Lovely Jubbly) and nine mules. The Mules carry all the tents and food (including the large kitchen and mess tents), overtake us after a couple of hours on the trail, and by the time we’re at the next camp site we find our tents set up for ourselves in a long line and the only thing we have to do is watch which one Big Chris heads for and scrabble to get as far away from him as possible.

Big Chris; now there’s a subject. Several passports and more scams going that a Marrakech market trader, he was approaching his pension and, as far as we could work out, trekking round the world courtesy of the DSS and several secret bank accounts in Miami. He also snored like a 747 taking off. Hence the scrabble.

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