Month: January 2018

We checked out after a good night sleep at the Marriott Hotel and headed for the first race destination in Morocco, Midelt. During the previous day, Bjørn has been getting a cold and has gotten fever and we are still having some issues with the car. The plan was to arrive early in Midelt to fix this. After a little while we started the climb through the Middle Atlas range, and was this a surprise?

During the last evening when we experienced rain in Fes, the mountains had been transformed into winter wonderlands. Imagine then all the local cars that are only having summer tires.

This meant that the roads were closed, and we tried different routes. This picture is taken by a road block in Ifrane. Rumours say that The modern town of Ifrane was established by the French administration in 1928 during the protectorate era for their administration due to its Alpine climate. Ifrane was conceived as a “hill station” or colonial type of settlement. It is a resort town set high up in the mountains so that Europeans can find relief from the summer heat of tropical colonies.
Anyhow we couldn’t get through and headed in another direction to see if this road was open. Here we had to stay for 40 minutes while the road was being prepared.
Finally we got through.

This road took us through the famous cedar forest of the Barbary macaques monkeys.

We drove on, and climbed even higher to above 2000m. This started to look more an more like home, and the Hardanger mountain passes of Norway.

At three o’clock the car was parked outside the Hotel, with snow and rain. Even if this should have been a short trip, truly we are getting surprises all the time.

The next camps are going to be purely camping, so no updates from us then.

NB: I forgot to start the tracker in Fes. That is why there is a gap in the map.
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Since we completed the Marathon in record time, we suddenly got an extra day in Morocco. We quickly decided to have this extra day in Africa, then instead staying in Europe. The ferry took across the Mediterranean sea to the Spanish enclave of Melilla at 0600 am.

It was a chaos at the border, but after approximately after one hour we were through both border control and customs. The Moroccans (especially the officials) have been nothing but nice and helpful. In Nador we filled up with diesel, got some money and headed out towards the sea and FES. This was a short but exiting detour to our first destination which was Midelt.

Stopping for some breakfast

We stopped for some breakfast after a little while. Seems like a beach house that is more active during summer. Here we had an egg, bread and cheese.

Going just some kilometres we had another stop at a marked. It looked liked you basically could buy almost everything you needed, and probably a lot was imported from Spain. They had live chickens, fish, fruit, bread, tools, hardware, utensils, clothes and whatever. This was actually quite fun just go around a look. Of course we didn’t go out empty-handed. We bought toilet paper, bread and the best Fina (Norwegian: Klementiner) ever. We bought a plastic bag full of them.

The trip went further towards the Er-Rif mountains and the road towards Fes. The trip took us from sea level to 1700 meters and newly snow. A dreadful weather had just passed in front of us, since we encountered trees that had fallen across the road, mud and gravel that had been carried along with water and streams.

Coming closer to Fes (which is still above 1000m), we came over several markets and some interesting passengers.

The time spent driving took a lot longer than planned, and we arrived in Fes in rain. Going camping was not something we voted over, and it seemed risky to just park the car anywhere. Therefor we came to the conclusion that a finally good night sleep would be a welcoming thing and stayed at the Marriott Hotel in Fes.

Some of us kind of collapsed on the bed immediately.In the background you can see one of the caretakers fixing the door handle that just fell of. It was a very nice stay that recharged our batteries.

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We are now official in Morocco where we are to be in Midelt tomorrow night. We have had som strict instructions to all participants that we are now longer allowed to post near real-time position updates for security reasons. In addition I’m out of Mobile Data in like 5 minutes driving off the ferry in Melilla. Maybe I can reach out to my work collegues to see if they can do something about that?

Anyhow, we are safe and very comfortable tonight in a world class hotell finally being able to have a good night sleep.

This is the route we took from Budapest to Almeria i Spain.

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The crazy marathon driving from Budapest is nearing an end. We are estimating to arrive at the ferry terminal taking us to Morocco in 3 hours. The race through Spain has been awesome. Newer been in this part of the Country before and really want to come back and explore the history of this region. The weather has been magnificent with a now 12’C temperature outside and sun.

Good morning everyone. We have been driving through the night and are nearly in Spain. It’s chaos in France close to the Spanish border. Lucky that we just had a technical stop.

The time is 04:10 and we just passed into France. We have been driving for 13,5 hours since the start in Budapest. Average speed is 91 km/h and distance covered is 1243 km. It is a shame that we are not able to see more of this magnificent part of Europe as it is pitch black.

Then we are in Italy. Mama Mia!

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We are out of Hungary, and Just passed the border to Slovenia. Everything is running smoothly.

The actual start was captured on go-pro and camera. Sorry that I wasn’t able to hold my phone as well. We’ll update the blog with the start later when we will have a break. It was flames and fury!

The goal is to leave Budapest, drive out of Hungary and through Slovenia to Italy, then France through the night. We have 48 hours to get to southern part of Spain driving over 3000 kilometres.