Trial Trip Tangier

I'm off to Morocco!

Former colleague Keith is between contracts at the moment, and said he was up for a trial-run long-distance tour trip as long as we could go really soon. I found out recently that the Morocco/Algeria border is shut and so a trip across North Africa can't start from Gibraltar. Morocco has a number of interesting places to see, so it'd be a shame to miss.

So the idea of a trial-run trip via France and Spain to Morocco (and back) was born, and I'll be off next weekend.

Keith and I met yesterday for a "planning meeting" and had a late lunch at a pub near his house. A stream of hot-air balloons were being launched from the next field throughout our chat. I kicked myself for not bringing a camera.

We didn't get into lots of detail, but happily found that we agreed about a lot of things, such as making the journey down through France and Spain "part of the trip", going down slow and coming back fast, what balance there should be between camping and hotels, etc.

Morocco is an exciting prospect; it's an Islamic country and it'll be Ramadam for the whole time we're there, which will probably make eating and drinking rather more complicated.

We're off now to find good maps, ferry/eurostar costs, insurance implications, etc.
It's quite a thought that we'll be leaving this time next week!

Climate picture

As a way to work out the best (least bad) time to be in different parts of the world I was looking for an animation showing temperature and rainfall through the months of the year. Maybe it's out there, but I couldn't find it. So I made my own, combining images from earthobservatory.nasa.gov. Surprisingly, the most recent whole year for which they have both pictures is 2003!

I used my favourite image program IrfanView to manipulate the images and UnFREEz to animate the gif. Annoyingly, Google/Picasa won't seem to let me upload an animated gif, so it's on Flickr instead.

Nothing's Ever Simple

I spent yesterday evening with my cousin Stuart. He's travelled in South America twice, mainly by bicycle and bus, and from Turkey, through Iran, Pakistan and India to Nepal.

He gave me lots of good tips, including pointing out that Algeria might present problems. It turns out that, despite calls related to Mediterranean Union unity, the Morocco/Algeria land border has been closed since 1994 and looks set to remain closed.

That probably explains why Ewan and Charley went via Italy, Sicily and Tunisia.

He also told me that:
a) the tourist season in Chile is mainly November to April, outside of which one may have to user roads in Argentina rather than Chile and if you get stuck you'll have to wait longer for help (which screws up my planned trip timing).
b) Having visited India several times, most of the stuff I'm likely to want to see is up in the North, so I may have the opportunity to shorten my route.

Based on these, I've updated my planned route map yet again.