Pre-Africa thoughts and ideas
We’re done with the Gulf now, so Africa it is. All things going well, we plan to spend four months in Africa, visiting three countries in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) and four in West Africa (Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger). And Dad, not a single one of these is even on the Australian government’s list of countries that should be avoided! Yemen was, though; lucky you didn’t pick that up before we went…
Anyway, each of these countries was colonised by France at some point, so it’s just as well one of us speaks French (a hint in case you don’t know: it’s not me).
Our very first African plan was to travel across North Africa, from Cairo to Tangier, but the back-and-forth, will-they-won’t-they visa game the US and Libya are playing with each other become too much and we had to scuttle it (Long story short: Libya is not giving visas to Americans at the moment because the US has delayed the opening of its embassy in Tripoli). A similar game exists for both of us for Algeria, for which you are supposed to get visas in your ‘home’ country. So we’ll try at the neighbouring capitals and see how we go – if we can’t get in, we’ll need to think of Plan C! So, after dropping Libya and adding some West African countries, we had planned to fly from Dubai to Senegal. But spending less time in Oman changed everything. By a fortunate fluke, our Dubai-Dakar flight was with Royal Air Maroc and had a stopover in Casablanca, Morocco. We managed to move the first leg forward and the second leg back, so now we’ll begin our Africa trip with four weeks in Morocco.
As you know if you’ve been following my travels from the beginning, I’ve been to Morocco before. But how long ago that seems now… It was July 2001 – I was 21, I’d never left the First World (and even then had only ever been to four countries outside Australia), barely knew what Islam was, and generally didn’t have much of a clue. I stayed for a week and was fascinated by the place but it was also a bit much for me at the time and I remember remarking that I didn’t want to return anytime soon. Things have certainly changed since then, and now Morocco seems like exactly the kind of place that I would love. Wendy also went to Morocco around the same time I did and stayed only a bit longer, remembers a bit more, and had a bit more of a clue, than me, so she’s keen to go back as well. And with that, Africa beckons! Some of the things I’m most looking forward to are: imperial cities in Morocco, Roman ruins in North Africa, mud-brick mosques in West Africa, animals in Senegal and Niger, and Saharan landscapes just about everywhere.
Tags: Africa, Morocco, planning, Travel
Nick