Nice little beach trip
Picture the scene, Essaouira, Morocco, beautiful place. Not much to do though so we all (6 ppl) decide to do the nice beach walk as recommended in the guest book, takes about 5 hours but there are a couple of little towns on the way to stop at. Why not. Take camel-backs with water, but decide not to take food as we can stop at the towns.

30 mins in, and one couple has to turn back due to one of them getting sand rash...hindsight says lucky cow.

Me, o/h and other couple decide to carry on.

Four hours in, no bloody little towns, no food, all knackered and wondering where the hell we were (no map due to instruction "just follow the beach"). See small dot on the horizon at the top of a large hill that looks like civilisation "woo-de-hoo" home safe...no, no, it's an abandoned bloody lighthouse. Four and a half hours of walking dressed for the beach (i.e. flipflops and ballet pumps), no clue where we were, no mobile signal. Crap.

Carry on walking in the same general direction which takes us across 30 foot sand dunes and dessert, in which I mean wasteland, rocky ground, couple of half dead shrubs, no wildlife apart from a few funny looking flies. Start to panic, just a little bit.

Another hour or so and several desert like hills later, we reach a crest and see, low and behold a REAL town! Well, I say see; we had to squint.

Down another hill we go and back onto the beach for another two hours of misery as we get blasted by sand (it’s not called Windy city Africa for nothing) and most of our skin is separated from legs (and other exposed body parts).

Get to the town seven and a half hours after departure to find out that we had walked over 20 miles.

Got a taxi back.

*pop*
Apologies for length - it's nerves
(!sis, Mon 11 Sep 2006, 13:48, Reply)