Hitchhiking to Morocco: Day seven
Seven = Heaven?
Okay, I don’t want to give the end of the story away, but I worry that I am way too good a writer and by now everyone who has read the last post has assumed Tom and I to be dead. We aren’t dead.
But waking up from a rather awful sleep, to the sound of heavy rain, the knowledge that Doritos and oranges were all we had to eat still, and the prospect of having to try to hitchhike or else go through another day like yesterday, was almost enough to kill us both off. The morning came way too quickly and these were the realities we had to face sooner rather than later. What a cruel cruel world. Besides, walking as far as yesterday would now be even harder due to:
- The immense amount of mud this rain blanket had created.
- Our malnutritioned and underfed bodies, subsisting on crap and vitamin C.
- The fact that now our spines were contorted beyond recognition by the boulders we had slept on and around.
Wearily we arose, and had the joy of packing away a tent in pouring rain, stowing it in our waterproof bags to make sure every single one of our possessions within, dry and protected from the elements, was as sodden and soaked as the ground and the tent and ourselves.
As many people do in the morning, I went to the toilet. Within a few seconds, Tom came pounding on the door screaming out that we had got a lift! THANK GOD! Normally I would pull up my trousers, I would do up my fly — but a large jumper covers a multitude of sins, so I leapt up and flew to Tom and our anonymous hero, that was how desperate and how grateful I as to leave this god forsaken place.
He didn’t speak a word of English, but he did take us to a place where we managed to get a lift reasonably quickly — mostly because Tom stood in the rain and looked as miserable as he felt, with lorries hurling past spraying waves of filthy motorway runoff water into his face, whilst I stood under some shelter with the bags. A couple pulled up, upon seeing a saturated Tom, and I swung both bags upon my shoulders, leapt over a ditch and lurched across the motorway straight into their backseat. Their car was customised with multicoloured pin-tacks all over the ceiling and walls.
Once again, we were left in a “really good spot for hitchhiking” — this has almost never worked out for us. This particular shithole town involved, once again, traipsing to the outskirts to find a motorway entrance. After hours in the rain we got a lift. Absolutely hours. It was grey and freezing and when we did get that lift it was only to a slightly more out-of-town motorway entrance. It was beginning to feel way too much like a less sunny, and therefore potentially even worse, yesterday. WHY DID WE EVER CHOOSE TO DO THIS?! HOW CAN WE END THIS SUFFERING!?!?
Again, we spent ages in the rain. We broke up the time by eating the last of our oranges, and crying. Well, I cried. I couldn’t tell if Tom was crying because my eyes were puffed up and besides, it was still pouring with rain.
But, eventually, a Spanish lady pulled over, and low and behold, she was going all the way to the ferry crossing place. We spent the first 30 minutes or so in silence, literally trying to stop crying and shivering — I think we were really shell-shocked. But though she didn’t have a word of English, through repetitive use of the word “loco” we described our journey to her in the best Spanish and sign-language we could. She laughed and cried in all the right places, and she shook her motherly, loving head and rolled her wise, knowing eyes at our youthful stupidity. Upon relieving ourselves of the tale of our epic adventure, she shook her head and said that she had picked us up because we looked so sad and desperate — and now she knew why.
So we did it. We did pay for ferry tickets, but there is no way that I think of that as cheating — it had been a horrible 36 hours, and a long week of being cold, wet, smelly and homeless. We were happy to buy tickets, even though at 35 euros each, they cost more than the entire week’s worth of food and accommodation and all other expenses had so far. It was money well spent.
Time for a holiday.
