MADE TO DEFEND

#Landrover #Rangerover P38 In Africa. Thanks For Sharing The Story!

ricparuk:

Filling Up On The Edge Of The Desert In Morocco

I’ve recently found this photo on my phone that I’d forgotten about. I don’t like taking photos of the locals so took the opportunity to take a quick snap without drawing attention. There’s water everywhere as there was a serious storm the night before and this is first thing in the morning so it hasn’t had time to dry out yet, won’t be long though as the heat builds up quickly.

We’re just about to head into the Sahara for 3 days and needed to fill-up. Most of Morocco has standard service stations with the occasional manual winding on the side of a broken pump but otherwise a normal fuel filling experience.

In this photo we’re south of the Atlas mountains in the poorer area of Morocco and very near to the border with Algeria, utilities are intermittent at best, the hotel that we stayed in the previous night had water off most of the time due to the supply being redirected to the local military base.

The village is Mhammid and is pretty basic. I’m sat queuing for fuel, the Defender and Range Rover in front are in our group. The ‘Gasoil + Essence’ advertised on the sign was being dispensed round the back of the buildings on the right by 3 guys in a room, pumping the fuel by hand from barrels into a two jar measuring mechanism and it was a long process to fill us all up.

Payment was a bit random with no common language and a calculator that seemed to generate random numbers, not really sure how much fuel I got but it turned out to be enough for the three days as I didn’t run out of fuel, unlike some others in the group.

This adventure to Morocco was ran in April 2011 by Neil Hopkinson of Impala Adventures