Just in time for Christmas, Xin Hui and I have published the collected blog entries from the Morocco Hitch. The book includes entirely new material and previously unseen photos and maps, all in a neat little pocket-sized paperback!

Priced at just US$9.99, it's a wonderful gift for yourself, or the perfect stocking stuffer for your friends and family. Re-live once again our zany adventure, with all the crazy truckers, language confusion, and hours of standing by the roadside in the driving rain. Laugh and cry with us as we make our way across Europe, trusting our fates to chance, and experience once again our triumph as we wash up on the shore of Tangiers, bedraggled and exhausted but gloriously alive.

The profits of this book will go to the charity that benefited from our hitch, Link Community Development.

Thanks again to everyone who supported us!

Summer came and went. Despite a couple of malaria scares and a yeast infection, I was in decently good health after returning from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. On my return to England, the Hitch seemed more and more like a very real part of my Easter vacation.

Filling out the paperwork necessary to register for the Hitch, I discovered that one of Link’s terms for signing up for the Hitch was that each group of hitchers had to have at least one member who was male. I could not hitch-hike to Morocco with Rachel after all. Attempts to convince male friends to embark on this adventure with me were abortive – the prospect of spending a week sleeping rough and being at the mercy of the trucker world did not appeal.

Thankfully, P.J. solved my problem for me. On hearing about the Hitch and the possibility of my wandering the Continent with some other fellow, he offered to accompany me. To be exact, he forbade me to go on the Hitch with anyone other than himself. I accepted.

The rest, as they say, is what you have just read in this book/blog. I think I made the right choice.

Thank you so much for your support, for helping us raise a grand total of £2055 and for being there with us all the way in spirit.

For example, the first night we spent squeezed into the lower bunk of Eduardo’s cab, which was our first night on the continent. The previous night, spent on the cross-Channel ferry, was no different to any other night we’d endured on public transport over the years, but the second night was different. It was our first night on the road, at the mercy of someone else’s hospitality, in an unknown and uncertain location, far away from the world we knew. I was wedged up against the wall, and Xin Hui was curled up against me. As Eduardo slumbered on the bunk above us, Xin Hui and I whispered to each other. I remember the smell of her hair, the sound of her breathing, her warmth against my body in the cold cab, the dim glow of the lights outside peeking through the curtains, the breeze from the air ventilation system (and later of Eduardo poking at the switches with a stick so that he wouldn’t need to get out of bed to turn it off), and most of all the nervous thrill of excitement that had taken grip of my stomach and settled down to nest. It stayed there, ebbing and flowing as the trip went on, but never leaving till a few days after we reach Morocco, when it finally sank in that we were under our own power again. Perhaps it was the fear of the unknown, the thrill of adventure, and the excitement of travel, which heightened my senses that first night, but I remember it the most vividly of all our nights.

The other memory which comes back to me when I think of the trip is of the very last day, of that fateful morning when I made such a huge mistake of forgetting that my phone was not set to Western European time. The lowest point was not when I realised my mistake, nor when I ran to the service station and found Sayid gone, nor when I screamed my anger into the cold morning sky. It was a while later, in Seville, when the DHL truck dropped us too close to the city centre, and we were stuck for ages at a petrol station, and no one would take us further onward to a service station. I spent half that morning approaching people out of sheer desperation, and at my lowest ebb I sat down outside the station and buried my head in my arms, as anger and frustration threatened to overwhelm me. That was when I felt Xin Hui sit down beside me, put her arms around me and lean her head on my shoulder. She gently told me that it was okay, that she wasn’t blaming me, that I shouldn’t be angry at myself, that everything would be alright and we’d make it to Morocco.

I’d like to say I believed her then, but I didn’t. I didn’t believe her for a long time afterward. I suffered through more anger and disgust at myself for another half a day. But until that moment I had been at my lowest ebb, the very nadir of my emotions, and I was drowning in the waves of my own self-loathing. She reached down and took me by the hand and gave me strength to look up again. Her belief in me reminded me of who I was and what I was capable of. Sometime later – it might have been five seconds, it might have been five minutes – I got back on my feet and started moving again.

When I think about the Morocco Hitch it’s not the successful end I remember. It’s the moments of great emotion, where things were most frightening and fearful and uncertain. It was those moments which made the trip worthwhile, which taught me the most about myself and which revealed the most about the relationship between Xin Hui and myself. Sometimes all you need is for someone to believe in you, and sometimes wanting to succeed because you love someone else and want to repay their faith and trust in you can give you strength that you didn’t have.

"Talc is cheap."

To shoot that scene, Steven Spielberg had to have every single television antenna in sight removed from the top of the square buildings. Beneath my feet, as I stood above another medieval city, like a mottled growth upon the fondouks, were hundreds of satellite dishes, their smooth, white plates provided texture to the white buildings they adorned.

That image helps give one an idea of what Fes actually is: a living, breathing, medieval city, where many people today live and work amidst the exact same buildings which were used by their ancestors 700 years ago. In fact, the internet cafe where I'm writing this is located in a building inside the Medina. Several hundred years ago, it was probably a residence of some artisan and his family, but the same building today connects me with the modern world. Outside, donkeys and mules continue to be used to move goods around within the cramped streets of the city (no more than a metre or two wide), and an extensive and ancient network of public fountains continues to bring drinking water to the residents. Inside, people are watching Al-Jazeera via satellite and sipping tea imported from China mixed with mint and sugar. I saw the interior of one such home- all the modern conveniences had to be retrofitted onto the walls. Exposed wiring and piping was everywhere. A traditional structure had been reconverted into a modern home, but the family continued to live around a central courtyard, eating the same couscous and stew of their tradition. Outside, the air in the labyrinthine streets is thick with spices, oil, smoke, the smell of manure and dust. I've never seen such a juxtaposition of old and new, and I continue to marvel as every turn introduces a new piece of living history.

If there's a downside, it's that the extremely cramped nature of the city means that you can't appreciate anything at a distance. High walls block your view of the interior of many interesting buildings, and as they are usually right up against all the buildings around it, you can never see the full extent of any building. Since they are usually of religious significance, you can't go in, or are restricted to a few areas.

Xin Hui and I had dinner last night on the rooftop terrace of our budget hotel, located near Bab Boujeloud (one of the gates to the Medina), above one of the most touristy areas of the Medina; a place crammed with food stalls and backpacker hotels. The Hotel Cascade, where we are staying, has the excellent advantage of having a high roof, and so it's great to sit up there and eat or drink, as you can gaze at the city stretching away beyond the gate. A cold wind was blowing in from the North, and traditional music wafted up from the street as we sat there with our glasses of hot Moroccan tea, looking down at the bustling street below, tourists and hawkers and locals and hustlers, and lights dotting the city, and we felt a small bit of connection with a world far removed in time but intimately present in space.

"You made it!" he exclaimed in French. He said something else about the port that I couldn't catch. "Weren't we meeting at 5 o'clock?" he asked. Xin Hui tried to explain to him what happened, but he didn't look as if he understood. I tried miming to him that it was my fault, but I wasn't sure if he got it.

Still, he was clearly glad to see us, and he congratulated us for completing our quest. We shook hands and bid each other good luck and farewell.

It may seem an amazing coincidence for us to cross paths again with him on a random city street in Tangier, but this trip has been filled with so many coincidences- good and bad- that somehow when I think about it I am not that surprised. Probably more than anything else, this trip has really showed me how life always constantly throws up new and unexpected twists and turns, and in the words of Tony, the laid-backed Australian driver who took us from Seville to the E5 coastal road just past Cadiz, "Whatever happens in life- just go with it." Perhaps it was no coincidence that Tony himself appeared when I was at my lowest ebb, full of anger and frustration with myself. His wise words will not be forgotten.

and

2 ferries later...

WE'RE IN MOROCCO!!!

A big thank you to everyone who made it possible to be here, especially Kate and everyone at Link Community Development, our Nominated Contacts, our parents and families, everyone who donated to our trip, to all the nice people who helped us and showed us so much kindness, and of course our drivers, wherever they may be by now. A special thank you to Mairin Hennebry for responding to my panicked phone call asking how to write "service station" in Spanish. All of you have helped make a big difference in the lives of many children in Southern Africa, and to the lives of two idiots from Singapore.

I'd like to sing Xin Hui's praises: she was a rock throughout this trip. While I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and alternately laughed and raged and hoped and worried and got depressed, she stayed steady and calm and kept us going. All credit to her: she was the one who really made this trip a success.

The hitch may be over but the adventure continues. We'll be writing backdated entries, along with reflections and thoughts on the trip, plus new entries on our adventures in Morocco. Keep checking in!

Just outside Seville, we met a very progressive Aussie chaperoo who said this about himself “Yeah, the Missus works and I make sure she’s got dinner when she gets home...she allowed me to come on this trip...she’s paying for it...whatever happens in life, just go with it.” This cool cucumber even went out of his way to drop us at a gasolinera on the E5 to Algeciras even though he was on the way to Cadiz around 100 km in the opposite direction. I reckon that wife of his has got to be some woman.

Because Tony is one lucky guy in more ways than one, we got our next hitch straightaway from a Spanish guy and his girlfriend on their way to the beach. This surfer dude had just returned from a month in Morocco and was familiar with the perils – and frustrations – of hitch-hiking. “Autostop? I have done many myself.” We bade him farewell at the point the road forked – one branch leading to Barbate, the other to Algeciras.

The next hitch was less forthcoming, and the two of us starting prancing about on the road to try to attract the attention of drivers – this greatly amused passing beachgoers.

One of these was a drop-dead gorgeous German girl with matching turquoise top, slippers, yoga mat and shiny new Fiat (we later found out she’d rented the car for her holiday). Her name was Julia, and she just so happened to be a fashion writer for German Vogue and a self-confessed semi-permanent resident of Ibiza when not covering catwalk shows. Incidentally, she’d never picked up hitchhikers in her life before us, but had seen us from across the road, and observing that we weren’t exactly basking in the glorious sunshine of southern Spain, had decided to offer us a ride to Tarifa where her hotel was. You might have noticed that up to this point, we’d been bent on getting to Algeciras – it is, after all, the point on the Spanish coast favoured by truckers crossing the Mediterranean sea into Morocco. As we cruised along the road to the coast, Julia languidly lifted her hand from the steering wheel to point at a billboard slowly coming into view, “Algeciras is very ugly, why not come to Tarifa instead? There’s even a ferry to Tangier, it only takes 35 minutes...” Suddenly, it all clicked: until very recently, only EU citizens were permitted to journey to Morocco via Tarifa, so we hadn’t known about this route. In addition, our trucker friends knew the trucker routes best. If we got to the port in time for the ferry, we’d be in Tangier by sundown – after a journey that would be almost 2 hours shorter than that originating from Algeciras. This we did, somehow, from a port almost as beautiful as the girl who drove us to it.

I’d like to think that getting lost is half the adventure.

Credit to Julia, a nice German lady heading to Tarifa who picked us up. She told us about the ferry and one quick check of the internet later, here we go: endgame!

We got picked up by a young Spanish couple heading for the beach. The man had been to Morocco many times, most recently last year, and recalled many people hitch-hiked there.

They dropped us off just before the turn to Barbate, where they were headed. There's a roadside restaurant here. We're stopping to have lunch, 68 km from Algeciras.

There are ostriches behind the restaurant. I ordered ostrich meat but I was told they had none. I guess they don't want to kill these guys.

So close now...

Proper Bed Count: 1

Why Nissan Micras? Maybe we're a bit like the autistic child Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - we seek to order our experience of the endless stream of traffic by the number of familiar cars we see. Like Christopher and his four red cars, we think of them as a good omen - we always get a ride after we see a Micra, never mind that we sometimes need to wait seven hours for it.

A toast to our favourite car!

Thanks to my incompetence, the adventure continues.

The transition between France and Spain was not immediately discernible – we whiled away a lazy afternoon in the border town of Irún getting a kick continually running over the line dividing the two countries. Excerpts: “now we’re in France, now Spain, now France, no Spain, France-Spain-France-Spain......wait, which side am I on now?” Sometimes you’ve just got to find some way to keep yourself going.

Before long though, the delicate chansons give way to the raucous rhythms of the south, spice assails your palate at dinner (even in trucker food) and the soil acquires a more crimson hue. Our mustachioed trucker friend who drove us from Burgos to Madrid started dancing with his mates when we stopped for the night at the Autogrill, flashing us a toothy grin each time he caught our eye.

You can feel the heat in the architecture, too – flatter roofs, reflective white, strategically placed windows and courtyards, or through the extravagant eye make-up of practically every female on the screen (oh, and did I mention the eyebrow-raising frequency they manage to find excuses for aforementioned kohl-adorned females to nonchalantly strip off their clingy tops on national television?)

Spain just smoulders with flavour, whether you’re bumping along the mountain roads of Castilla-La Mancha, walking on the trails of Inquisitors and Conquistadors in Castilla y León, taking in the majesty of the sierras of the Basque country, marvelling at the lavish silent processions of the hermandad at Easter or downing that extra cup of water after that very salty bacalao.

We’ve been here longer than we’d wanted to be, but boy do I already want to come back for more.