Very cool trip report!
Back from Africa – Day 6 – Weather Hold in Marrakech
Today the weather was too bad over the Strait of Gibraltar to fly to Spain from Morocco. And as Marrakech is a very nice destination, we decided to stay here. So no flying pictures or stories today. We spent the whole day sauntered into the old city (Medina): walking through the souks, the Madrasa and visit the photography museum, again get lost in the souks, eat tagine, visit Jardin Majorelle … A wonderfully exotic city and therefore so glad we got stuck.
For more photos and story:
see http://www.abeam.be/back-from-africa-day-6-weather-hold-in-marrakesh/
I’ve also already chatted with that friendly controller in the tower in Er-Rachidia – must be the same one. Actually the Saudis go Falcon hunting, but they don’t hunt the Falcons, they use them for hunting.
That’s a really great report and lots of good photos!
Actually one big lesson I learnt was to do what you are doing: write it as you are going along. If one leaves it until one has returned, it usually doesn’t happen 
A number of people from here have been down to Africa, especially the west coast, but not so many have written about it.
@Peter: I wrote a whole book about it that is available on Amazon.com
Flying in Africa is really great and seeing these pictures makes me feel homesick and wanting to go back to Africa. It is the adventure, the different culture, the not knowing exactly what will turn up next and meeting/making new friends.
@Niner_Mike: great pictures on your abeam.be blog! Keep on posting!
Really enjoying your stories and pictures @Niner_Mike!
Thanks for taking us all on your trip with you! :-)
Back from Africa – Day 7 – Marrakech-Jerez-Bordeaux
Unlike yesterday, we only flew today. After wasting time with paperwork with the Maroccan authorities and the Air Force in Marrakech, we left an hour later than planned. We were also forced to change our destination in Spain from Castellon to Jerez. The first VFR flight from Marrakesh to Jerez was quite exciting because of the bad weather in Tangier, in north Marrokko. In Jerez we refueled, and got delayed by Ryanairs taking precedence. But than we did a beautiful IFR flight all across Spain, over the Pyrenees, almost entirely in the dark. And we made a brilliant night landing in Bordeaux. We are now late in our bed, so no abeam.be post. Tomorrow the last flight of our adventure back to Lille.
To all: thank you for your positive reactions and encouragement!!
@Silvaire: the desert scenery of Mauretania and Western Sahara reminded me indeed a lot of Nevada and Arizona. I will make a collection of shipwreck photos in the coming weeks! They intrigue me.
@Peter: I had been thinking on how to communicate about this trip. I decided to use my own blog primary for the long stories and pics, with Facebook posts and post here feeding into the abeam.be blog. I had to force myself into the discipline of selecting, downscaling and uploading the pics and writng the blog every night, but the reactions provided so many positive energy that it was easy to do it.
What I do is I save the wx data before each flight, take a load of pics, and then the writeup is driven by the pics. Still, doing it later takes a lot of motivation
In the future I will use the external camera videos to drive the writeup (which will be much shorter because the videos have subtitles) and shove the pics into galleries (automatically generated by photoshop).
My blogpost from
Back from Africa – Day 7 – Marrakesh-Jerez-Bordeaux
is now online on:
http://www.abeam.be/back-from-africa-day-7-marrakech-jerez-bordeaux/
