Like many places in Morocco, Dakhlar looks like a big building site. Everywhere you look there is a building project starting. I get a sense of an expectation that Dakhlar is destined to be a major tourist area. On the approach road new restaurants, hotels and campsites are being built. Along the sea front are new roads, beachfronts and more restaurants. This all sounds great but nothing is finished and quite a few sites look to have been abandoned. In general, there seem to be far more projects started than ever get finished.
We parked up with some other campervans several kilometres out of the town. There is a pleasant beach here and the cove is popular with surfers, wind surfers, kite surfers and non-surfers. It was nice to stop driving for a couple of days. We gave Baloo a good cleaning inside. The bike also got a clean and a bit of a service. We restocked the food lockers. Chilled out on the beach for a while, watched the surfers, lazed around and waited for the race to arrive.
The Paris-Dakar rally began in 1978. Every year trucks, cars and motorbikes raced from France to Senegal. In 2008 the event was cancelled because of terrorist concerns and then moved to South America. Now called just the Dakar rally, this year it is in Saudi. Meanwhile, in 2011, the Africa Eco Race started up to reinvent the rally while also laying claim to “eco-responsible behaviour”. To this end, they are involved in local projects, tree planting and other ways to bring a benefit from the race to the countries it passes through.
As luck would have it, the rally camp was just a stone throw from where we were parked. This really was luck. When we picked the location, we had no idea where the rally would be. We wandered over the day the vehicles arrived. The local security were happy to let us into the compound. Probably because we look so obviously European. We watched some of the vehicle coming in and manage to spot Gaz, who we know from Manchester. He is riding for the Desert Rose team and is doing well. Next day was a rest day. We snuck into the compound again and enjoyed a few hours chatting to some of the people there and looking at the vehicles. The day after, they were gone. Up at 4am for the next leg to Mauritania. This was also our cue to get back on the road again.
Very tasty MAN truck 
Swiss bikes in a neat row 
Another MAN truck 
Gaz arriving after 700km of desert