Time was dragging on in Imsouane. I had started making scones. And the marmalade to go with them. We ran out of poppadums so I fabricated some from gram flour. Then we ran out of gram flour so I spent an hour or more grinding chickpeas. Eventually I took to arranging fruit in a bowl and photographing it. Time to go.
Imsouane from afar 
Homemade poppadoms 
Moonrise over Imsouane 
More Imsouane 
Locally grown fruit
We had a ferry booked. Many had been cancelled but this one looked promising. Enough post-corona virus normality, the new world order, was arising to make us optimistic about getting out of Morocco. Quite a few special ferries had already sailed. These were mostly arranged with the embassies of Italy, Spain or France. They focused on their nationals and were charging quite outrageous rates. They also assumed that you could be on standby to get to the port in a day. For us, Tanger Med is more like four days. We did not want to move up closer because that would take us into the areas most badly affected by Covid-19. So our strategy was to bide our time until things had settled down enough that we could make a steady, planned drive to the port. This appeared to becoming around.
First job was to get a permit. We already have one travel permit but for this job, we needed a different, more powerful permit. It is over an hours drive down the coast to the government offices. We did this trip four times. Each time involved at least an hour standing around in crowded waiting rooms full of strangers. How this helps the corona virus campaign is beyond me. Eventually, on the day we had to leave, we got our permit. Lockdown restrictions were being lifted. Agadir was coming back to life. “No virus in Agadir”, the petrol pump attendant assured me. It was getting late by the time preparations were complete so we did a few hours up the motorway and stopped at a service station near Marrakech.
Morocco is now divided into two types of zone. Zone 1 areas have very few cases of Covid-19 and an Ro less than one. In these places, which is most of Morocco, life is slowly returning to normal. Zone 2 areas are still in lockdown. These are primarily the coastal areas from El-Jadida north to Tanger. Obviously, the authorities want to prevent traffic between the two types of zone.
Bananas 
Agadir coming back to life 
Turtle heads
Next day we took a wide detour around Marrakech, which I think is Zone 2. We also wanted to avoid the coastal route so we intended to go inland then north through Meknes. Mark caught us up near Kasba-Tadla and we found a great place by a lake to camp. His ferry had just been cancelled but he was going to the port anyhow, hoping to get another one. We had heard stories of people just turning up at the port and managing to get a ticket. The lake had turtles swimming around in it. They were very shy and usually all you could see were their heads.
Next morning notification arrived that our ferry was cancelled. Just two days before we were due to board. I talked to GNV, the ferry company, and booked the next available vessel on July 13th. Now what? The plan had been to head to Chefchaouen where there is a reasonable campsite a couple of hours from the port. On our new schedule, we did not want to be stuck there for a month. Mark had a couple of days before he wanted to move north so we thought we would explore the locality a little. Enough to get our heads straight again. We like Morocco but we have been here nearly eight months now and a long list of European luxuries is calling. Baloo needs some maintenance and servicing. So do we. The postponement was a disappointment but the counter point is that Europe will be a few weeks closer to normality. What to do for another month?
We are at the western end of the Atlas Mountains. The terrain is up to 2,000m altitude and this helps keep it cooler. The mountains also attract rain, giving rise to a rich and fertile area. This is very different from the arid desert areas we have spent so much time exploring. Just now, early summer, there is a cacophony of wild flowers and fields full of ripe wheat. There are streams, Aloe Vera plants and forests of towering Cedar trees. We pottered for the day, then drove up a quiet dead end lane and parked up for the night. A man on a moped appeared, scowled at us and spent the next hour sitting across the road from us messing with his phone. Eventually the police arrived and they were not in a good mood. After quite a lot of unintelligible mixed language shouting, we were escorted some 25 km to the town of Khenifra. We arrived just after sunset and a different type of police officer took our details.
A different sort of Morocco
Twenty minutes later, he returned, welcomed us in a very warm and friendly fashion to Khenifra and said we could camp anywhere we wanted. In retrospect, we think that we had wandered into the private hunting area of someone wealthy and well connected. Whatever the cause, we found ourselves in the Carrefour supermarket car park. The night guard said we could not stay there so we explained that the police said we could. This was nearly true. We paid him a few Dirhams and he went away happy. Between the ferry and near arrest, this had turned out to be a bad day but there was an unexpected benefit. In the morning, we could shop at the supermarket and round the back was a small but adequate wine shop.