Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Another early start, this time because we were leaving early for a day in the mountains (it is a school holiday week in Morocco and local advice - correct - was that the traffic would get congested, as opposed to moving but anarchic, if we left it much later). Headed for the Menara Gardens which I'd heard good things about, but they weren't open yet so instead my route took me through the sparsely built southern part of the city and signs advising of various real estate developer's fantasies (several of which involve resort hotel/golf course combinations - I was thinking that perhaps the developers got sidetracked on their way to Phoenix, but in fact the Marrakesh area already has more than 20 of these). A somewhat different sight was seeing the palm trees which had been used as a platform for mobile phone antennas.

I don't normally do as much as this the day after a long run, and it showed a bit - various creaks and pretty slow most of the time, although picked up somewhat in the last 10 minutes.

The rest of the day was spent in the nearby Atlas Mountains, first going up to 2700 metres and seeing the country around what passes for a ski resort in these parts (it's been a drought year and the snow cover was thin, and visibly covered with red dust), then down into the valleys. Beautiful country - in the lower parts the mountains had a lot in common with the Flinders (at least if you mentally subtracted the villages clinging to various hillsides), higher up they were rockier still and almost devoid of vegetation (which didn't stop them being used for grazing sheep). Something you wouldn't have found in the vicinity of Wilpena, though, was the strip of cafes/restaurants intermittently scattered along one of the river valleys over a distance of several kilometres - the ones on the far bank being reached via footbridges of varying degrees of dodginess.

Also ventured into the local public transport system last night (our hosts would probably be horrified if they found out) - perfectly fine if a bit crowded and on a somewhat ancient vehicle (though it doesn't qualify as a genuine developing-country bus because there were no chickens on board). As regular readers will know, I enjoy exploring foreign public transport systems, definitely not being a subscriber to Margaret Thatcher's supposed dictum that anyone who finds themselves on a bus after their 26th birthday can count themselves as a failure in life.

Heading back tomorrow morning. It's as long a trip as the one here was, but the gap between flights in Dubai (9 hours) is long enough to go to an airport hotel (it's the middle of the night - if it were during the day I'd take it as a chance to look at Dubai, February being a much better time of year for that than August).