WESTERN SAHARA
I last wrote to you in Essaouira, my last stop in Morocco. After leaving there, we drove south through some more sparsely populated parts of Morocco before entering the Western Sahara. Entering Western Sahara was incredibly uneventful, largely because most of
it is administered by Morocco and so there was so border, just a rumble strip in the middle of a hamlet and some empty flag poles next to a modest stone monument commemorating the Green March of 1975, after the Spanish colonisers gave up the territory due to the fall of Franco, their dictator. The march consisted of thousands of Moroccans marching into the territory that they
have long considered their own as it was last part of Moroccan territory in the 1500s.

Eelke, a friend of mine from the Netherlands, sent some historical and current political info about W Sahara by email. Getting balanced info about the situation or the history there was not so easy in Morocco as they obviously have a biased viewpoint.

After Morocco took control of the territory, a group called the Polisario formed, comprising people opposed to the integration with Morocco. The violent conflict between Morocco and the Polisario, backed by Algeria. Morocco started to build a wall in the territory in 1980 to try to protect people from Polisario attacks. By 1986, the wall reached 2500km, aparently longer than the Great Wall of China. The territory to the West of the wall is in Moroccan hands and is the where all the economic interest lies in the way of phosphates, iron ore, diamands, silver and maybe oil.

A referendum is demanded by the UN to allow the natives to decide whether to be part of Morocco or not and if so, whether they should have some self determination within Morocco. The Moroccan government is resisting such a referendum so the current situation is a ceasefire but no solution in sight.

Going through the Western Sahara was uneventful and didn't really provide much of interest. If you can picture driving along a
tarmac road for 2.5 days next to the Atlantic Ocean at the bottom of the cliff to your right and desert to your left, you can imagine
what I found there. Just to add a little excitement, we saw some people who live under tarpauling and fish for a living. They swap
the fish for goods by the roadside. Due to bad weather, there are a lot of rusty shipwrecks on the coast. We also saw a village
that had subsided into the sea and the odd petrol station where we could buy tap water and tax-free petrol. And we crossed the Tropic of Cancer, starting our very long journey in the Tropics.

Perhaps the highlight of the Western Sahara was a sand storm on the 1st night there, making it impossible to see without wearing my sunglasses and shining the torch right in front of my face. Several tents collapsed, material got ripped and some welded metal bits snapped off. My tent just about survived. I felt like a man for not running to the truck ;-)

The one exception to my description of our journey through Western Sahara was our stop in Layounne, the largest city of the territory and a fairly strange one! Most of it had been hastily built after the Green March so houses were built in straight lines as in Europe and all look similar! There was a strange feel to the place, partly because of the large military presence. 3 of the 4 planes in the airport were UN planes; there were plenty of smurfs (light blue-capped international soldiers) in their big white Land
Cruisers; as well as many Moroccan troops. The people were incredibly friendly - lots of smiles and waves. One man stopped me in the street to take a photo of me and when trying to spend every last Moroccan dirham I had in a shop, the owner tried to give me things for free because he was so pleased that he had met some people from other countries! If only people gave me free stuff at
more convenient times, I'd be a very rich man!