Morocco, Land of Mountains and Dodgy Roads
Now this isn't to be a tale of excessive alcohol consumption and saying hello to Huey on the big white telephone (although I have a few of them, though none spectacular enough to share), as in Morocco you can't get an alcoholic beverage too freely.

To the tale in question:

Myself and the lovely and very tolerant Mr. hats went on an in-between university years on-the-cheap touring holiday in 2007 - Madrid, Lisbon, Toulouse, and Marrakech. All very lovely, although we spent most of it shagging because there is only so much 'sightseeing' you can do. Now, all who know me know that I am an extremely bad traveller - vomiting when the plane takes off, vomiting when the plane lands, vomiting in between. Also, vomiting on boats. Look in the dictionary under 'vomit' and there's my pasty-white face staring back at you, or at least, it should be. We managed to get through a week in Madrid (some vomiting), a week in Lisbon (also some vomiting), Toulouse (vomiting in the car on the way from the airport). So all in all, pretty standard. That was until we decided to go on a trip to the Sahara desert, through the Atlas Mountains from our base in Marrakech...

The minibus trip was scheduled to take us at 7am - Mr. hats and myself had had epic dysentry for five days previous, and were only just getting back to being regular (or getting away from being 'regular', as it were). So off we went from the hotel, arse clenched and looking forward to a 6 hour journey through the Atlas Mountains. We walked to the minibus stop and met up with our fellow tour participants - a few Aussies, a couple of Brits - all tourists (no sane Moroccan would do such a thing!) Minibus arrived, luggage was loaded, and we set off on the dusty tracks to the land of the camel.

No sooner had we hit the edge of Marrakech, and I was hurling chunks. I'll have to add at this point that we didn't bring a sick-bag with us, so I was doing technicolour yawns into the carrier bag we brought our lunch in. A leaky carrier bag. I hurled once, I hurled twice. Our fellow passengers were trying not to look at me, probably (and rightly) believing that if they looked back, they would be scarred for life. We carried on through the low-lying regions of Morocco - I was throwing up every 15 minutes or so. Then, we started our climb through the Atlas. That's when things really started getting bad. The leaky carrier bag was sloshing about as the road got more bumpy, the hurling got more frequent and more interestingly coloured. Any water consumed (this was in August - temperatures of 40+) was straight back up and into the carrier within 5 minutes. All I could think was 'Thank fuck my rear end isn't playing up as well!'

We eventually came to the half-way point of the journey, by which point I was vomiting blood and this scared poor Mr. hats shitless. I wasn't a happy bunny either, but after we'd had a rest and a sit-down the throwing up stopped. The rest of the trip was fine after that - we saw the camels (although the camel riding trip to the berber camp almost saw the poor camel wearing a vomit hat...) and went back home without any further events.

Length? Let's just say that Mr. hats wasn't up for nooky that evening...
( its_hatorah_bitch is b3ta the devil you know on, Fri 8 Jan 2010, 14:33, Reply)