This week is the 50th anniversary of my first entry into Morocco in May 1972. I really wanted to be in Morocco for this anniversary, but family sickness prevents this. I've been writing up our experiences of the first trip, a portion of which I reproduce below.
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Within a week of arriving in Spain I was off again on a trip to Morocco with three friends in an old Land Rover. We were heading to southern Morocco to buy a huge quantity of the beautiful twisted glass canes, known as Goulimine beads, which we thought we could then sell in Spain. These ‘trade beads’ were in fact antique, being made in Venice as ‘millefiori’ and carried by the ton as ballast of ships trading in Africa and elsewhere.

A Land Rover is about as far removed from a luxury vehicle as you can get, and Wally’s 1949 Series I model was already 25 years old at the time of this expedition—in an era when normally only Volvos lasted as long as ten years. It was a cramped short wheelbase version with side-facing jump seats for the two who would be sitting in the back. Fuel consumption was terrible at 18-20 mpg, engine oil seemed to disappear at the rate of a pint every 150 miles, and we left a cloud of black exhaust smoke in our wake. 



We drove along the Spanish coast to Algeciras and took the ferry from mainland Spain to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on the north African Mediterranean coast where we filled up with duty-free fuel costing about 9p/gallon and stuck cans with another 30 gallons of fuel on the roof rack.

Our first challenge was entering Morocco—apparently the authorities were fed up with long-haired dope-smoking hippies who bought little money to the country. The border police at Bab Sebta took one look at the length of our hair and turned us away. So we retreated to Ceuta and were shorn of our locks and tried again, but without success. By now the barber would be closed, so we waited at the border until the staff shifts changed and this time passed muster. However another hopeful visitor we met in the barber shop was still turned away as he had really long hair in his passport photo!

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)