According to my airmail letter home, we set off from Ceuta on 4 May and arrived in Marrakech at 2am the next morning. I think we must have slept in the Landy which was parked up in the famous Djemaa el Fna (square of the dead). The next morning we didn’t hang about, we had a quick look round the souq, leaving Marrakech at 11am. In retrospect I am hugely impressed with the distances we managed to cover bearing in mind the state of the roads and the slow pace of the Landy. I think we must have been starting early, finishing late, and swapping over drivers on the road.

The obvious route from Marrakech would have been towards Agadir but whilst nowadays there’s both a main road and a motorway linking Marrakech and Agadir, in 1972 there was nothing. We had the choice of west to Essaouira and then south along the coast, or over the mountains.

So we travelled over the Tizi n’Test (tizi means pass) in the High Atlas mountains. This started as narrow asphalt, but from about 4,000 feet above sea level to the summit at almost 7,000 feet and then down the other side it was nothing more than an 8-foot wide dirt track with a sheer drop of more than 100 feet. Half an hour later we were still slowly climbing but the drop was now 800 feet. The swaying of the Landy’s knackered suspension was accentuated by all the fuel on the roof rack and it took six hours to travel 50 miles. Amazingly we managed to travel 300 miles that day, as far as Goulimine, arriving long after dark.

Nowadays, Guelmim (modern spelling) is a thriving provincial city but when we visited it was a small village with its dual claims to fame being the weekly camel market and the fact that it was a key point on the trade route south, past Tan Tan and across Spanish Sahara (modern day Western Sahara) to Senegal and beyond. Which I guess is why it was one of the main sources of the beads. We were advised to carry on to Tan Tan which was a further 100 miles into the semi-arid desert for a better choice of beads.

There weren’t many restaurants or snack places in rural Morocco at the time—most people grew their own vegetables, reared their own animals and made their own bread. When we could get food it was expensive, so we had lots of oranges and bananas. I do remember eating a vegetable tagine for the first time in Tan Tan and this was also the first time I encountered green chillis in a dish. I assumed they were green beans so there was some hilarity when they were quickly expelled.

We spent the rest of the day and the following morning in Tan Tan negotiating with a trader over a huge ammunition chest with more than 10 kg of Goulimine beads, until we finally settled on a price which was the equivalent of about £120 (lot of money in 1972!). When I came to pay the guy didn’t know the exchange rate for pesetas and I must admit I ‘erred on the side of optimism’, so the beads ended up costing just over £100. We decided to quickly hightail it out of Tan Tan and drove the 200 miles north to Agadir that afternoon.



Agadir had been destroyed in an earthquake twelve years previously and was being rebuilt as a modern town with all the atmosphere of Coventry’s 1950s concrete jungle. We spent the night there in the first hotel we had seen at a cost of £1.20 for the four of us. The next day we hit the road back to Spain and Fuengirola.


Given the amount we were all spending on lager (!), Peter Dean, the Sugar Shack owner was quite happy for us to set up a stall in the shade to sell the beads, possibly being a draw for more bar trade customers. So we started threading the beads onto leather thongs with options for necklaces, wrist bands, ankle bands and so on. They were a great success. We thought we could sell the £100 of beads for about £600 and this turned out to be spot on—by the time we had sold one-third we had recovered the price of the beads plus all our travel costs.

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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)