Going OFF GRID in MOROCCO - VAN LIFE AFRICA // S04E02

We've crossed from the relatively safe pastures of Europe into Africa and a land which is completely unknown to us. Typically whilst living the van life we prefer to find free places to park up and we don't often stay in paid campsites. However here in Morocco we were unsure what to expect. How would we be able to find overnight camp spots? Would it be safe and are we likely to be hassled and moved on? So let's go exploring and find out. In north of Morocco is the mountains so we are going to be doing that first because we'll be heading on down to the coast and hopefully warmer climates later on. Now is the time to see the mountains before too much snow gets in here and it certainly looks beautiful. Last week we met up with a few van travelers from Catalan Spain. Caio, Ina and Dave. We've arranged to meet up with them in the middle of the Atlas mountains so we're on the move to our rendezvous. Morning. One of the main reasons I live in a van is so that I can not have to deal with the cold weather and winter. I like to migrate. I'm like a migrating bird but right now we are in the kind of Moroccan highlands in the mountain region just because we want to see this part of Morocco and this is the town of Efrain and it's pretty chilly. It was a cold night last night. There is ice on both inside and outside the windows so it's not exactly comfortable living conditions but even I washed my underwear last night and it's frozen solid this morning so not particularly pleasant but totally fine because I'm sure lots of people doing van life can deal with much worse than this and this time we are prepared. I'm glad that we have our heater, our basto heater. It uses our gasoline but keeps us warm. We don't have it running at night time but during the day when it's cold so like this morning I woke up and put it on just to try to thaw out the van a little bit. I never thought I'd have to say that. Time to put the kettle on I think. It's just above freezing temperature out here and I put the heater on before I came out to talk to you guys so let's see how warm it is in the van now. So temperature inside the Kombi now is 12.4 degrees which is much better than zero. 54 degrees fahrenheit and rising. Time for a cup of coffee, tea. All the comforts of home. The guys had heard from other travellers about a really cool camp spot not too far away from here so as the sun rose and drove the chilly night from our bones we packed up and headed out to locate the forest. it's definitely the roads have taken a turn for the worse in Morocco. It's a big difference to Europe and the drivers like it's the worse the roads get the worse the drivers get I mean in terms of like just doing really risky manoeuvres. We get people overtaking us when it's just definitely not a safe place to do it. We're going to be pretty careful in Morocco driving for sure because this is like the chance of having an accident has gone up significantly since we got to this continent. Whilst on the subject of wild camping it's worth saying that there are a lot of people in Morocco and it's never too long before locals find us to say hi and usually try to sell you something. I guess a few tourists must come here because these guys are here looking to give us donkey rides or horse rides. It's easy to dismiss the local entrepreneurs as you'll encounter many every day but it's good to remember that local knowledge is always valuable when you're a visitor. Let's try to follow that way and see where we end up. Love it when you don't know where it goes. Let's go exploring. This time we got led to a quiet place off the road where we would be able to spend a few nights. When you're overlanding you're often in new places every few days and it's impossible to always know exactly how safe the area is. So safety is always at the forefront of our minds when it comes to wild camping. This is even more true when we're intending to spend multiple nights in one location. Most of the time there is nothing to worry about but it is just something that we keep in mind. One of us is getting stuck in this situation. Oh he's stuck. Did you get stuck? No no no we can go back. Where's he taking us? I don't know. He doesn't understand that when we say enough enough. There's a couple of good spots back there. I mean they're quite close to the... I know yeah. Did you see that spot a little bit back on the left? It was open. I think we go for that. At this point it is muddy and these guys are slipping around a little bit and who knows how much worse that will get. It's hard driving these two-wheel drive vans through mud. I'm pretty confident because I know that this vehicle is prepared for it and I know that we can recover ourselves too if we got stuck in this. I think we're all going to be okay but we're going to go find a more open area back there that's flatter and less muddy because no one likes hanging out in the mud all day. Boomerang's loving this though. This might be home for the night. It's a really nice spot here but there is a lot of rubbish so I think we need to do a bit of a cleanup first and tidy up all the trash. The other locals that are always quick to descend on camp are the street dogs. As dog lovers it's heartbreaking to see how skinny these dogs are and since arriving in Morocco we've been carrying extra supplies to try to fatten them up. Here in the Asrou Cedar Forest up in the Atlas Mountains the temperatures can drop quickly as the sun sets and being that we live outside a campfire tonight is a great way to keep warm. So we could stay outside and enjoy the silence of the evening together. It's always interesting when you wake up with other vanlifers to see their morning routines and how they make tiny home living possible. With chocolate or without chocolate? What are you making? Crêpes? Yeah, five pounds please. Especially with custom-built campers each of us have designed our homes uniquely to be exactly as we need them. It took you one and a half years. Yeah, it took one and a half years. I didn't do it alone. Dave helped me. It took one year and a half working in the morning and afternoon here. It's a lot of work isn't it? Yeah, yeah it was. It's really well isolated. Is it warm in here at night time? Yeah. Right now it's pretty cold up here. Yeah. You've got a heater right? Yeah. What does that run off? No, it's from the gas oil of the van. So from diesel right? Diesel, yeah. Yeah, gas oil. The kitchen goes with propane with camping gas bottles. One bottle maybe one month. It depends if it's on summer or in winter because if it's summer I use the microwave. I use the kettle. You have a microwave. That's an important point to make. How does that work? I mean a microwave, I thought it would use too much power. Yeah, but because if you use it like four minutes per day you cannot use it anymore if it's winter. But it's enough for the batteries. What kind of batteries are they? The batteries are gel batteries. Okay, yeah they're good. They weigh a lot but they are cheap. Yeah, cheaper than lithium. So this area here turns into a bed? Yeah, this table can switch down. Yeah. And then it turns like this and then the bed. Oh, it's a big bed. Yeah, it's a big bed. And how many people? Two or three, depends on the night. I'm joking, I'm joking. So, how long have you been living in here? I've been living here for four months. You find it comfortable? Yeah, of course. Yeah, you like it? See that smile? Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. It's like if you have a kitchen and a toilet in your room you would never go out and the best is you can move your room everywhere you want. Yeah, that's it. This forest is known because wild monkeys live here. It might sound ignorant but we had no idea that there were monkeys in Morocco and it was a surprise to see them come so close to Kat. And he's trying to get in. You might want him in here with Alaska. These monkeys are obviously used to humans and they are not shy about asking for food. Remember folks, rabies is present in dogs, cats and monkeys in Morocco. And hopefully not people. You're going for firewood? Yeah. We mainly decided to travel with a van because I played too many instruments and I didn't want to leave them behind. So this is where we store all the instruments. These are the accordion, some small instruments, flutes, these kind of things, tools and backpacks. And this is for your washing. Yeah, when we don't have, when we wouldn't, we don't find the laundry or maybe we find the laundry but it doesn't have a dryer or something. This is where we hang our clothes. Come on in. This is our bed. It measures like 120 centimeters by two meters long, 195 actually. Is it comfortable? The bed? Yeah. It's really nice, really nice. Shower and toilet. This is your bathroom? Yeah. This is a composting toilet or a dry toilet and it's got like a box with sawdust in the back and then a bottle for the pee. It's a 10 liters bottle and then we've got a funnel that goes straight into the bottle. Yeah, we've got like a kind of a bulb to not allow the smell up. It's like a ping-pong ball that you throw into the funnel. Really? And then yeah, when you pee, it goes up and allows the pee to go in and then it blocks the hole right after that. Such a good idea. So it doesn't, it doesn't smell. Then we have a extractor fan there, drain for the shower. It's a pressurized bag that we put pressure by a hand pump and then we take it in, we boil water in there in the kitchen and then we sit down, we put it here and then we shower. Big cupboard, you can fit a person in there. Yeah, actually I fit in there. Wow. So this is where we store our clothes, my side, Inna's side and then the dirty clothes. What? That's how you do it? Yeah, every time. Inna gets on top and then... That's quite funny. Oh, it's like a... Yeah, this is like an office chair, a piston because the telescopic leg was so expensive. So we wanted to save some money and we mounted the table on this. Is it actually an office chair? Yeah, it is from an office chair. Yeah, yeah. We bought it like it's new, it's not recycled from an office chair, but yeah, it's for office chairs. And then the best part of this is the laptop tray. So this is where you can put... Yeah, tablet, the laptop and then we lay here and then we watch a movie and yeah. Nice. And then it's got a magnet here and this goes like this. It's great, very clever build. This is one of that things that we made after the van build because we always had the laptop on our legs in here and we said, oh, it would be nice to have it here. And how long have you been living in the van now? I've been living in the van one year and a half and with Inna together two months since we started traveling. It's been very nice. Yeah, I would never go back to paying rent and have a normal house. I mean, I have everything here that I need, more than I need, actually. I mean, I could have more or less and be the same happy, but it's very good to have all these kind of things. So our batteries are stationary batteries, like the big ones, tall ones. And we've got 525 amps hour at 24 volts. So they give us 12 kilowatt hour. It looks like a lot of batteries. Yeah, they weigh like, wow, they weigh 360 kilos. We're having, yeah, like the van is a bit tilted to the left because of this. We don't have sensors for telling us the levels of water and sawdust that we use for the toilet. We have this, and as long as we see that we don't have enough water, we take this and we swap it this way. So when it's red, we know that we have to look for water and the same for the sawdust. And you made all of this yourself? Yeah, everything, everything, every single corner. Did you know how to do this sort of thing before? Not really. I mean, I knew something about a little bit of something about everything, the experience of making it and what you learn after that, how you feel like you can do whatever you want after this. It's unpayable. From here, we're separating with the guys for a while and heading out of the mountains to warmer climates. So far, we found Morocco to be very welcoming and we have felt safe whilst wild camping. However, the next part of the journey sees us being moved on by police frequently for fear of our safety. We have been moved on by the police and it does get harder to find spots to camp. But that is a story for next time. Guys, thank you so much for watching. We hope you liked that video. We're just going to give you a real-time update right now that we are still in Morocco and we are filming and documenting everything as it happens. So those videos will be out very shortly at the end of this Moroccan series. Yeah, there is a state of emergency right now, so we're not allowed to travel anywhere. So you understand that this video was filmed before we were put into quarantine, right? Yeah. Thanks so much to our patrons and those of you that are supporting our content. Your support makes this series happen and we wouldn't be able to do it without you. If you want to keep us rolling with the production, you can get access to hundreds of bonus posts and it just costs you a little bit of money tipped towards each of our videos. And we would really appreciate the support, but if not, don't worry about it. We will leave the link below. If you want to join the Kombi Crew, we'd be happy and very grateful to have you. Take care guys, make sure you're looking after yourselves and be safe.