WORLD TRAVELERS Still Under STRICT LOCKDOWN in Morocco // S04E10

We found ourselves facing the coronavirus pandemic in North Africa, in the country of Morocco, where a state of emergency has been declared. Morocco's approach to lockdown is much stricter than some places, so in this episode we're sharing how events unfolded and what lockdown life is like at the top of Africa. I'm still stuck here in Morocco, not able to go out. We are driving around the world. You guys are invited too, so subscribe and buckle up. It's one heck of a ride. Usually we prefer to live in a van so we can travel, but right now that just isn't possible. It also isn't possible for us to leave North Africa with the two of us, the dog and our Kombi. So we've moved into an apartment in the southern coastal town of Tamarat in Morocco to ride out the pandemic. Typically this time of year this town will be full of surfers and travellers, but 2020 is not your typical year. The state of emergency and rapidly spreading virus has caused widespread anxiety in communities around the world and here, like many other places, people are following the government's advice and staying home. The streets are eerily empty. It really is so surreal to be out here. I'm just taking Alaska for a quick walk, but the town's dead for all intents and purposes. There's a few people driving around, like going about their business and work and stuff, but for the most part the town's dead. Everyone's in lockdown. No one's coming out and it's a real gloomy feeling because it's kind of like cloudy and rainy here and it's not normally like that. I can't wait for it to pass, like it's only been a few days and I'm already going absolutely insane in the house, so I want to go out. But obviously this is the price we pay to stop the spread and that is really the most important thing. It's, I've got to say, it's quite nice to see, for the most part, most people coming together in this time of crisis and sacrificing their own personal agendas for the greater good of the community and, well, humanity. Maybe we've got a chance. Maybe there's hope for us yet. So I just found out from now on we need a form, a permission form to go outside and do anything like getting any medicines or getting any food and water. We need permission, fill out a permission slip, and I just found out that this is the permission slip that we need to fill out and get someone to stamp and sign. We can't even read it, like we have no idea what's going on here, no one's telling us anything, we're just trying to find out information from the internet, but no one's told us where to go to get this form filled, so we have permission to go outside and get food and leave the house. It's just very confusing times, don't know where to get information from. Just a few days of lockdown, I'd say that the mood in town's pretty good. I reckon about 50% of the people that I've walked past have said hello back to me, which is pretty good. A couple of people have looked at me a bit strange, but that's not that odd, they're probably thinking, what are you still doing here? The mood seems good so far, pretty hard to get supplies in this town, all the shops seem to be shut, so maybe I'll try again tomorrow. Closed, closed, closed, closed. This is the Tamrat main street, kids playing up on the balconies, playing football, there's not really much going on here, everything's closed. The Australian government's saying that they can't help their citizens who are getting back home at the moment from Morocco, there might be other countries that they can help with, but from Morocco they're struggling. Also the insurance companies are saying that they can't help. Just to summarise, we're stuck in Northern Africa in a pandemic with no access to health care, no insurance to pay for any health care, no help from the government, what an adventure. Not sure how long it's going to be, we're going to be in lockdown for here in Morocco, there are cars at the moment going around town with loudspeakers saying something in Arabic, we're not too sure what it says, but all we can understand is coronavirus, so we think they're saying that we all have to stay indoors, which is fine, but we are running out of food, so we're not too sure if we'll have to go outside to get food or what. Combustions. Yeah, just don't know what's going on. Luckily the community spirit was still going strong here in town, we had been worried about getting to the markets for supplies, but in the end the local fishermen came to us to deliver their catch. Sardines, calamari. One kilo of calamari, one kilo of sardines, fresh, and one kilo of sole. This was 10 pounds. I think having those fishermen come this morning was like a bit of a morale booster, just a little bit of excitement for the day. Ben's just gone out, the landlord just came around and said that she's going to help us with the permission form, so he's gone out to go and get that with him. This is the form. This is our freedom, Leah. It's all in Arabic, I have no idea what it says, but basically this gives us permission to leave the house. You're going to like this part. It gives one of us permission to leave this house, and my name's on it. So unfortunately, Leah, you remain a prisoner in this house. So what does that mean? Do they only get food? Yeah, we can either leave for food, or we can leave for medicine, or essential work, which I don't think travel vlogging really counts as essential work, so yeah, we basically can only go for food and medicine. Yeah, it's stamped by the local authority, in my name, and there's one per household. So you're doing all the shopping then? Yeah. Time to go out to the shop, get supplies if it's open. Supplies are pretty good. Dog food's running out. I'm guessing that's not a priority on the limited number of trucks that are coming to town with food. I'm anticipating food prices going up here with the limited supply, but I mean, this is still not too bad. It was like 20 euros, so about 200 dirham, for a full bag of vegetables, 12 rolls of toilet paper, some soy milk, some normal milk, a dozen eggs, biscuits, a few bars of chocolate, so it's pretty reasonable. I can't remember what you asked me for. There are a lot of things in the store. Supplies are pretty good. Dog food is running out. Did you find soy milk? Yeah, that was the most expensive. Look how much it was. Did you find it more expensive than usual? I don't think so. How do you think I did? Good, you got a lot. Let's have a look what we got. So was there fruit and veggies there? Like a lot of it? Yeah, there was quite a bit of fruit and veg, no ginger. It's good to know that they're not running out of, like they're not low on supplies here for a small town, you know? Yeah. We got you lots of chocolate though. Yay, thanks. You can get free quarantine with chocolate, right? Yeah. Okay, so there are some ferries going out of the north of Morocco from Tangier Med to Siete in France. I think I'm saying that right. It's not a usual route. It's a special route being put on. And we have been advised with an hour and a half's notice that we can get on this boat. Which would mean we'd need to leave pretty much right now. The problem is that when we get to France, we only have 24 hours to get across France. We have a 24-hour permit to get out of France. Now currently the channel tunnel between France and England is still running so we could potentially get the Kombi from the south of France to the north of France through the channel tunnel or maybe on a boat to England. Boats are not running to Jersey so we cannot get to Jersey, okay? So that's going to be the situation for at least the next month. We're not going to be able to get back to Jersey with the potential that that could be extended. As we were unable to get back to Jersey and also unable to stay in Europe, our only option is to remain here in Morocco until we can get out and reach a safe end destination. In the meantime, we have to get used to Morocco's strict lockdown and life in quarantine. Like most other people, our income and livelihood has been severely affected. The travel industry has been particularly badly hit and being a travel vlogger at this time is not ideal. For us, this will be infinitely worse than any adpocalypse but for now we're just happy to have projects that can keep us busy and our minds occupied. So it's nice to have some space to spread out but we didn't expect to leave Bumerang for quite so long. Fortunately, the climate here is quite dry and Bumerang's got protection and he's doing pretty good. I haven't had to do a great deal to make sure that he's ready for storage. We've just emptied the water, we've cleaned out our drinking water container and I've turned off the solar panels because I don't really want to, you know, have the same thing that happened last time when I stored a vehicle and came back to it and it was burnt down. However, with our awesome electrical system, that is definitely not going to happen because there are lots and lots of belts and braces to prevent any kind of system meltdown. So yeah, Bumerang is standing by. I had to pump up the neighbour's tyre. I noticed it had gone flat because they haven't moved their car for a while either so I used my onboard compressor. That's about as exciting as it's been with Bumerang. To be honest, we're not really used to leaving our vehicle for this long because normally we're in it, but I guess strange times, right? One of those projects I've been working on is to improve the mounts for our camera gear in the Kombi studio. If you're interested in the behind the scenes of our mobile production, we release bonus videos to the Kombi crew on Patreon and our channel members. Click join below this video to unlock our exclusive videos, real-time updates from the series as it happens. Oh yeah, and you also get our book for free too. Thanks for your support. Got to be honest, we are finding lockdown tough. We usually find our entertainment from the great outdoors. The one book that we have has been read multiple times and our TV only has two English-speaking channels, BBC World and CNN, both of which show nothing but coronavirus-related stories. I've been following lockdown in various places around the world and I can totally understand why Morocco is taking such a strict approach to it, but whilst it's been effective and you've got to kind of give Morocco a round of applause, like the effect on mental health is huge of not having contact with other humans and just being locked inside for weeks after weeks after weeks. And I just don't really see that being taken into account here. As full-time nomads, we used to be in a way from our family and friends, but not having any contact with other English speakers at all, it's for such an extended period of time, it's hard. Cheers. Cheers, happy birthday. Happy 70 years old one. I mean, in other places around the world, people are allowed out to exercise, but here we're not even allowed out to walk a dog. Why not? Hello mate, can we do this sideways today? I used WhatsApp to speak to friends at home. Thank God for video calling, right? Every morning we did the push-up challenge together. First 10 push-ups, then 9, then 8, and continue all the way down to one. Give it a go at home, you'll see a big improvement in your strength after just one week. Then you can add the same number of sit-ups between the push-ups to test yourself a little bit more. It's surprising how much this little bit of human connection made a huge difference to my morale. What are you guys up to? That's right guys. I want to go surfing. All this stupid exercise, a rubber band and there's a perfectly good wave out there. And no perfectly good reason why we can't go and play on it, other than that's the law. Them's the rules, I hate rules. I find it hard. I like common sense. Common sense tells me I should go surfing. Like everyone else on the planet. Right now, back home, there's people going surfing. People are allowed out for four hours a day right now. I'm still stuck here in Morocco, not able to go out and I'm ready to go out. What about you two? Are you ready to go out? Currently in Morocco, it is illegal to take your dog for a walk. It's difficult to explain to a dog why they're not allowed outside. Our dog, Alaska, has lived outside for most of her life since we found her in Peru in 2012. It's impossible to make her understand that she isn't being punished. We don't have a backyard, but we do have this space at the front of our apartment here where Alaska can do her business. And this is basically what we do every day. We come out here, she goes to the bathroom. We try to sit out here for a bit and that's about as far as we can go around here. At least it's sunny and warm. That's right. To keep Alaska busy, we've been playing with her inside with various games to maintain her mental and physical health. So because Alaska can't go outside and get exercise and be kind of stimulated, we have to keep her occupied with things like, you know, putting some healthy snacks like carrots and broccoli in her little conch thing. So she plays with this for an hour or so and it keeps her occupied, but she's getting bored in here too. So we need to find games to play with her and get her some exercise as well whilst being stuck in an apartment. You want this? So I know that might seem a little cruel to lock her outside, but that's the challenge. She has to find her conch with the treats inside and we're not just going to give it to her. We're going to make her find it. That will keep her happy. Where can I put it? Alaska's treats become harder and harder to find. Victory! Muy bien! Well done, Alaska! Muy bien! Alaska was making the most of being inside and just as well. With less humans on the street, the street dogs were taking over and whilst a pandemic raged around the world, this little village was having a rabies epidemic all of its own. So last night here we heard a really distressed dog outside of our house and we noticed that it was acting really, really strange and weird and it was horrible to see this dog in such distress and we assumed that it was a rabid dog. So this morning we contacted the Moroccan Animal Aid Centre who looks after animals here and they got back to us this morning and said that they were going to come and look for the dog. So we are just keeping an eye out for the dog around our area this morning and hopefully we can see her so she doesn't keep suffering and she doesn't spread the disease to other dogs and humans. It could be anywhere around here. We just got a message from Fanny from Moroccan Animal Aid and she said that she found the body of the dog that we were looking for. So that's good news, at least they found the dog. Hopefully she didn't suffer too much and she died quickly but that's good news. They did a really good job finding the dog. So yeah, sad. Morocco is currently classified as a high-risk rabies country. During our time in town, there were new cases of rabies practically every week. I just want to briefly talk about Moroccan Animal Aid and give them a shout out because they have been a really big help helping out with the rabid dog situation in this area and also rescuing animals in this area. So if anyone ever comes to this part of Morocco and wants to help out, they are always welcoming volunteers to help out with the animals and if any of you guys are able to help out with any donations or any dog food, please help them out because they are a charity-run organisation that need donations to do what they do and they do a really, really good job. So I'll put the link in the description if you want to go check out their website if you wanted to help them out. That would be really, really cool. For the most part, living alongside street dogs has never been a problem for us. 99% of the time, nothing happens. Did he bite you? Am I bleeding? I fell. No, he didn't bite me. I don't think he bit me. I don't think that that's a dog bite but that puppy is... that puppy is definitely... like, he shouldn't have been acting like that. He just charged me from the other side of the street. That's really odd for a dog. No major injuries or anything like that. I think this is all just from falling over, trying to get away from the dog, running backwards whilst kind of like looking like I was going to attack back at it so that I'm big and it was hopefully a little bit fearful of me but it wasn't fearful of me at all. I think a lot of people think that that would happen from a street dog, that they do charge you but to be honest with you, most of the time they don't. I'm pretty sure that he didn't bite me. It's hard to say because I was kind of scrambling away like backwards trying to... like as I fell over, I'm looking backwards and he's right there on my heel like barking from a little puppy but obviously it's not the little puppy, is it? It's the killer disease that he might have and obviously this is not a time to be going to hospitals for like, you know, anything other than coronavirus. They've got their hands full so I've really got to take care of myself and try to stay out of these situations so I don't cause a further burden on society. Lockdown life in Tamrat was interesting enough but as we entered Ramadan and the Moroccan government extended the state of emergency for another month, we were definitely ready to find our freedom. However, figuring out an escape plan was still easier said than done. We are unable to get the ferry that is being offered to get people with camper vans out of the country. But that is the story for next time. Guys, thank you so much for watching the video. This entire docuseries is made possible by you guys watching at home and voluntary support towards our production budget. Those of you that have clicked join below this video and have joined the Kombi Crew will get a whole bunch of extra bonus content that we make exclusively available to you to say thank you for making this series happen. The latest one is all about how we're mounting cameras and stuff inside the Kombi so be sure to check that out if you want to support. And if you haven't yet joined, click join below the video or visit our Patreon page and you get a free sign-up book and stickers and merch and all of that goodness including real-time updates from the series as it happens. So see you there.