Thursday 9th October 2008

Contrary to all expectations and despite the interesting motion of the ship, I had had a great night’s sleep and woke up feeling refreshed and raring to – oh yes – to not go anywhere. I swallowed my usual bucket load of heart medications and had, as instructed, my first anti malarial capsule. I collected my breakfast at the cafeteria, had two bites, and just made it back to the cabin. With much effort, I wasn’t actually sick as I didn’t want to lose my meds but I had a very uncomfortable few hours. I felt better by about lunchtime but didn’t risk eating anything. That gave me the advantage of being first in the lounge in the afternoon so that I could sit in a corner and people watch. At this stage I was still intrigued by the dress code – everything from jeans to jelabas. I noticed that two of the bikers and their support van driver (wimps) always sat together and didn’t ever talk to anyone else. I’m sure they were technically better bikers than me, most people are, but I couldn’t help thinking they were missing out somewhere. Still, ‘chacun à son truc’ as one of my shiny new French phrases has it. Noaam came to join me for mint tea and, by limiting his vocabulary considerably, managed to tell me quite a lot about himself. I was discovering that, while it’s relatively easy to have a one to one conversation in another language, it’s a whole different matter trying to keep pace with three or four people. After some help from Najim with filling in my Marocco entry card for the morning I went off for an early night.