Adventures and mishaps in Oualidia

Valentine's Weekend part 2.

Part 1 here.

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Finally we arrived in Oualidia! The first thing we did was lock the keys in the car, which boded well of course. Luckily our hotel was next to some mechanic shops, and so while I got settled and read in the beautiful garden of the hotel, Othman paid a guy the equivalent of $2 to break into our car. 

So then we decided it was time for lunch.

We ate at a seaside restaurant under the other hotel we might've stayed at. And O was silly.

Across the street was a shop renting ATVs, and Othman just couldn't pass up that opportunity. So we got one ($10 for half an hour) and headed over to the beach. He had fun.

And although I was slightly terrified when Othman was driving, I actually had fun driving it!

We crossed over the big dune to arrive at the ocean...

And he played around (and got the ATV stuck more than once) while I took pictures of the breaking waves.

See the little geyser on the left? It was cool to watch the water spurting up in such a vertical line.

We returned the ATV, both it and us a little worse for the wear (at one point O had to leap off because he was heading straight into a ditch, and he cut up his hands and bruised up his legs a bit. And this was in the first 30 seconds of him driving alone. Sigh). Then we walked over to the other side of the beach and went up into the rocks to watch the tide rush in.

Oualidia is apparently an important bird conservationist area, and during our stay we saw dozens of species of birds. We had fun watching this little guy hop around for quite a while.

Before we headed back to the hotel to rest, I decided we needed some pictures of us from this vacation.

Later that night, after a nice nap, we went out to the beach again to walk along the boardwalk and do some nighttime photography. But as I set up the camera I realized my lens, which I had changed from the telephoto to the 50mm, wasn't moving. My backpack had fallen off the hotel bed with the camera in it, and one side of the lens was jammed in. I was pretty upset for a while but was able to walk off the frustration a bit. (The best part of the story comes a few days later back to Casa: Othman was looking at the lens and clumsily dropped it onto his computer... and it was miraculously fixed! Talk about lucky.) So much for nighttime photos, but after walking a while and grabbing some simple dinner food at a grocery store we went back to the hotel to eat, where I took some still lifes. in the yellow lighting.

And a picture of Othman's banged up hand! It's hard to tell here but it was quite swollen. 

We cleaned up dinner and it was bedtime. We had to sleep to prepare for another day of adventures!