Between 2008 and 2013 I’ve visited Loubar many many times and have had any number of ideas of how to develop the project. I suppose, reflecting the amount of building I was doing in Fez, in the early years I focussed mostly on ….rebuilding the ruin, as can be seen from these couple of short videos.
Weat Facing View Aug 07 Feb 08 West sideview of farm Finn
South Facing View Loubar Aug 07 Feb 08 South Sideview of Farm Finn
To be honest, by the time I’d finished Dar Finn I was Built Out”. As importantly I not only had no more money left to do any sort of construction, but I’d also realised that not only did I need both time and money to realise and understand what sort of build I might want to develop, there was a whole other way of approaching this project…. GLAMPING!
For those of you as yet uninitiated, have a look at this for an idea of what I’m talking about and the seed of an idea began to grow.
Originally I thought of yurts , which sounded perfect. I also got a job with UNICEF in Tajikistan, which put a few quid in the bank…we are on a roll, I thought. But in fact getting enough yurts to make a camp…sorry, glamp, was pretty expensive. And then I came across Ben and his site, flirting with yurting and ideas moved on.
I had researched getting a yurt and at 5ms they would cost me approx £5,000 new and half that 2nd hand. Amazingly I found one for sale on e bay, from Abigail and her Welsh family living in Galicia I put in my offers and “won”…..but a glamp site full was financially out of the question, so I searched for Bell Tents, as seen on Bens’s site.
OK, they aren’t exactly the same as yurts, but they are close. The yurt would do me for the winter in xaouen, but where to get the bell tents from. Amazingly there is a whole world of Bell Tenters, from specialized Bell Tent blog site to mumsnet .
In the end it came down to a choice of 3 companies: Soulpad , The Bell Tent Company (BTC) and Karma Canvas . If I am honest BTC didn’t really get back to me and Soul Pad had, I felt, gotten too big and lost their soul. Karma Canvas however were extremely helpful, gave every assistance with sending the kit to Spain, where I would pick it up for Morocco and enthused at the idea of Glamping in xaouen, which they knew…oh and they were also much cheaper.
So I was sold…and definitely not “souled”…my problem was to get the chance to see what I was buying in action…and thus a plan to see Ben began to hatch…unfortunately….or fortunately, given the sparse finances, I was at the time of thinking about all this, doing another consultancy in Congo with Oxfam and UNICEF, so the trip would have to wait.
Not sure what to make of this chap…..but perhaps, somewhere, he has a point…You Decide!
And you’ve got to try the “Vibration Technique”!
