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Editor’s Note: Sinuhe Xavier is a commercial director and photographer with a particular fondness for vintage Defenders of the highest quality, as you can tell from his photos and stories here. Follow him on Instagram: @SinuheXavier.
“Sinuhe, we are in Morocco. If anything happens we’ll just take a taxi back to Lisbon. Portuguese style.” This is what Ricardo Pessoa said quite matter-of-factly after I quizzed him about any spares and recovery gear that might be in the back of the 1994 Cool N Vintage Resto-Mod D-90 we were driving across Morocco. I am used to the full arsenal of what-could-go-wrong contingencies being packed into the back of my truck, but that was not the case here. And “Portuguese style” was a phrase I would become very accustomed to in the next few days.
I’d spent the previous 48 hours flying from Los Angeles to Tangiers, then hopping in one of those taxis Ricardo mentioned, riding it to Chefchaouen — two hours through fields of olive trees to the mountains south. The rain had started coming down when the cab driver dropped me off outside the city walls. My French and Arabic were about as good as the driver’s English and Spanish, so I darted across the bridge with loose directions to my hotel. This was mid-January, off-season in Morocco, and the narrow streets were empty, its signs only in Arabic. It took me…more than a minute to find the hotel.
Ricardo drove from Lisbon to meet me and wasn’t due in until past midnight; he took the Ferry across the straights of Gibraltar with two Land Rover Defender 90’s in tow. Our plan was to drive over the Atlas Mountains and then south through the Sahara, looping back over the Atlas range into Marrakech. And while I was exhausted from the travel, I could barely sleep: driving a Land Rover on the continent of Africa had long been a dream of mine. So I sat with a steaming plate of vegetable and lamb tagine in a damp hotel located deep within an ancient village, only hours away from fulfilling that dream.
The morning was clear and the narrow blue corridors of Chefchaouen came alive with the sound of the morning prayer. The smell of burning wood and fresh baked bread wafted into my window. The clouds revealed lush green mountains — something I wasn’t expecting in this part of the world. (I later learned that the region was known for its cannabis cultivation.) As we drove east, the topography morphed from verdant green hills to the pine-covered Atlas mountains.
