Arriving to a foreign country  and having all your camera gear taken away from you  is not fun, well this is what went to me last week. We arrived in Casablanca, Morocco amped to shoot some Kiting and to cruise around. Not even out of the airport I was pulled aside and asked “whats in the bags” in broken english. To cut a long story short, when you fill in the form when you arrive in Morocco don’t put down Photographer or Journalist as your job and have gear with you. For some reason this requires “special permission” to bring your gear in the country to shoot even if you are going as a tourist like I was. Well, I got to spend 8 days in Morocco cruising with some cool locals up and down the coast to a number of surf and kite spots. I managed to get some gear from a German tourist who with out a question let me use it for the last couple of days.

A local fishing boat

Coming back to SA was just as much of a mission, We arrived at the airport 8 hours before my flight to get my gear, this was after a 6 hour taxi drive from hell from Essouira to Casablanca, but at the end of the day that’s all part of the journey. Needles to say I got my gear back as the plane doors were closing, after been escorted around by customs police like criminals I was not a happy person, they made me check by gear through and pay 200 euros over weight and also made sure my tickets were all the way to Cape Town. We were even escorted to the plan to make sure we got on. At the end I was pretty glad to be out of there, but now that I know what to do next time I will for sure go back…..if they let me in there.

Ruben Lenten forgetting about the hassles

The local crew from Moulay and the Kite crew

On arrival back to Cape Town happy as hell I thought the nightmares where in the past, but it was not over yet. When I checked the gear from check in I found that Emirates had managed to snap my 300-800 lens in half….thanks guys, trip over.