One of the biggest joys of recording sounds is that you start to learn to listen. Our whole journey is turning into a (very long) soundwalk. Recording these drips percolating through rocks and dripping down ferns into a little stream at Terjit Oasis, I fo

This one's for anyone who's ever had a camping stove - an unforgettable sound (especially for your fellow campers, at dawn...) which seems to induce an amazing amount of nostalgia in people who've used them before but no longer carry them. This one's an M

Ah, Terjit. On the evening of the day we left Atar, we crawled into Terjit Oasis - almost literally - with broken bikes and suffering bodies (more about all that soon, in the blog). Streams, rockpools (to swim in!), date palms, toads, glow worms, fireflie

A large, mixed group of terns, recorded at the Cap Blanc peninsula reserve in northern Mauritania. The group was dominated by Caspian Terns, but included other terns which we weren't able to conclusively identify; the Little, Sandwich, Royal and Gull-Bill

Mauritania's 2.5 kilometre long iron ore train is usually described as the world's longest train. We recorded this - our first attempt to record in stereo - by the train tracks in the outskirts of Nouadhibou on a very windy day, and getting very strange l

In this second "Bike Mic" recording, Huw describes what he sees as we pedal out of the desert and into Nouadhibou, a few hours - and a world - away from Western Sahara. Recorded on: 17th July 2009, 20:10 local time. Location: Nouadhibou, northern Maurita

On the way from Sidi Ifni to Guelmim in southern Morocco, we cycled past a women's cooperative extracting oil from argan nuts. We went in to meet the women, get laughed at and repeatedly bash our fingers with a heavy rock. You can read (and watch a slides

Recording this was really an experiment / learning experience for us but we thought we'd post it anyway; we loved Sidi Ifni and hope these sounds evoke a little of its atmosphere. Main lesson learned: cycling sandals (with metal cleats sticking out of the

This has been our daily alarm call here in Agadir. This individual sits in the palm tree straight opposite our balcony and sings away until just after dawn, when other ambient noises increase. It only starts again in the evening, and then only briefly. We

In a hostel in Immessouane, we met a Moroccan couple on holiday from Casablanca. The first night we were there, we noticed Nawal cooking up a delicious tajine - the staple Moroccan dish - in the communal kitchen. The second night, we asked if we could rec