Marrakech and homeward bound.

On our first evening in Marrakech we fell for the blandishments of the first restaurant hawker we tripped over in Jeema el-Fnaa. These guys really are something else – the same blather in a dozen or more languages but I was flabbergasted by the guy at Stall 81 who asked me where I was from and when I said Wales he replied with “Iechyd Da!” (good health in Welsh). I normally have to mention Gareth Bale’s name before I get even a flicker of recognition so I was utterly flabbergasted to hear it (and so perfectly pronounced as well).

The cab ride back from the Medina that first evening was even more dangerous than on the way in – inches away from other cars, pedestrians, cyclists and the occasional family on a moped (a father, wife and young child in one case). The small minority of scooter riders that wear helmets only pay lip service to safety by leaving it unfastened and almost useless.

To put it in perspective the road statistics for the UK are 5 fatalities every year per 100,000 vehicles. We’re one of the safest countries in the world. India, a country that we might assume to be rather less safe in this respect has 130 deaths per 100,000 – 26x worse than the UK.

Morocco just laughs at that figure and posts an entirely believable 209 deaths.

We decide not to ride into the city centre to fuel up before leaving.

On our only full day in Marrakech Dave and Roger head into the souks for some mementos but it felt too hot for me and Sudi so we headed to a Hammam for a pummelling from a Moroccan masseuse. Hammam Ziani has a reputation as being in-between the luxury europeanised Hammam experiences at the 5* hotels and the more authentic local ones where you need to know what you’re doing to avoid looking a fool.

Shower -> Black Soap -> Steam Room -> Shower -> Scrub -> Shower -> Massage -> Shower.

I was a bit disappointed that Sudi got a stylish navy blue dishcloth to cover himself while I got an effeminate little  floral number. I bore the massage without flinching except for the bit where he tried to pull off each of my toes in turn. I yelped a bit when he did that.

 

Tea and a nice sit down to compare notes afterwards before heading to Café De France for a coffee and view of the square from a rooftop terrace and dinner at Nomad (a lovely romantic restaurant somewhat wasted on four blokes on a bike trip).

The view of the square from the slightly touristy Cafe De France.

DaveH and Sudi at Nomad.

It’s an 8am start for the 400 mile trip from Marrakech to Tanger Med. The holiday’s over bar the shouting – it’s just a motorway drag skirting Casablanca and Rabat and and on to the port. A leaking oil seal on the back of Roger’s bike gives us a moment’s consternation but it’s an uneventful journey on good fast roads and we reach the ferry terminal at 3.15pm. I came over on a different ferry to the other guys and Transmediterraneo have a ship leaving at 4pm so I make it out a couple of hours before the other guys.

The monkeys at the check-in desk make it clear I’ll only get on this sailing if a little money changes hands and I’m keen to get away so I grab a handful of shrapnel from my pockets and hand it over. They’re aggrieved it’s so little but I get my boarding card and head on to find a long queue that makes it clear I’d have made this sailing even without the fixer’s help.

The crossing is only 90 minutes.  I grab a baguette and pain-au-chocolat from the bar and slump in a chair and before long the Spanish coast comes into sight.

We have a night in Algeciras and we’ve decided that the length of Spain in a single day is beyond us so we’ve two days to make it to Santander in time for the Saturday evening ferry to Portsmouth.

We pull over for the night just south of Salamanca having completed about two-thirds of our journey. Hotel Mozacabar is a little way off the motorway and looks like Crossroads Motel from the 70s soap. Meg Richardson is at reception although no sign of Benny or Miss Diane. It’s clean and cheap and completely soulless. An evening meal in the attached restaurant doesn’t hold much appeal but if it’s Shughie McFee in the kitchen he’s having a stellar evening.

The food is superb – veal tripe in a tomato sauce, oxtail medallions and a crème caramel. The suggested wine is a 2012 Ribera Del Duero and it’s heavenly. If you’re looking for somewhere to break a journey then as unlikely as it may seem Hotel Mozarbez is definitely worth a visit if only for the food.

We’ve a nice easy 240miles to Santander and we knock them off early in the day and stop for a leisurely late lunch some 35Km from the ferry terminal. We get there with a couple of hours to wait before boarding but it passes quickly enough gasbagging with the other bikers in the queue about our respective trips.

It’s done.

The holiday’s over.

Around 3,200 miles plus some change, some great experiences, some new friendships forged and many lessons learnt.

Time to start thinking about next year’s bike trip.

Stopgap Post.

Great day in Marrakech yesterday. More to come.

Today is the start of the slog home. After breakfast it’s motorway from here to Casablanca and Rabat to Tanger-Med then Spain Algeciras to Santander for a Saturday evening ferry. The best part of 1,000miles.

Seeya later.

Day 10 (maybe – I’ve lost track actually so take it with a pinch of salt).

Sudi can barely stand but is determined to keep going so DaveH and Roger load his bike and manoeuvre it around to point vaguely towards Marrakech.

The scenic route from Ait Benhaddou to the beginning of the Tizi N’Tichka pass turns out to be unrideable because of more deep gravel so we turn back and retreat to the dreary security of the main road. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed with the Tizi N’Tichka – plenty of nice bends but very poor road surfaces in parts, yet more roadworks, a lot of traffic, unchanging landscape and quite commercialised on the northern side as you come down. Give me the Jebel Saghro anyday.

We ride into Marrakech but thankfully along the perimiter which is hairy enough anyway – one-hand shading Delboy’s satnav from the sun. We’ve decided to stay at the IBIS about 4km outside of the centre so that we can park the bikes securely and avoid the frenzy of riding into the centre of Marrakech. The evening’s crazy cab rides into the Medina confirm we made the right decision.

Day 9.

The low-point of our journey so far.

The road from Zagora to Ouarzazate (and our destination today Ait Benhaddou) is being paved (or re-paved) and it’s a mess of intermittent roadworks all along the way. Only Moroccan roadworks aren’t like UK ones – they’re often unsigned stretches of dirt, gravel and sometimes mud with trucks and steamrollers doing a slow-motion dance with little regard for the traffic trying to edge past them. Pride comes before a fall and in this case we get two of them. We get through 20km or  so and hit a stretch where there’s oncoming traffic on the one side of the road that looks rideable. I should have stopped and waited but I get up on the footpegs, flex my knees, bend at the hips and plough on digging my own literal furrow. It’s not the usual gravel – the stones are bigger than that and it’s deeper than it looks. Much deeper. The front wheel sinks and the handlebars start waving from side to side uncontrollably as the front wheel slews from side to side. I’m not entirely sure what I did – I think I tried to give it more throttle to lighten the load on the front wheel and to try and drive though it. Maybe I lacked the courage of my conviction and came on and off the throttle instead of keeping it open but the resulting slewing from the handlebars was now throwing me around and I knew I was going down. Awful moment but I got away with it unscathed (other than my bruised pride and punctured ego) but behind me Sudi had also gone down (ironically the two of us were the only ones with some off-road training) and trapped his left ankle under his aluminium pannier – thankfully not broken but swollen and bruised.

Sadly my view of it was more of a close-up than I wanted.

This is Sudi cooling his swollen ankle in the pool at Kasbah Du Jardin in Ait Benhaddou and the bikes parked up. DaveH unbends parts of my bike including the front spotlight that got turned into a nostril illuminator. Oh dear.

Some great views on the ride.

This is up in the Jebel Saghro southwest of Ouarzazate :-

And the familar scene of Ait Benhaddou :-

Day 8.

Today (Sunday October  16th) we’re heading for the town of Zagora – home of the famous “Timbuktu 52 days” sign.

It’s a bit different from “Membury Services 12miles” and dates from a time when trading caravans used to stop here on their way to Timbuktu.

Within 100metres of leaving Kasbah Mohayut we’re lost. We head out down the dirt track to the paved road and turn right (correctly). Then the left turn we need to get onto the Erfoud road says “No Entry” so we head straight on into the southern Moroccan equivalent of suburbia and end up surrounded by a swarm of young boys on bikes.

We eventually get out and we’re on the road to Erfoud which is where our poor man’s satnav (an Android tablet with maps.me) was taking us rather than the slightly shorter road to Rissani.

Slightly befuddled because it’s not the road we came in on I pull over to check with the others. Massive dunes to our left on the way into town, massive dunes to our right on the way out. That’s the general standard of my non-digital navigational skills but feels correct in this instance.

ManB: “We’re headed East” (i.e. wrong direction).

ManC: “No we’re not – we’re heading North.”

ManB: “We need to turn left.”

ManA: “Where? There’s no f$scking road!”

It’s not a great start to the day that turns out to be when the question about whether to fill up before leaving or whether to first ride on a while finally gets put to bed. We’ve had the same discussion at the start of almost every day and invariably end up making the wrong decision. We just hadn’t been bitten by it. Until today.

Our “wrong road” out of Merzouga takes us slightly out of our way via Erfoud instead of Rissani but does at least give us the opportunity to find out that neither town has a single drop of unleaded petrol. We press on towards Zagora through seemingly endless miles of arid unforgiving landscape. It doesn’t look like a great place to find shade if we have to.

Roger’s bike isn’t as well endowed in the fuel capacity department as the rest of our bikes and we’re soon fretting.

At the fairly low speeds we’re averaging the bikes are pretty miserly with fuel but no matter how parsimonious they are Roger’s bike isn’t going to make it much further before it splutters to a halt. By the time we get to a third dry petrol station he’s been on reserve for the last 15km and there are 40km more before the next one.

I suspect it’s the way of things in Morocco that they’ve got a thought-out contingency for emergencies (and blundering idiots) and at the third dry petrol station we’re told that if we ride off the main road to the next village we can buy emergency rations to get us to the next fuel stop. One of the locals hops on a ragged little scrambler and we try (and fail) to keep up with him as he races off the main road and down a dirt track about 1km to a tiny little village where the makeshift petrol station is clearly signed.

It’s a candidate for a Design Museum award because not only does it signify a petrol station but it also illustrates the units of measure and the delivery system. It’s genius.

The local that led us to the village on his scrambler rides in jeans and daps with a short-sleeved shirt and no helmet or gloves. He’s a better rider than any of us by a literal country kilometre. No armoured clothing, no flip-front Shoei Neotec helmet, no armoured Goretex jacket. Nothing.

It strikes me how ridiculous we must look to them in our preposterous high-tech swaddling and space-age bikes and gadgets but they’re genuinely polite, helpful and friendly.

I guess he might not have appeared quite as cool if he was trudging 700miles down Spain in a day on that bike in jeans and a t-shirt. Horses for courses I guess so I mustn’t be too hard on us.

We’re mightily grateful even at £10/gallon.

This is what salvation looks like :-

And our saviour’s magnificent steed :-

Roger takes ten litres. The rest of us get 5litres each from anther makeshift petrol station elsewhere in the village.

The next petrol station lives up to it’s name and we’re all relieved to brim our tanks with essence sans plomb. Also filling up is Sonny – a Turk from Istanbul who’s recently been living in the USA and has shipped his bike out from Florida.

He’s heading in the opposite direction to us but we stop and chat and share lunch before getting back on the road. I make a note of a place in Santa Barbara that he recommends and hope to make it there over Christmas when I’m staying with my girlfriend’s lovely family outside Los Angeles.

Today’s 5hr journey ends up taking nearer to 8hrs.

We’ve learnt a lesson today about filling up with fuel as soon as you can. Seems obvious but maybe you need a fright to really bring it home. We’re doing better with accommodation as well having booked ahead at Zagora so all we need to do is find Le Sauvage Noble.

Our navigation aids have given up on us by now – the tablet with the SatNav has burnt the battery at a rate the portable charger can’t keep up with and my iPhone limply coughed  up a furball after a scant 5mins work as a substitute.

Have I mentioned it’s hot here?

It’s hot here.

Luckily the hotel is easily found on the left as we descend the hill into town.

The pink slippers clash with my biking gear. Shame.

This is what a fraught day on the road can do to a man in his prime. Dave Harll, once an adonis but now just broken :-

Next morning before breakfast Sudi and I take the panniers off our bikes and head out to find a piste to try some off-roading. Even if it’s only an hour it’s a box we feel we have to tick after coming all this way and something that we hope might stand us in good stead if we come back to Morocco for a more focused fortnight.

This is the end of a few Km of track and it’s just enough.

Day 7.

Our departure at 8.30am from our self-inflicted shithole hotel in Azrou had a definite “Get the f$sck out of Dodge” feel about it. We’ve had quite a few long rides so far – 11hrs Santander to Algeciras, a relatively short but hair-raising ride at night from Tanger-Med to Chefchaouen (the coast road after Tatoune somehow and then through the mountains) and I can’t remember how many hours from there to Azrou, inching past cars, buses and lorries stuck in mudslides and with rivers of water running across the road at intervals.

With stops for breakfast and fuel but still pressing on reasonably hard we took around 8hrs to get further south to Merzouga and part of the Sahara at Erg Chebbi.

The trip so far had felt a little like a forced march so having two nights at a decent hotel was something we all felt we needed so many thanks to the accommodation thread on HorizonsUnlimited which threw up Kasbah Mohayut – a lovely place with dunes starting at the back door and though it might be a little touristy it really is a beautiful little haven.

Camel rides and a trip into town for the others today. As for me, 1,500miles after leaving Swansea I’m reading a book and taking it easy.

Day 6.

We all felt we should press on but the overnight thunderstorms and forecast of heavy rain showers made us think twice. In the end we decided to set off and assess the situation after reaching the first town. We were headed for Azrou which is a small town south of Meknes and just a stopover on our way to Merzouga and the dunes of the Sahara.

We picked the first hotel we saw after a tough day’s riding through roads made impassable for other vehicles by mudslides and streams of water running across the tarmac. We had to get through three or four places where turning back might have been an option and in one place where diggers were trundling up the road to clear the blockage we’d just slip-slided our way past. A long, hard day’s riding and then to a place where we were mobbed by touts and hassled from the moment we pulled up and a night in a hotel where there was no shower. Not “no shower in your room” but “no shower in the hotel”. The bikes were chained up as best we could and we had a fitful night’s sleep wondering if the bikes would be there in the morning. You don’t get much for your 80MAD (£4 per person) clearly. Azrou then – not much to recommend it from the little we saw but we did have a nice tagine and a few bottles of beer (wrapped in foil as a disguise by the friendly proprietor).

The £4/night hotel really highlighted the folly of just rocking up somewhere with no accommodation booked or even researched. Must do better!

Day 5.

Chefchaouen is a beautiful town in the Rif mountains south of Tangiers. Rain was forecast from lunchtime and as that didn’t leave us enough time to get anywhere of any interest we decided to spend the day there.

The locals couldn’t be more hospitable even going so far as to offer us a guided tour of the plant growing and production facilites. Apparently most of Morocco’s cannabis growing and processing takes place in the Rif. We were pretty sure it wasn’t an official tour and we probably did the right thing by passing on it.

Day 4.

The parts arrived from Madrid and the bike was ready by 1pm. I knew that by the time I was back at the hotel and packed I’d be cutting it fine to get the ferry to Tanger Med and to get to Chefchaouen before dark.

It’s always a little more involved taking a vehicle to a non-EU country and in Morocco’s case you have to complete a form to temporarily import it into the country. The form is in triplicate – one part gets taken from you at customs as you enter the country and another gets taken as you exit the country. The third part must be a memento. Along with the temporary import form you need to complete an immigration form on the ferry. It’s a seemingly sophisticated system where a Moroccan policeman boards the ferry at Algeciras and you all queue up with your completed immigration card and your passport and he enters your details into his laptop computer and issues you a unique ID number that gets stamped into your passport and which you then use to complete your import documentation.

u·nique

yo͞oˈnēk/

adjective

1. being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else.

Unique is a familiar concept for most people but in the case of the Moroccan police it’s got quite a flexible meaning. I couldn’t see if the guy’s laptop was actually fired up but if it was it’s sole purpose was to guarantee that your unique ID has already been assigned to someone else and to ensure that your departure from customs once you reach Tanger Med was a long and painful process then it did it’s job. I managed to change some money at the port but the insurance office that allows you to buy the mandatory third-party cover for the motorbike was already closed. And it was nearly dark.

Tetouan is a fair-sized city of around 500,000 souls. I hadn’t intended to go there at all but the N2 road I was looking for in the dark and without Satnav never came into view so I had to take the long way around to Chefchaouen. Tetouan is about an hour away from Tanger Med after climbing steeply into the mountains and back down again. It’s like some sort of video game getting through the city at 8pm. A crazy but exhilarating introduction to Morocco but the sixty congested miles from there to Chefchaouen, a lot of it on windy mountain roads was probably the most foolhardy and dangerous thing I’ve done on a motorbike.

Overtaking would be crazy on those roads. Probably very nearly as dangerous as not overtaking and waiting for a stream of mad-eyes to take you out by overtaking you in some hare-brained manoeuvre.

I promised myself I wouldn’t ride in the dark in Morocco and managed to break that promise the moment I arrived. I wouldn’t choose to do it again but I loved every moment of it – one of the most exhilarating rides I’ve ever had.

This road sign as far as I could discern it’s meaning from the local driving behaviour   means “It’s really rather dangerous but hey – why not give it a go anyway!”

You’d have thought I’d spotted the three BMWs lined up on the road outside Hotel Rif in Chefchaouen as I went sailing past.

But no.

Where would be the fun in that?

Day 3.

We manage to get out of the port at Santander with only one small wrong turn. It’s Sunday and there’s nowhere to get my bike fixed so we decide to stick to our woolly plan and point the bikes towards Jerez – what I like to call the “bottom” of the country but some people might call South. My bike’s patched-up with the bottom of a Tesco “bag-for-life” and a couple of cable-ties. As good as new (nearly).

Jerez is 617miles from Santander. Sudi is the only one of whose ridden that sort of distance in a single day before. It seems a long way but I’m interested to see what that sort of mileage feels like. The answer of course is bloody awful. Until the last hour I felt like I could join the Iron-Butt clan but the last of the nearly 11hrs just about broke me. So – an interesting experiment but not one that I’ll be repeating anytime soon.

Our 2am arrival at Hotel Dona Blanca in Jerez was a fraction later than we’d anticipated and the city centre location on cobbled streets made me slightly apprehensive of the solo run across town in the morning to the BMW dealer. As it happened the Monday was a fiesta so I was just about the only one in Jerez on the roads. Sadly that included the mechanics at the garage that was not only closed but didn’t have anything to do with bikes either (my internet powers having deserted me temporarily). So, with the other guys still enjoying breakfast at the hotel I decided to head to the port city of Algeciras where there was another dealer (surely, surely I couldn’t get it wrong again) both open and specialising in motorbikes!

Javier at the dealership was brilliant but without the necessary parts wasn’t able to do anything. Javier ordered the parts from Madrid and I headed to the nearest Marriott to further recover from the previous day and night’s exertions. Sudi, Dave and Roger wanted to wait for me to get the bike repaired but I insisted they should go on. It’s stressful enough having to get your bike fixed in a foreign country without also having three other people waiting for it to happen.