Moroccan Adventure
Ian Mutch heads to North Africa
Down to Gibralter for a wedding and then the Editor decided to go the extra thousand miles south, well it would have been rude not to...
"Oh no! This can't be happening" I thought, as the wheels slid away from me and the bike went sideways down the crowded street full of pedestrians.
I could blame the woman who walked across my path some ten yards ahead of me I guess, but I hadn't braked that fiercely and at little more than a walking pace the loss of grip had to be down to an oily surface, Kill Spills demo Chefchaouen next year please.
Helping hands approached and I smiled around at the Samaritans, thanking them profusely in English as my Moroccon vocabulary of one word had deserted me. With the bike upright I scraped my foot around on the road surface in an effort to accuse it, and divert attention from my own incompetence which I promptly demonstrated a second time by hitting the starter while in gear. Uncool or what? I jerked forward like a private on parade shoved in the small of the back by the swagger stick of an angry Sergeant Major. Well you know what they say; you come into town looking like Marlon Brando and leave looking like Norman Wisdom.
In minutes I was a few blocks away pondering life when a man approached me. "You want hotel? I show you very clean, very cheap, very close to here, very good you come see, you look." He gestured at his eyes and taking my hesitation for agreement he climbed on to the pillion seat.
"Are you mad?" I thought, I can barely control this machine with me alone aboard it. "What the hell, we'll see where this leads us, off we go." A few hundred yards on we arrived at a stone arch leading into the ancient Medina of Chefchaouen where my guide wisely dismounted and beckoned me forward. I was unsure about this but followed him for a few yards to a point where the route narrowed and the road surface telegraphed the 'Not for Harley-Davidsons' message loud and clear.
"Are you sure?" I shouted at him with some incredulity as he waved me onwards. The idea of riding a large motorcycle into this menagerie of vegetable carts, livestock, children, hooded sages, and Burka-cloaked women seemed bizarre, but I'd entered a bizarre world so whatever - lead on McAchmed. Minutes later I was lodged in a hotel whose heavy timber door was set amidst the startling blue stone walls enclosing an atrium around which were arranged perhaps 20 neat rooms. I was invited to bring the bike right inside the entrance lobby for safety, after which I went out on the town in quest of lamb tagine and mint tea.
Later that evening under the setting sun, I arranged myself on the roof with my laptop to do some typing as the Imams called the faithful to worship. Three stories high, amidst the forest of drying laundry and TV ariels atop centuries-old sun-bleached buildings, I was a spectator in this foreign theatre's dress circle. Up here at the end of a day packed with anxieties and exotic imagery the hills singing to me through the voices of the imams, I was saturated by a spectacular sense of the surreal. I'd shifted worlds, I'd shifted centuries.
Day two and my journey progressed through a landscape of hills into which patches of cultivation were insinuated where the rockier features permitted. By midday the terrain levelled off, spreading out into pure farmland. Here now were broad fields of empty soil extending for miles as far as the eye could see. The crops had been harvested from a land that now lay fallow in vast gently undulating mounds of fertility which took me by surprise, as it conflicted with my perception of Morocco as simply Sahara.
By afternoon the view changed further as the land became drier and more desert-like. The road wasn't bad for the most part, though care had to be exercised as drastic irregularities appeared without warning. In some areas the right hand side of my lane on this twin track road had sunk six inches or more, the severity of the decline being enough to send a bike right off the road if its rider was caught unawares. In view of this I held a course closer to the white line where the tarmac was more reliably flat, moving over for on-coming traffic which expected to have right of way, I soon learned. At one point a car coming from the opposite direction lurched violently toward me, crossing the white line and plunging in my direction, propelled, I imagined, by the asphalt 'tramlines' of its own lane. Such moments of anxiety were supplemented on the negative scale pan of experience by the persistent filth of diesel smoke belching from the badly maintained trucks and cars sharing this scenic track with my bike and ten thousand donkeys.
As the day wore on, the pot-pouri of vivid images overcrowded my memory. Flights of birds darted across my track, a flock of sheep poured suddenly up over the road urged on by shepherds. Over to my right the land fell away to a wide shallow river running between huge rock formations where women battering laundry on great smooth slabs stood upright to wave at me. Wild dogs trotted along the roadside like guards, studying me carefully. A truck up ahead bristled with people, the open back doors exposing a sea of faces, others stood on a footplate and clung to bars while a dozen crouched on the roof rack, their robes flapping in the diesel breeze. I waved to them as I passed, a conductor firing up his orchestra with a gesture that transformed the vehicle into a sea anenomae of waving limbs and 'air throttle hands' as the travellers grinned and shouted encouragement.
Donkeys trotted along the roadside, laden with straw and vegetables, piloted by smallholders carrying their produce. The riders studied my approach, their eyes telegraphing curiosity as the contrasting cultures passed each other, ships on a dusty ocean. Some waved spontaneously, all returned my waves. On we went, no time to stop for long, just many picture stops. Cross to the other side of the road where the ground sloped left, kick down the side stand, unzip the left pannier, camera out, snap snap, zip, back on board and onwards.
At one point I passed through great avenues of plane trees reminiscent of provincial France, their thick smooth lower trunks painted white to assist those foolish enough to drive at night. Do not ride at night - that was the advice given to me by others and I had no intention of ignoring it.
I wanted to cover a good distance today to make up for my slow progress of the first day. Ideally I wanted to be right down to the South Eastern corner of my route into the Sahara, from where I would then head West toward the Atlantic coast on the other side of the country. I would feel more relaxed then, more like I was on my way home, a strange appetite for this early stage of the trip maybe, but I had not yet gone native and overcome the long-standing fear I had of Africa. Further south still and the land began to climb again, cutting into a forest of cedar trees where I was astonished to encounter a sight for which I was not prepared. The first ran across the road in front of me as I rolled slowly between the scented pines.
"That's an odd looking dog" I thought as it loped across my track, stopping mid-lane and sitting up to study me. What the blazes? It's a bloody ape! A policeman standing by the roadside grinned at my astonishment as I manoeuvred around the beast and pulled off the road into a layby where two local lads sat swinging their legs on a crumbling stone wall. "Quick, quick," I thought. "The camera, get the camera out." It was then that I became aware of movement all around me as a legion of hairy folk paused to study the goggled arrival on the iron horse. I was amongst the trees now and, in front of me, to the left and to the right, just about everywhere I looked in fact - apes, I was surrounded by apes, Barbary apes if I'm right, the same kind that inhabit the Rock of Gibraltar, and upon whose hairy shoulders the fate of the outpost rests.
I didn't have hours to hang around if I was to make Erichidia by nightfall so it was onward ever onward, the miles clicking up on the tacho past the 200 then 300, for a day in which I'd had no breaks except to take pictures and fill the fuel tank, oh and to photograph dead snakes. I've never come across serpent roadkill before so it was another first and though the creature had the look of a venomous reptile, I felt a little sorry for it and took several pictures which gave a small hunched woman time enough to trot up and request money from me. I gave her a coin whereupon her four children appeared like genies from a lamp to pose for a picture before forming an orderly line, palms upturned. Having cashed them all up I climbed aboard and headed off into what was looking much more like the Sahara I had anticipated. Not sandy but rocky hard land flanked by scenic formations offering little that I could see to sustain its population. Ancient walled forts appeared now, brown like the countryside, images from the movies so romantic, a sceptic would think them the extravagance of big budget Hollywood directors.
I was getting anxious about the time now. The map showed a part of the Atlas mountain range ahead and the hotelier had warned of rain. The thought of mountain bends in the rain with the added problem of darkness filled me with a choking sense of dread as I looked at the growing cloud formations in the darkening evening sky. I once met a biker who told me he liked riding in the rain, an appetite I found so disturbing that I was never able to look at him in quite the same way again. The formula is simple; rain bad; rain, mountains, darkness, tears.
Up ahead, a wall of rock grew in front of me and up we went through a series of hairpins from which dramatic views over giant landscapes unfolded. The occasional trucks I encountered were struggling badly with the gradients, groaning through tortured gearboxes and pumping diesel fumes like ancient destroyers making smoke to confound enemy gunners. The Harley snorted past them with satisfying ease, its huge 1450cc engine jumping fifty feet from negligible revs at the twist of a throttle every time opportunity allowed. Out of the bends though still in the Atlas, the road straightened out, cutting through broad passes flanked by great rock formations.
I'd begun counting the mileage to Erichidia now, performing mental arithmetic with the kilometres and drawing some satisfaction when the remaining distance fell below the 100-mile mark, then 80 then 70. The road was mostly straight now with speeds of 60 mph or more quite possible, but still it wasn't enough. As the sun sank lower behind the hills I realised I wasn't going to make it before nightfall. With 30 miles to go to Erichidia I passed a huddle of low buildings showing light. A handful of figures sat outdoors at tables drinking mint tea and contemplating the Sahara beneath an awning decorated with the legend 'Berber Tagine.' Seeing no hotel sign and not much encouraged by the look of the place I rode on a quarter mile before pulling off the road to study the map as if by scrutinising it I could make Erichidia draw closer.
I tried phoning the Brigadier to see if the place he'd marked was worth risking night riding to reach but I couldn't get a connection. It was then that a wild eyed figure on a bicycle pedelled up the hill to ask "You want hotel?" This was Ali.
"There is hotel down here?" I asked, gesturing back at the buildings I'd just passed.
"You come look" he said. "Come with me, don't go ahead, we go in together." I couldn't help noting that he didn't actually say "yes." Obviously he was on a cut if he could draw visitors, so I rode along slowly in second gear as he pedelled alongside on the empty road, grinning like a demon and making conversation in spite of his physical efforts.
"This is first day on bicycle for me" he panted, "first day, I just get this today." After viewing the 'simple' room I was invited to occupy I had my doubts. A mattress on the floor covered with a blanket that knew little of washing machines was not quite what I'd had in mind, I didn't even bother asking about sheets.
"Is there a shower?"
"Shower, ah?"
"Shower, water?" I made raining signs on the top of my head.
"Ah water, yes." Ali opened a door to a tiny room occupied by an asian toilet and indicated a tap extended by a short length of hose set into one wall. Hmmmm.
"Over here is hot springs" he gestured to a point in the distance.
"People come from many miles to bathe in hot springs. It is good for health for bones, he indicated his joints, elbows knees, "good" he grinned at me with a mouth heavy with metal.
I was a bit dubious about it all, but the real issue was food, did they have any? I'd survived all day on a croissant and bottled water and I was ravenous. Ali led me to another building featuring a football machine, two plastic tables, four chairs and a portrait of the king. On the small bar sat an earthenware tagine, inside which was the most appetising meal I had clamped eyes on in weeks.
"OK I'll stay." I secured my room in the bunkhouse with a small padlock on the door and crossed the yard of rubble, where a barbecue was being fired up in a metal drum. With a mint tea to lubricate the nosebag I was as happy as Larry and the lamb tagine was every bit as good as it looked. I took the Brigadier's advice and washed my hands with the antiseptic gel, as according to him you can get sick from bacteria that you collect on your hands by touching things. "What kind of things?" I'd asked him. "Anything" he'd told me, door knobs, chair backs, anything. I was a bit doubtful but I didn't have time to get sick and spend even a day laid up so I took his advice.
I'd ridden over 300 fairly demanding goat-dodging miles and I was exhausted but I was now ahead of schedule with a lot of Morocco under my belt and was beginning to feel good about the trip. Sitting in the simple stone building in the warm evening air, stuffing my face with the tagine and soaking up the karma, I was beginning to feel as if I belonged. The few locals playing pool at a table outside on the veranda had stopped peering at me, as I blended chameleon-like into the landscape, shoveling food, sipping mint tea and scribbling in my notebook. A bearded character in a floppy hat sat down on a plastic chair a few yards from me, nodding and grinning in my direction before lapsing into a contemplative stare that suggested a soul with time on his hands. Ali explained. "This man is good man but he has some troubles here" he indicated his head. "He has some problem in his head but his heart is good, in his heart he is good man."
My motorcycle was parked under a reed awning sheltering some outdoor mattresses on which a couple of youths stretched themselves for the night. My prize possession was closely guarded.
At midnight I laid out my clothes on the blanket and put my panniers next to my head. I needn't really have worried, these were decent people, they didn't have great wealth but they seemed like decent people to me.
Day 3 I was up early and keen to find the hot springs, sticky as I still was with yesterday's sweat. Three Euros bought me access to the bath house where scorchingly hot water bubbled from a pipe and flowed down a sloping floor to a pool a foot deep. Several men in trunks sat around the edges of this steaming cauldron while others lay on their backs with their hands and feet in the air. All looked at the stranger who had come to take the waters, roaring with laughter as I retreated in pain from the scalding slope. Now I understood two things. Firstly, why the men had their feet in the air and secondly why it is that striking the soles of the feet is a popular torture method of interrogators. With persistence I finally got wet all over and felt clean and that was enough for me.
Back on the road I felt good, the daytime heat was building but I was washed and rested. What I did not realise was that I was going the wrong way. The Brigadier had marked two routes on the map, one big southern loop and a more northerly shorter one in case I ran short of time. It was while unwittingly traversing this shorter loop that I stopped to photograph a scene and spotted a chilling name painted above me on the rock 'Ossama.' Photograph time for sure, courtesy of time delayed photography.
Eventually I came to a cross-roads decorated with signs that baffled me and it was here that I learned, courtesy of The King of Orange Juice, that I had gone wrong. The King showed me where I had gone wrong and then, to my astonishment, asked if I knew Nick Sanders. Well of course I do, Nick being the raving lunatic who circles the earth on an R1.
"I know Nick" I told him, he's barking, I pointed at my head with a twirling finger to clarify my point. The King laughed and urged me to take orange juice with him at his restaurant only a few yards beyond the junction. Here he showed me pictures of Nick and squeezed three oranges into a tall glass using a metal press. Absolutely delicious! From here, I took a small connecting road to get me back on my planned route.
Small scruffy towns punctuated this track, their high streets crowded with donkeys and vendors, through which I threaded a careful course, mindful of my spill in Chefchaouen. I'd scored nil on the pedestrian kill count there and that was the way I wanted to keep it.
The waving duty was getting a little onerous by now as half the population seemed to need a cheery response which gave me an insight into what it must be like being a royal, it aint for me but it beats the hell out of being stoned to death which was one of my fears.
The Timbouktou cafe was a must for a photograph, though it's actually nowhere near Timbouktou, but I needed to buy more water, so it gave me a short break and then on we went into the heat of the afternoon. I regained the right road at last and headed down to a point close to Erichidia before heading Westward to the town of Rimi where things became confusing.
The signs heading out of Rimi all seemed to want to send me to a place called Mazouga, which I couldn't find anywhere on my map, so I made the mistake of asking people who lived there. Having stopped in the street I opened the map over the tank and pointed at the route I wanted to follow which was clearly marked in a broad river of highlight ink.
Indicating the fork in the road ahead I asked the crowd of youths who gathered around me, "this way or that way?' At first, opinion was fairly evenly divided, but with the passage of several minutes a consensus developed in favour of the left fork. The advice strengthened in conviction until I had a dozen arms all pointing emphatically down the road that I suspected was right, so off I went. Twenty minutes later, with my suspicions aroused by the position of the sun on my right hand side rather than my left, I stopped and unfolded the map again. A moped rider came along soon and in response to my vacant gestures, he turned around and joined me in staring at the flapping map slowly dissolving in the sweat from my hands.
"This way?" I asked, pointing ahead and indicating the highlighted route.
"Yes yes" much furious nodding and unequivocal pointing of an arm.
"OK" I thought, this many people can't be wrong, and on we went. Another twenty minutes and the sun was still on my right. As an ex- navigator I understand these things and this was all wrong. Then a thought occurred to me. Of course! I had travelled so far south that my latitude was now south of the sun's declination (its celestial latitude). This means that from my perspective the sun will be north of me, so in the afternoon with me on a Westerly course, it will be to my right, Eureka! What a fool I'd been. And so I travelled on further, bolstered by my conviction as a strengthening hot wind lifted sand off the desert, blowing it into my mouth to the point where my vigorous humming of the 633 Squadron theme was accompanied by an unpleasant crunchiness. Blessedly the brilliant foam lined goggles (see trade news) protected my eyes completely, which enabled me to see that the road was filling up so that the navigable section of it was down to one lane.
Fortunately very little traffic came the other way, but when it did it expected the full width of tarmac, while I had to move onto an indistinct band of uncertainty to avoid becoming part of the landscape. "Just as well there's not much traffic" I thought, trying as I was to look on the bright side of a day that had become quite arduous, and then it hit me. "I'm a halfwit!" it's Sep 22, practically the autumnal equinox, the sun's declination can't be North of my latitude, it's way South, on the equator in fact and I am not yet on the equator, not by a long shot. "I AM going the wrong bloody way! Deciding that it was best to keep going until I saw a sign, I did just that, after pausing to smother my face in more sun block and swallowing the last of my water. having drunk two litres in as many hours. "Well I guess this road leads somewhere" I thought.
When I was at sea I much preferred the life of a navigator to that of an engineer for several reasons, one of which was that if the engine broke you went nowhere until it was fixed, whereas if you were lost as I often was, you just kept going and always ended up somewhere. The trick of course was not to look surprised when it wasn't where you were expecting. My road naturally came to an end, literally. Passing through a large stone arch, I rolled onto a broad area of rubble, beyond which a line of low buildings occupied the foreground of a vista dominated by giant sand dunes in the distance. A goat bleated at me as a mutt, awoken by my engine, lifted its head to peer at me before laying it back on its paws, too hot to bother. This didn't look right. I cut the engine, pushed my goggles up on to my forehead and took out the map again as a smiling, blue-robed Berber tribesman approached me with outstretched hand.
"How are you ?" he asked in perfect English just like all the best aliens in Dr Who.
"I am completely lost." I told him.
"I don't know where I am."
"You're here" he told me, stabbing at the map to indicate a place way off my route to the South East in deep desert.
"Mazouga!" My how I laughed.
Next issue camel riding with the Berbers, chicken tagine and the Bikers Home....
^top