Closing the loop…

Arrival back into Marrakech was something of an anti-climax after the truly fantastic riding of the last 8 days or so, since my last update in fact… I arrived back into the madness of the Djemaa el Fna, chugged a couple of glasses of fresh squeezed orange juice from one of the carts that characterise the square and then rode off into the medina in search of my digs… game over. 36 degs C doesn’t even feel particularly hot any more… Looking back it has been a really fantastic ride, every single day has been deeply satisfying. The riding has been hard going at times and as such extremely rewarding, with of course the added pleasure that comes from the warmth and hospitality of the Berber people. I’m getting ahead of myself however…

I really was feeling rather buggered in Boumalne when I last wrote (also the last occasion I had a connection to the outside world), a combination of recovering from the chest bug that hit me in N’kob, some hard riding across the Jebel Sahro and less than ideal diet… but with no desire to hang around in the town a short day was in order.. something to spin the legs and ease any restlessness. So I trundled north of town, climbing slowly into the Dades Gorge.. to the head of the gorge some 33km from Boumalne where I camped in what passes for the garden of one of the very many guesthouses that litter the place. The gorge is very much tour group land, I didn’t feel at home at all, although it was a nice ride up and I did find it quite amusing to be stared at by a bunch of french tourists off a bus at a cafe I stopped for coffee :-)

From there subsequent days took on a flavour of just navigating village to village in the High Atlas, making use of the network of dirt tracks and trails that link the villages.. some 460km of dirt in the end, and relying on local knowledge for finding my way on trails that appear to be largely unmapped. I imagine local trekking maps will show many of them but the ones I’ve seen cover too small an area to be of use on a bike journey. Luckily though folk in the villages are only too willing to help with directions and ideas for interesting ways to get to the next place, and the gites that can be found in some villages to serve the trekking market are very handy for information. At times it feels like a leap of faith heading off onto the next stretch but the reality is that if there is a track then it only exists to serve the purpose of getting from somewhere to somewhere else.. and if the somewhere else isn’t exactly where you wanted to be there will be another track… my compass did come in handy on a couple of occasions when faced with a multitude of tracks heading off, and I did go wrong on a couple of occasions but not very wrong and it was no big deal to get back on track by asking in the villages. The only other thing to be aware of is that whatever distance you are quoted it’s pretty certain it’ll be at least half as much again… and sometimes double :-) I haven’t got a GPS…  to be honest I rather enjoy the interaction with local folk and discovering trails that way than blindly following a bunch of waypoints…it is very satisfying. I’m also not particularly keen on a reliance on a tech. Just old fashioned I think, have done it this way for years and perhaps too much of a duffer to change ;-)

The high mountain trails really are brilliant… lots of challenging climbing on loose rocks, some faster hard-packed sections, technical descending and breathtakingly beautiful. They are also extremely quiet.. the only traffic I encountered for much of the riding being a few folk on horseback. I did on one occasion meet a bunch of European mountain bikers with a support 4×4… I barely got an acknowledgement to my cheery wave beyond a stare so wondered if perhaps they were feeling silly in their body armour on long travel suspension bikes ;-) Water is hard to come by in places so I was typically starting each day with around 8 litres on board… I might not use all of it but it is also something of a ‘security blanket’ in case something goes wrong..broken bike, broken body etc etc.

Rather than bore you with a load more words, and to save myself from being here all day, I’ll just throw a bunch pictures at you by way of giving you a flavour of the journey and then, out of consideration for my fellow passengers on the flight tomorrow, I can go and do some laundry… it has been a while, my shorts are stiff enough with dirt to stand up by themselves and as for my socks… well, ‘toxic’ is the word that springs to mind :-) Apologies for any typos, I’m using a tiny bluetooth keyboard and it suffers from a degree of keybounce now, abused as it has been…

So there you have it. I only managed to ride about 1200km in the three weeks… but almost half of that was on dirt.. at times very rough dirt, and just about all of it was steep, hot, and completely wonderful :-)