Touring Morocco on a Motorcycle Adventure

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This morning we found ourselves doing the conga behind five other tourists led by a very serious policeman. It's sole purpose, to fool the laser controlled security gate on our way to be interviewed and stamped in Tanger port's immigration department.

This port is brand new but they have still decided to make people walk 500m across carparks and from building to building for different pieces of paper. It's all done with a stern demeanour and no smiles, yet at the same time there is a definite air of mischief about the proceedings. At least now we have an immigration story to tell.

Leaving the port on the new motorway we find children tight rope style walking along the barrier of it's central reservation. Shepherds with twelve sheep and a calf line the embankments and locals, whose walk home has obviously been calved up by six lanes of fresh tarmac, are crossing it on their commute home. 

When you see a man riding a donkey across the motorway you know you've arrived in Morocco.

At last we make it to Larache, a terrible hell hole of a seaside town or the jewel in Moroccos crown. We are yet to discover which.

We woke up in a large hotel situated in a bussling city centre to the sound of a very confident cockerel. 

Half an hours ride out of Larache and Ashley tells me all thats running through her head is "Arr donkey....oh dead dog.....Arr donkey..... oh dead dog".

The main forms of transport in this country are legs, donkeys, old Mercedes belching out black smoke and mules pulling wooden carts on car wheels. Leaving the city all of these modes clog the road ahead of us.

Since leaving northern Spain we have seen perhaps three proper motorcycles, non of which appeared to be on holiday. We are stared at constantly, especially Ashley. It seems a woman riding a tiny air cooled trail bike is a rare sight and it's fun watching the heads turn as she takes the lead.

Neither of us has ever ridden outside of Europe and Ashley, with her newly acquired licence has previously only ridden one hour from the doorstep, once.

In the same way that in the UK you are never out of sight of a road sign, here it's a human being. Some look dead lying next to the road, others stand watching their flock or a single cow. Some sit next to a box of oranges or just three bottles of Coke for sale.  I even saw a man sitting quietly watching his potatoes grow.

Still riding and hunting for accommodation as the sun set, we narrowly avoided several collisions with the hairy Barbery apes in the snowy cedar forests outside Azrou.

The diversity and scale of this landscape is the greatest I have ever seen. I remember seeing this part of the world on television when the Paris Dakar was still accurately named but I didn't realise then just how truly immense it actually was. Its almost too big to squeeze through the lens of my camera and as we ride through the Atlas range everything just gets bigger and bigger. 

At the end of today we finally saw a group of other motorcycles, six big BMWs. Following them was a Toyota Land Cruiser support vehicle towing a spare BMW, just in case. 

We have a spare inner tube, just in case. Oh and a tin of emergency peanuts...which I have just eaten sitting next to our hotel pool in Ar-Rachidia.

This morning Ashley beckoned me from the peeling paint bathroom with a strangely calm "Oh look at this!"

Having just got up from doing her posh pilates on the floor she was now watching a scorpion crossing the carpet where moments earlier she had been stretched out, strengthening her core.

      

Just when we thought it was going to be yet more endless desert, we dropped into a huge wide gorge full of date palms and buildings built from mud, an oasis. Slim plumes of smoke rose from house fires scattered across the valley floor and up ahead a large haystack was moving along the verge towards us. It was only as it got closer that I realised there was a donkey underneath it.

By lunch time we had reached the desert and it wasn't long before Ashley accidentally rode off the road into the sand at speed, mesmerised by the sight of our first herd of camels off to the right. Not a problem when the first off road obstacle is twelve miles away.

After reaching the deep and frighteningly narrow Todra gorge we found an Auberge perched on the cliffside at its entrance.

"350 Dirham?, we'll take it!" Ashley looked impressed at her unusually assertive boyfriend. Of course I hadn't heard the "each" but it was a stunning bargain and our room looked down the gorge and dry river bed below. Everything was solar powered and we ate in the restaurant by candle light only.

Today I left Ashley with her book and decided to attempt the gravel 'road' described in our guide book as the 'Todra gorge loop'. A circular route linking two large gorges via mountains and desert.

This turned out to be a far greater under taking than I had imagined and I soon found myself at a lonely 9000ft riding through endless deep gorges along a dry riverbed in driving sleet and thick mist. Soaked through and freezing I could feel nothing beyond my knuckles.

Riding through the snow and mud, looking at the arrow on my sat nav moving very slowly along a very long line I felt that, with hindsight, I may have been rather stupid.

After another hour of rocky riverbed I was back out onto the safety of the tarmac in the adjacent gorge.

However the loop still wasn't over and it was now getting late. I kept texting Ashley to tell her I was still alive but was getting no response.

Back on the main highway I raced back across the desert to our gorge at full speed with the light fading and the sun setting behind me.

As I finally entered the Auberge I spotted Ashley in the hotel kitchen flicking back her hair, laughing loudly and drinking mint tea with Addi, the handsome and charismatic hotel owner.

Apparently she hadn't checked her phone but assured me that she really was beginning to get slightly concerned.

On the the outskirts of Marrakech the craziness began. Our first unusual sight, a scooter with a 5'x5' framed mirror between the rider and pillion coming the other way. Soon we were in the full mellay with every form of transport coming at us from every direction. At the same time we tried to ignore the donkey with the broken leg standing on the remaining three at the side of the road and pressed on. Sat nav soon had us in the old town in six foot wide alleys with speeding mopeds and hunched old ladies.

Riad found and youths paid to guard our bikes for two days, we took to leg power. Walking the streets of this city has been our most dangerous activity so far. The vast maze of alleys are packed with everything you'd expect along with speeding mopeds, donkeys and overloaded carts and bicycles. They brush past your arm at 30mph, the mopeds that is.

It's amazing and the hassle is endless, "Hey my friend, where are you going? You want restaurant?". Then he follows you for a hundred metres becoming less polite by the metre. 

The danger only increases at night when in the dimly lit alleys the mopeds come at you, their riders choosing to carry their helmets over that handy thing on the front, the headlight.

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Leaving Marrakech I could see people staring at us in the same way they stare at Clarkson when he drives yellow Lamborghinis through Kasakstan. 

On the outskirts the road opened out and the traffic instantly disappeared but not before we were treated to the grand finale of motorised madness. A man on a moped, flat out, throttle in one hand sizzling frying pan with omelette in the other. As we overtook him the smell was simply delicious.

As we rode out of the city I looked off high into the sky and thought what strange clouds they were to have such a mixture of both fluffiness and harsh lines. These clouds were mountains and we were heading straight for them.

The road began to enter beautiful valleys, always with a huge river below with fast flowing grey water. 

The Tarmac soon developed a jagged edge on both sides and became slightly less wide than the cars and trucks using it.

This meant lots of off road riding and by off road I mean veering off the strip of Tarmac onto the gravel verge whenever a truck or car came at us in the opposite direction, which thankfully wasn't very often.

Because Johnnie Foreigner drives on the wrong side of the road and as the river was on our right this meant we were off road between the bitumen and the hundred foot drop to the rapids.

During a stop for lunch Ashley mentioned that many miles ago she had noticed that my rear luggage box was bouncing a lot and looked like it was about to fall off. When I looked at it I discovered that a weld on the rack had snapped and my luggage was indeed about to fall off!

By now we were half way across the pass in the usual middle of nowhere. 

Five hundred metres later we rode past a building with lots of unfinished steelwork lying outside and three welders taking a tea break. I turned round, explained the situation to them in my best 1981 school French and moments later I was stripping the bike down to hand over the offending part. A few more moments later and I was re-assembling the repaired and repainted rack. My new friend then silently took my hands in his, wiped off the paint and oil with some turps, sprinkled my hands with washing powder and poured water over them from a five gallon drum. I gave him double what he asked and we left waving.

By now I am completely taking for granted the fact that when we ride past the people of southern Morocco they pretty much all look up or even run to the edge of the road smiling and waving. Bikes like ours with riders in open face helmets seem to be an unusual sight and I have forgotten what it's like to be ignored by everyone except for the odd bloke who recognises the sound of a four stroke single.

We have a long ride ahead of us from the coast back towards Marrakech today. I am up at 7.00am in search of yet another metal fabricators, handing over my metal luggage rack for its second repair in two days.

Back at the hotel I refitted the rack to my bike only to discover that Ashley's front tyre was completely flat.

I repaired it and at last had breakfast.

Back on the big roads north and the clutch on Ashley's SL230 begins to slip, badly.

By the time we hit the new motorway through the mountains it starts raining and the clutch problem has us down to under 30mph with over a hundred miles to go.

Northern Spain is looking optimistic.

In order to get home to continue our lives Ashley abandons any thoughts of mechanical sympathy and we plough on, sometimes reaching downhill speeds of up to 35mph!

Our only hope is to not bypass Marrakech as planned but to head into the city for help.

Reaching the city in the dark the Garmin leads us to the closest, and easiest to spot in the chaos, hotel and we begin to think of a solution.

Planning the trip I had read that the person to contact in an emergency was a Dutch tour operator called Peter back at 'Bikershome' in Ouazazoute.

I called him. He answered from somewhere in the desert and told us Nouraddine at Loc2rouse bike hire would be able to sort us out.

I called him and he instructed us to be at his office at 9.00am. He sounded like a man who could sort things out.

We googled his address and in the sprawl that is Marrakech he was 500m down the road. If necessary we could have pushed the bike there. 

After a night of frantic googling,as I got into bed Ashley pointed out that this kind of holiday wasn't conducive to a healthy relationship because with everything that was going on apparently "we weren't talking" anymore.

I grunted, rolled over and went straight to sleep, utterly and completely exhausted.

Four floors below street level, in the corner of a carpark, in a glorious workshop filled with BMW and Honda bikes I took the side off the engine and handed over the tricky stuff to Nouraddine's mechanic.

To do this job Honda's special tool 702474 is required to remove the oil filter and clutch basket.

This man had a special hammer and steel punch, which worked beautifully. 

Next we were in a crewcab pickup being whisked across town in search of new parts.

At what looked like an ironmongers the bikes removed clutch basket was handed over and three men scuttled off in three different directions, one of them out of the shop. They returned with three different parts from three bikes, none of them a Honda.

After a long and animated discussion one part was assembled and Nouraddine turned to me and said "It is different but it will work".

Back in the workshop the bike was reassembled expertly. We started it up. It worked. A little snatchy but better snatchy than slippy I always say.

Incredibly, when pushed Nouraddine would only accept some money for the parts and some change to go to his mechanic but flatly refused any further payment, explaining that relationships in Morocco were far more important than money. 

Before setting off we had coffee on the street quite taken aback by the whole experience and the kindness of strangers.

As we get closer to Casablanca the traffic demographic begins to resemble that of somewhere just outside Knutsford. 

 I pulled out to overtake a slow moving truck when a fast moving Porsche Cayenne overtook me on the inside, it's driver waving his fist British style.

Driving into the city we hit rush hour traffic that wasn't going to let us filter between it with our wide luggage.

The three lane queue was huge and as we sat in the middle lane we found car after car on either side of us winding their windows down to start a friendly conversation with "Big trip?"

 After all the sights of the last three weeks this was like driving into downtown Los Angeles, orderly lines and posh cars with more D.K.N.Y than D.O.N.K.E.Y.

When we finally got to the centre it was obvious that this was a totally different Morocco.

We tried several hotels but soon realised that we really didn't want to pay five nights worth of accommodation to have our bikes valet parked by a man in a top hat.

Leaving the the city, we headed back to the relative safety of the motorway and rode onto Rabat and a bed for the night.

Ashley flung open the third story hotel curtains this morning proclaiming "That's right Arab men-a naked woman. DEAL WITH IT!".

This impressive display of female emancipation soon crumbled as she spotted a lone dog on a flat roof three stories up across the street. Returning to her default settings she started creating a very tragic back story as to how it got there with lots of sentences beginning with "What if he......?". 

This dog was wagging it's tail and was possibly the happiest dog I'd seen in three weeks.

This mornings rainstorm possibly saved our lives. We delayed setting off until it had passed and ten miles out of town came across a steep hill of utter chaos. We tentatively made our way over huge oil slicks amongst cars now on their roofs, their occupants standing bloodied on the road side. One truck had jack knifed and another lorry that had gone through the barrier was now somewhere down the hillside. Moroccans do not like wet roads.

The road to our Mediterranean ferry gave plenty of time to think about friends and family, about past life choices made, people I may have let down, regrets, career decisions, the future and all the what ifs.

Obviously I didn't do any of that, I spent the time usefully deciding what model of bike I should do this sort of trip on next time and what modifications I could make to it. This passed many hours quite happily. I've decided on a Honda.

On the ferry Ashley asked what I had missed most, whilst being away from home for so long.

"Greggs the bakers". I thought it but didn't say it out loud, obviously.

Please visit our podcast here;

The Trail and Adventure Motorcycle Podcast