Piss wet through, we still had over 50kms to go to reach Imilchil. On these mountain roads, in near darkness, it meant another 2 hours of exhausting riding. Instead of looking at the scenery it was all we could do to stop becoming part of it.
We finally stumbled in to town, shivering and aching. Like a beacon in the dark we found the softly glowing lights of Chez Bassou. We knocked on the door, part in hope, part in desparation.
After what seemed like an age the door opened slightly. This was evidently not the first time a bunch of bedraggled travellers had turned up at the owner’s door. As we were the only guests he beckoned us and our bikes in to the restaurant.
We chucked ourselves on some cushions and slowly unzipped our jackets as all the aches and pains started to hit home. Our hair was matted, faces full of dust but all that mattered was the pot of refreshing tea that the owner laid down in front of us.
Half an hour later we were tucking into a hot lamb tagine. All hail Morroccan hospitality. It beats a muesli bar from a Travelodge vending machine any day of the week.
After dinner Greg returned to whinging about his hurty leg. Naturally we ignored him until he rolled up his trousers. Said leg had turned into what looked like a doner kebab spit with a purple rinse.
We had a fleeting moment of sympathy before reverting to calling him a bellend for crashing in the first place.
Suddenly everything felt back on track. We woke in the morning to blazing sunshine. And a power cut.
He liked to touch our helmets
Not cloudy. No chance of meatballs.
The plan today was to cross the High Atlas mountains all the way to the mouth of the Dades Gorge. The route through the mountains was nothing more than a dirt path more frequented by cattle than vehicles.
One slight issue. No power = no working fuel pumps.
The options were either to hang around waiting for the power to come back on or set off with only the fuel we had on board and hope we didn’t end up stranded in the middle of the mountains.
After a group discussion we decided the sensible option was to wait for the power to come back on, so we didn’t, and headed out into what was an increasingly desolate and hot landscape. Perfect.
Imilchil is over 2,000 metres in altitude and our route through the High Atlas would take us to over 3,500 metres due to a slight navigation error (more on that later).
With temperatures at night plummeting compared to the daytime we really didn’t want to get stranded overnight.
Our tactic was to keep a slow and steady pace using as little fuel as possible. Unfortunately, conditions conspired against us. The track was strewn with rocks and was so bumpy that trying to maintain throttle control was like trying to not spill your pint on a bucking bronco. On top of that the gradient was so steep that we had to drop down to first gear and generally nail it to get anywhere.
The scenery was amazing, only spoilt by the fact that if you took your eyes off the track long enough to marvel at the surroundings you either hit a rock and fell off or got vertigo and fell off.
After a couple of hours of steep ascent we crested a summit to be greeted by a view all the way down the valley as far as the eye could see. All the way to the Sahara itself. In the face of such an awe inspiring panorama, we decided it must be time for lunch.
From here on in “lunch” took a different form. We now had to delve into our stash of food impervious to both scorching temperatures and being rattled around constantly on the back of the bikes. We needed sealed or dried food with a half life of several thousand years. Or put another way, Lithuanian army rations.
Kaspars had used a contact back home to secure us a job lot of post-apocalypse food. The only problem being that with the ingredients written in Lithuanian even Kaspars had no idea whether we were eating tuna pasta or depleted uranium. You have to be slightly wary of a brown stick that looks and tastes like chocolate but which doesn’t melt at 40 degrees.
As scenery goes, it was one of our more impressive lunch stops. Whilst unpacking the food and firing up the petrol stove (having momentarily forgotten we were supposed to be conserving fuel), a goat herder appeared. Or just a man being followed by goats.
It never ceases to be a surprise that no matter how remote you think you are someone appears from nowhere, or in this case from behind a rock. It had taken us three hours to reach here by moped and we hadn’t passed a single house, so where the hell were he and his goats going?
Bizarrely the only other humans we’d seen all day were three lads from Manchester in a Volvo coming the other way. The herder eventually meandered over and climbed on Oz’s moped. He asked us to take some photos. We did. He then demanded we pay for the photos. We didn’t.
He then switched his attention to the contents on the stove. After a few nods and the motioning of his fingers in to his mouth we got the jist that he was hungry.
We offered up our selection of sealed foil bags, the contents of which his guess was as good as ours. He picked one out and seemed delighted until he actually tasted it. With a gag, followed by a spit, the half chewed contents of his mouth sat there glistening in the sun.
He wiped his mouth and shuffled off without saying anything. Obviously not as hungry as he made out then if he could afford to be picky about it. It was only after he’d gone that we realised he’d picked out pork meatballs and beans. This did raise the question though, how does someone who doesn’t eat pork know that they are eating pork? Anyway, we rid ourselves of any guilt by blaming the Lithuanian army for not writing things in English.
On a road to nowhere
Flat white or cappucino Sir?
After a hearty lunch of who-knows-what and a quick check round the bikes to check that nothing essential had fallen off we pressed on towards the horizon as the temperature continued to soar. By mid-afternoon we were really starting to flag. The combination of the terrain, heat and dust was tiring on the body and the eyes and the problem was there was absolutely no shade of any description since we were now well above the tree line.
Enter, Hotel Tizi, a “hotel” of such randomness that it wouldn’t have been all that surprising if it was staffed by pandas. Located on a mountain top, it was hardly a prime High St location. At best, that day they would have had passing trade from us, three blokes in a Volvo and a hungry man being followed by goats.
We were enticed in by the thought of an ice cold Coke but alas although they had a fridge with a plug on it, there was no plug socket to put the plug into so it was basically a cupboard with a glass door. We asked for water but they explained the water had to be boiled, in which case we may as well have a steaming hot coffee.
In the circumstances it was not as horrendous as it sounds. To be honest anything that wasn’t warm water from our Camelbaks was a welcome change.
The combination of caffeine and 18 sugars was actually a good pick me up. Oz even produced a packet of biscuits from his battered panniers and we gorged the lot before turning our attention to a different kind of gorge.
That is not a tyre lever
Up the creek without a pump