The town of Boumaine is known for the Dades gorges
which follow the river of the same name into the hills to the north (Morocco
has many rivers, we've been crossing them all week and they all have odd names
as you might expect. What they don't seem to have, however, is any water. Occasionally,
we might gasp in awe at a trickle of silver thinner than Longford Brook but in
the main the rivers here are dry but for a few weeks each year when melting
snow turns them into raging torrents but, all in all, not the sort of place for
Mr and Mrs Trout to have a happy life). Our run to Ouarzazate was short, a mere
70 miles and so we decided to use the spare time to make a brief excursion
through the Dades gorges and were well rewarded for doing so. What followed
were twenty miles of twisting roads with switch-backs more reminiscent of the Alps
culminating in the sequence you can see here, and a well deserved bottle of pop
in the café at the top. The road doesn't go much further beyond here so that
was that. Or was it...?
There are certain times one can look back on as
crossroad moments and a cursory glance at the map at that point was one such.
You see, on the other side of the mountains there was another gorge road and
the two are connected by allegedly four km of what they call 'piste'. This is basically
unmade road, green lane or dirt track. How difficult could it be? After all,
our bikes were just about capable and at worst we could always turn back...
55 miles of mountain sherpa tracks later...
Somewhere along the 'four km of piste' we possibly
took a bit of a wrong turn. It's hard to tell as, well, there are no signs
obviously... and not much road either. The next 7 hours served to make today
the day of the trip, tested our bikes to the limit and us even more so. We
climbed on narrow dirt tracks, the paths becoming rougher the higher we got with very steep drops it paid not to think too much about. Stopping
in tiny Berber villages resembling nothing more than shoddy collections of
ramshackle huts we were swarmed around by dirty, thin children begging for
money and, strangely, for pens. Once we'd given away a lot of what we had and
anything we could write with we headed on... up. The chances of finding a
tarmac-ed road further up a mountain range you would think are a bit slim.
Without really knowing where we were we just expected to turn the next bend and
there would be our route, black and winding, down the mountain. Except it
didn't appear. At 10,000ft (above which in an aircraft you must have oxygen),
things were getting more serious.
In true Red Lion Bikers fashion we pressed on (the
only alternative being to go back and by now we were four hours in). Finally,
the tracks began to descend, and despite a further 20 km of the same rocky
mountain shale where the best policy was definitely 'don't look down!' we
emerged in a village where our Brian bought something in a pop bottle he hoped
was petrol and we were mobbed again by disappointed children who realised we'd
already been fleeced for any spare.
A mere 150 miles to our destination to go... (I'm
sure we only had 70 miles to do this morning... yes, we'd spent the entire day
going in the wrong direction) we finally hit the black top and the gorge road
we'd set out to find seven hours before.
What a day. Too long certainly (a bit like this
post) but one which will be talked of in Herculean terms for many years but one
also it would be hard to talk up.
A final twist on the way home, yours truly had been
feeling a bit dicky for a couple of days but possessing the constitution of a
concrete rhino put it down to Morocco's best effort to unsettle my innards.
After emergency stopping three times in 30 miles I'd revised my opinion. The
next two days aren't pretty to describe so I won't but I'm going off Morocco
rapidly, unfairly perhaps.
More of Marrakech and Casablanca to come next...
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