There is always a double knot of anxiety and anticipation when packing riding rucksacks and fettling pointlessly, when facing the prospect of riding somewhere a little edgy. This is a useful simile because Morocco is essentially an ancient, extinct volcano circumcised by donkey tracks and watered by mountain snow melt. Global warning here doesn’t mean the loss of a few ski-ing slopes – no with bugger all annual rainfall, the entire south of the country is a couple of warm winters away from sliding back into the desert.

So a Landrover supported trip into the mountains shuttles us high into the foothills on increasingly crumbling roads clinging to ever steepening slopes. And where the Landy cannot go, the semi-nomadic villages and their animals can, creating vast swathes of lonely singletrack hugging the side of the mountains in a series of never ending rocky switchbacks. It is is – by degrees – achingly beautiful, stunningly unspoilt and bloody terrifying.

The villages are cut into the hillside, camouflaged by the sandstone – itself cleaved from anywhere close enough to hand carry it. They appear at first crude and unfinished but that’s just through the prism of the Western eye. Each building blends perfectly with its’ surroundings, ensues form for function and its’ inhabitants lack nothing in terms of fierce pride in their culture easily mixed with genuine hospitality.

Loading the Landy is always a faff and we’re about an hour late striking out beyond the lunacy of the city. But it’s only ninety minutes into the mountains and soon we’re climbing reasonable gradients at unreasonable altitudes, low lying lungs painfully adjusting to the thinner air.

One of the joys of riding a bike off road is you get to learn the extremes of personality unshielded by any veneer of social convention. I know how well each of my friends climb steep slopes, how able and brave they are going the other way, where they are fast and smooth or slow and nervous. How they react when it’s all wet, cold and shit and their bike is ‘just fucking useless‘ and the unashamed joy of when they’re on it and nothing else can ever get close. This is stuff you understand before anyone volunteers a vocation or springs a surprising family in a bleak car park.

Today we were all a bit average. Desperately happy to be out riding our bikes, but a bit clumsy and lacking in any sort of flow. I like to think of this as my ground state. The first downhill confirmed what I really already knew in that my trusty bike was a barely ridable pogo stick and my shoulder was just a smidgen from being totally fucked.

The sight of my friends snaking away in ever increasing distances was one that became irritatingly familiar over the next three days. A combination of being properly averse to falling on the shoulder and said limb not being of any real use other than for resting lightly on the bar. And aching.

Fiddling around with shock pressures and quaffing ibuprofen kept me going most of the day though and what a great day it was. Officially the warm up, it still threw up nasty little climbs, endless off camber singletrack and fast blasts down dusty fireroads. The landy was always somewhere close, carrying all our stuff, lunch and our rather splendid Berber driver going by the name of Najiv.

30 years old, brilliantly competent in the drivers seat, making local salads and shooing away the occasional seller of tat. His English was better than my long forgotten French (Morocco has been independent of the French since around 1954 but along with infinate Arab dialects, it’s still the common language) and through a bit of both he explained he was away from his wife and kids for six months at a time to earn a living.

Jason had the first proper stack, dumping his front wheel in a rocky gorge and pirouetting over the bars at a velocity marked “that’s going to fucking hurt“. But he emerged unscathed leaving me cursing silently on the unfairness of life. Clearly I am just Mr. Mong and I’d better get used to it. My shoulder really had had enough by this time but my ego hadn’t so I grimaced on for the remainder of the day until two late punctures provided the excuse I was looking for to quit.

Somehow a packet of 20 Malboro had been planted on my temple like form so it seemed a shame not to smoke a couple in the warn sunshine leaning on the handy landrover. I’m a cheap date when it comes to finding some inner peace and mountains, bikes and a general lack of responsibility does it every time.

We shuttled 20 clicks up to a Mountain lodge run by a sour faced French dame whose father had clearly been Vichy. She didn’t like us much and dispatched us to a remote bunkhouse warmed only by steaming ride kit and sufficient methane to ratchet up global warming. But there was more beer, more bollocks and a partial lunar eclipse perfectly framed by a total lack of light pollution.

And since we were on the top of the mountain, tomorrow was all downhill apparently.

Morocco is a fantastic place to visit. Flying into Marrakesh, your first thought is that the place is splendidly bonkers especially in the old walled city. The Medina is home to a very large Souk, a traffic system that must kill thousands and the kind of street theatre you could watch all day. The Souk can be simply described as an unmappable maze of interconnecting alleys fronted by tiny stalls selling everything. Some of it is tourist tat, but most of it isn’t with amazing spice shops crammed into tiny corners and welders practising their trade in the middle of the street.

And what streets they are – however narrow they must support at least five lanes of duplex traffic. You must never, even for a split second, glance behind you because rotating back frontwards will put you within biting distance of an irritated donkey or under the wheels of a scooter driven with the spirit of the immortal. The system seems to be trail sharing at it’s most democratic, pedestrians are rarely knocked over by donkeys who – in turn – are not abused by the plethora of barely working two wheel vehicles. Cars weave between this menagerie of random and road crossing becomes a simple process of “clench buttocks and run for it“. Don’t bother looking for a gap, there never is one.

But somehow it works. It is as if the town planners went on a fact finding mission to Mumbai and said “like what you are doing here but it’s not quite noisy enough and lacks a little danger”

Our hotel was smack bang in the middle of maelstrom of noise and movement and you are immediately struck by how cheerful everyone is. This isn’t some Muslim fundermentalist state, it’s more a generationally muted warrior tribe making a religious lifestyle choice. Sure you still get nutters and panhandlers but at least they are happy nutters.

The joy of arriving somewhere hot and happy was soon mitigated by the discovery that my bike was secondary picketing my still busted shoulder. The complex and expensive rear suspension had been transformed into a pogo stick when the damping circuits had clearly been seized by customs.

My plan for riding around the injury by setting the bike up super soft and sofa like was now somewhat compromised. Every time I touched a brake or rode over a large pebble, the rear end of the bike would rise like a kracken from the deep and transfer my body weight forward to my shoulders. One of which really didn’t want any weight on it at all.

A gentle ride round the walled city and a mad dash through the souk shredded the remains of my denial that everything would be all right on the night. But I was on holiday with my friends, we’d been promised there would be some infidel beverages with dinner and tomorrow we would be in the mountains.

So we watched the sun go down over the main square, sipping soft drinks and marvelling at what the locals could do with first a snake, and latterly with a pidgin and a hedgehog. I kid you not.

… so no time to tell you how this brave little soldier whimpered through the pain barrier and battled past a non working limb to courageously wrest another beer from the bar. I’m welling up here I can tell you.

Work and a million emails have truncated my day from 8am to now with almost nothing in between, so it’ll all have to wait until things quieten down. I don’t expect it’ll be worth waiting for but, you know, you might get lucky.

In the meantime, there was quite alot of this going on.

And some looking at these:

That’s the mountains, not the Donkeys.

The very short summary is my shoulder is possibly now a little more painful then immediately post spang three weeks ago, my bike broke before I had chance to ride it and at one point, there was the real and immediate threat of a beer drought.

The shorter summary is it was bloody fantastic 🙂

This picture was taken by my friend Jay “now in deep Therapy” Tejani who foolishly ventured out on his mountain bike into the Chilterns. Where he spent a happy two hours pushing the bike DOWNHILL and whimpering at the trail conditions.

Petrol in the South East is broken. We appear to have entered monsoon season in the UK and there is nothing on the TV. Time to leave.

The frenzy of packing is over. It began well with forecasted temperatures hitting eighty degrees and rain only happening to other countries. Shorts, T-shirts and suntan cream then? Er no, a little more meteorological investigation indicated that temperatures in the mountains we were cycling over are considerably lower and the weather a tad less consistent.

No problem, just pack everything I own in the bag. Small problem is the bag now exceeds the weight allowance for the entire plane. The poor aircraft would have to taxi all the way there, and the the entire flange of baggage handlers may spontaneously explode if they tried to lift it. Plan C was a headless chicken like “Maybe this top, no, no this one, er hang on if I pack that, then I won’t need this, er, er, oh fuck it, that’ll have to do“. A sophisticated and measured approach I’m sure you’ll agree.

The bike bag had similar treatment until a moment of uncharacteristic honestly exposed the nonsense of packing any tools other than a small mallet. Realistically my only options on bike breakage are to leave it there for the natives to eat or hire a passing goat to portage me and the bike back to Marrakesh.

Having endured this mental anguish without the soothing pumice of a large drink, further irritation was plastered on during an ill fated trip to town. The reasons behind this last minute trolley dash are too painful to recount, and all that needs to be said can be summed in a conversation I had with a small man in a large suit sporting a glossy brochure and a nervous smile.

“Can I interest Sir with a unique opportunity in the exciting area of double glazing?”
Now normally I feel sorry for these people; they too probably wanted to be astronauts or the Prime Minister (considering our current one, I’d give ’em my vote) but vocationally have been tossed the unedifying prospect of tricking idiots to part with their money. Actually, maybe they should be Prime Minister.

I replied evenly “Young Man, I would rather marinate my testicles in aftershave and roast them over an open fire for eternity than spend one minute with your shiny suit and shiny brochures” I looked him deep in the eye “Trust me on this”

He backed away nervously muttering “why do I always get the nutters?“. Frankly he’s lucky, if I hadn’t been busy, I would have killed him there and then and offered up “Services to the Gene Pool” as my cast iron defense.

But I’m saving that for the first SleazyJet staff member who attempts to wrest any more money from my innocent person. First it was£30 for the bikes, then about a thousand pounds for hidden taxes followed by a further£20 because the government are robbing, greedy bastards with a spurious green agenda. That’s kind of how I interpreted their email anyway.

Assuming I do not suffer radishing* from Mountain Bandits, or plunge headlong into a rocky crevasse screaming “I told you that shoulder was no good“, then – come Tuesday – photographs, tales of great daring and other lies shall light up the hedgehog. Until then, have a good one or “How much for your goat and your sister” which is the traditional form of greeting in Marrakesh apparently.

* A lighter form of ravishing for the modern tourist

That’s my friends’ best medical diagnosis of the spare nose I’ve grown on my shoulder. On Saturday, under clear skies and with temperatures in the mid 70’s, I should be doing a bit of this.

That’s a trail in Morocco and it’s easily identifiable as “not this country” because water is not cascading down it, the bike doesn’t appear to be weighed down with a tonne of finest mud products, and the sky has something in it other than rain.

Aside from the insanely early flight, this trip has much going for it; great friends, dry trails, a support vehicle that will shuttle you up those difficult hills and a country I’ve never been too. Weighing against this is the shoulder of doubt and its’ worrying nobblyness. Having seen no improvement and less sleep for the last week or so, I see my options as:

1/ Demand an A&E X-Ray and some useful treatment.
2/ Do nothing and hope for the best
3/ Be sensible and don’t ride because the potential for fuck ups are legion.

Problem with 1/ is if they find something cracked or bust, it invalidates my riding insurance. Problem with 3/ is that it is extremely dull. So 2/ it is then with additional camera batteries and patience if riding becomes too difficult and I become “man, tanning on truck”

I’ve been looking forward to this trip through the dark and wet winter months. To say I’m irritated after taking ownership – yet again – of the mantle of mong would be a bit of an understatement.