That is what Spring has done although it is as swallows to summer, with warm, breezy days sandwiched between icy blasts and freezing rain. But warming rays have thawed out this less than hardy perennial and hacking over drying trails has replaced hibernation. Hacking coughs have also been a early season feature but I’m not one to make a big thing of it.

This is Steve Watlington Wakins recently harvested from retirement and showing old school style perfectly matching his retro bike and really rather advanced years.

Not quite as old and annoyingly fitter is Nigel who casts off winter sensibility for a bit of buggering about in Swinley Forest.

For me, it’s a case of scratching the crust off old memories of how to ride and what happens afterwards. Having crashed almost as many times as I’ve ridden this year, my downhill style has been likened to nervous lemming that has been damningly blighted with self awareness. You’re not getting me close to that cliff, no way, it looks bloody DANGEROUS.

Uphill, thankfully, nothing much has changed except I’m a little slower, a little more rubbish and a little readier with excuses pertaining to lost fitness, gained weight and some random mumbling around tyre pressures.

After the ride though, it’s the same glorious dichotomy of pain and pleasure. But I think of it as fitness pain and it is simply dulled with a quick beer or a strong brew. And either is very welcome as long as there is cake to follow. With the pain comes proper tiredness – not the kind of boring bone ache from , say, gardening – but smarting pain with an aggressive personality.

So try and run up the stairs and in it steps between your hind brain and leg muscles calling everyone out for an industrial dispute. I find it best to have a little rest until the Synapse Union and Dendrite Management have come to an accommodation. Yesterday, this took quite a few minutes and children rushed past many times, as I lay supine but marooned half way to the landing.

And the ˜Give me something to eat RIGHT NOW or I’m starting on this child’ hunger pangs are back as well. The kind of stomach wrenching non maskable interrupt that has you running “ okay limping quickly “ to the fridge and considering devouring an acre of raw broccoli.

It’s all good.

The dirty dozen of twelve riders seeking sunshine and singletrack are heading off to South Wales over the long Easter weekend. If I can shed about a stone, regain at least partial fitness and not succumb to any further undiagnosable illnesses, all will be well.

I never did get round to cataloging the last two days of riding in Morocco. Not that I was doing much riding anyway. So here’s a pictorial story with a few words. I’d stick to the pictures if I were you. Day 3 started with a few kilometers descent on a surface best described as dusty ball bearings. Each corner was a mountain switchback which led to some fairly interesting “ohhhhshit” moments. I buggered my shoulder early on and was soon far behind and whinging.

I’ve no idea what Martyn is doing with that bike in the shot above but he’s clearly enjoying himself. I ended up back in the broom wagon which was a little scarier that riding. You really need a vehicle here that has a short wheelbase and a tight turning circle. It’s disconcerting looking over the edge to a thousand feet of vertical bugger all but after a while you sort of get used to it. If you close your eyes and take strong drugs.

I met the fellas for lunch and deciding riding was going to be more fun/less fatal than the landy, we set off on about 10k of dusty, loose fireroad that ended up being way more fun than it should have been. At this point I gave up again and so did a few of the others being faced with a huge climb. The road – and I’m using the word advisedly here – to our third night stop at a burbur lodge was fairly terrifying and I was glad of various but extensive medicinal products to dull the pain later that evening.

The last day was going to push the difficulty a bit and it started with a rocky, off camber singletrack strewn with huge boulders. Pretty technical all the way down to the village but WAY WAY safer than taking the landy back down that track of the night before. Some super steps near the trail end put paid to my riding for the weekend tho. A little too much vigour and a little too little shoulder recovery rended the arm pretty useless.

After another landy uplift, three from five (Nig had succumbed to some kind of major intestinal failure) set off on a huge traverse across the valley where vehicles cannot go. And sometimes bikes too as Jason tells of an incident when he flung himself off the trail and over a handy cliff. Somehow he only fell about ten feet and damaged himself not at all. If that had been me, they’d have been scraping me off the valley floor with a spatula.

Apparently it was a fantastic ride and one both Nigel and I are looking forward to doing next year when we go back. And we have to go back because it is a wonderful place to ride your bike and equally fantastic in terms of the people, culture and stunning scenery.

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 🙂