11: Follow that swallow

As I rode out of Tafraoute after a six day sojourn, there was a sprinkling of snow on the mountain tops of the Anti Atlas. It was definitely time to continue the migration south and escape the tentacles of the northern hemisphere's winter months. As I dropped southwards out of the mountains, I passed through one village where a little boy made the customary plea for a pencil. Muttering "no" as I pedaled on, I thought I heard him say something else. Turning around to look at the kid, with his school bag on his back, he was holding out his half eaten bread roll towards me and saying, "Tiens", or "take", with a big, innocent smile on his face. I wanted to give him every pencil and pen I had on me. I wanted to run over and hug him for restoring my faith in small Moroccan children. Instead I stuttered out a "non, merci". Shouting a thank you in Arabic for good measure, and waving unsteadily, I pedaled on elated.

The temperature climbed steadily as I emerged from the mountains and joined the N1 south at Bouizakarne. The strip of asphalt runs all the way through to Nouakchott, capital of Mauritania, and represents one of a limited number of possibilities for crossing on a sealed road from North Africa into sub Saharan Africa. As the principal road south into Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, the road is predictably heavy with goods and passengers being brought north and south. With only enough room for two trucks to pass each other, I had to settle for riding on the dirt shoulder at times. This unpleasant state of affairs was initially compensated by the friendly waves and hoots of the passing truck drivers, although fatigue had set in and this unwanted attention became somewhat tiresome, merely adding further cacophony to the dust and diesel fumes.

Guelmim. I'm sitting outside a cafe, drinking tea, when a camel runs straight through the red light of the town's main intersection and on down the road. Described by my photocopied guidebook as a 'small, dusty town with little to offer the passerby', it feels like Las Vegas to me after the journey through Morocco's southern interior. Pizza, smoothie-type drinks made from avocado - fantastic, and a supermarket stocking peanut butter, and, wait for it - porridge oats! Although despite my apparent enthusiasm for the latter I indulge less and less these days.

I spotted Olly and deduced that he was the owner of the GB-registered motorbike parked in the lobby of the hotel. Hailing from Bristol, Olly was also enroute to West Africa and over a late night tea and an early morning breakfast we swap stories and information about the road behind and the road ahead, his a slightly more condensed and speedier version than mine. I receive word that my two potential riding partners for the journey south will be a few days in arriving. As I watch Olly loading his bike, I spot two cyclists replete with touring panniers, pull up at the end of the street. I say hello and ask them where they are heading? The young Swiss couple tell me they are headed to the ruins of the nearby old French military fort, Fort Bou Jerif. A scene reminiscent of Stanley's encounter with Dr. Livingstone follows. Overhearing that I'm Irish, they ask if my name is Julian Bloomer. It transpires that they had met Jean and Patrick in Marrakech (two French travelers I had met a couple of weeks back in Merzouga) and the guys had told them about meeting me. It's a small world. The other day I received a reply to an email I had sent to Daniel Harmen, an English cyclist currently in Guinea, and he said he had met some people recently who told him that there was Irishman coming down from Morocco on his bike. It could be another Irishman, but then again. As I say, it's a remarkably small world, even if you're on a bicycle.

Olly heading for Western Sahara

I make a pleasant day trip from Guelmim to the ruins of Fort Bou Jerif, on an unloaded and sprightly Rocinante. There's a campsite beside the fort, a popular stopover for those heading south apparently. I chat to a Dutch couple and a South African couple who are heading to the DRC and South Africa respectively in well-equipped overland vehicles. There is music, laptops and Bovril. It's all so tempting and looks like fun. I leave before I get overcome with emotion. Nick, an English motorcyclist, passes me by on the way back to Guelmim. He's heading back home after several weeks touring Europe and Morocco. He likes the idea of cycling. I like the idea of his motorbike. The grass is always greener on the other side.

Fort Bou Jerif

To anticipate the trucks I buy a rear view mirror from a bicycle shop in Guelmim. Its meant for a motorbike and is a lot larger than I would have wished for, but it will do the job. Perhaps I'll get an engine next.

Life in the desert

On the road to Tan Tan. It seems less busy than the other day. I'm happy to wave to honking truckers today. The new mirror is fantastic. I can anticipate when I need to be close to the verge and when I can relax and move towards the centre of the road. Hard to believe how cold it was in Tafraoute a few days ago. It's hot again. I pull into one of the only settlements along the route just after midday. I have my own sandwiches so I just take a coke, happy to be out of the sun for a bit. Oil and coke seem to be the main products heading south. Two bloodied goats heads eyeball me from a nearby table. Presumably they are to demonstrate the freshnesh of the carcass on offer to customers. The flies are horrendous. Everywhere. I have to keep the lid on the bottle and take quick gulps whilst avoiding drinking a fly too. The only other customers, a group of truckers, tuck into their goat tagine, encouraging me to join them. I decline politely, and head back outside where it's about Gas mark 5.

A long way from home...

Twenty kilometers before Tan Tan I'm waved through a police checkpoint. Five dogs follow me in hot pursuit but soon give up the chase. They seem to have much less resolve than their mountain cousins. Outside Tan Tan I pass the first police checkpoint where all the details from my passport are noted. This becomes increasingly common the closer one gets to Western Sahara. The officer in charge of the biro looks at my bicycle, and then at me. "You are on a bicycle?", he says, studying the column for 'type of vehicle' in his ledger. I nod and smile to affirm that I am indeed sitting on a bicycle. We exchange jokes, with neither of us understanding the other, and then he waves me on into town.

Tan Tan isn't Guelmim, but it's not a bad spot. A collonaded main street bears testimony to the town's history as part of Spanish-Morocco. There's a hustle and bustle along the street. I'm in a €5 per night establishment, with a balcony overlooking the main bus park. Tomorrow morning should be a treat. Still, the owner is friendly and the shower is hot. I change into civvies and go to find food, water, and the internet while the muezzin calls the devout to prayer.

Tan Tan, Morocco

Trip distance: 6355 km

10: Slowing down in the Anti Atlas

"People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home" - Dagobert D. Runes

"May all your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you" - Edward Abbey

"The journey is the destination." - Dan Eldon

Plenty of time for accepting kind offers to sit and drink a tea lately...

There's a couple of thought provoking travel quotes to ponder on this wet and chilly Saturday evening in the Anti-Atlas mountains. While the pace of movement has slowed down to a virtual crawl over the past week, the bonus has been that there is plenty of time to accept invitations for tea, and to enjoy some time off Rocinante in the hills around Tafraoute. There's a lot to be said for the idea that the slower you travel the more you appreciate it. Rather than take a more direct route from Tata towards the main (only) road south through Western Sahara to Mauritania, I chose to employ one last diversionary tactic and make a last visit to the temperate climes of the Anti Atlas. Well as I sit typing, wrapped up in almost every item of clothing in my wardrobe, it's a bit more temperate than I would have wished for.

Leaving Tata I headed northeast to Igherm, stopping overnight enroute at the oasis village of Tagmoute. Invitations for tea have abounded of late and I reckon that if I were to accept each one I'd be hard put to make more than about five kilometers per day, but I had lots of conversations with people in the villages enroute. Many of the people I've met have spent significant parts of their working lives in Europe, usually in France, and have retired home to Morocco. For many of the migrants, while working abroad provided an income that would have been unattainable at home, it has also meant an often painful separation from their families for many years. Pondering on this hardship the other day, after a brief chat with a man who had spent 28 years working in France whilst his family remained in a village near Tagmoute, I approached the top of what had been the first serious climb in the past couple of weeks since crossing the Middle Atlas. A movement on the treeless hillside brought me back to the present and soon I had made a conscious connnection between the blur and the savage barking that I had subsequently begun to hear. I realised then that I was probably experiencing my third "Encounter With A Ferocious Dog" in Morocco.

Moments before the battle...

When one is climbing an incline of more than 8% on a loaded touring bicycle, with the additional ballast of 4 litres of water - just to make sure the odds are truly stacked against you - the appearance of a rabid-looking, salivating hound who probably hasn't eaten since the last cyclist passed this way, certainly brings out a feeling of vulnerability. If this was a wildlife programme, I was like that aging buffalo that couldn't keep up with the rest of the herd when the lions broke from their hiding. It was merely a case of chasing down the prey. Only I didn't even have a herd. The last and only car on the road had passed by well over an hour previously. Cycling appeared only to provoke matters as Jaws decided which juicy-looking calf he'd sample first. I remembered the three options that I had been rehearsing for such occasions, all of which seemed truly pathetic in the face of this frothy-mouthed canine. The most humane approach, and therefore least effective, would be to spray water from my bottle in the dog's eyes when he came close enough. The second was to wield my pump at the dog and give him a wallop if he tried to move in for the kill. The final option was to pretend I was taking a penalty kick for Ireland that would bring us to South Africa in 2010, with the dog's head being the ball.

I settled on trying the middle option first. As I was unhooking my pump from the bike frame, as if it were a double-barrel shotgun, I realised that what I had presumed to be the echo of the dog's barking was actually a fellow bloodthirsty hound who had come over the mountain to see what all the fuss was about. Delighted at the prospect of sharing the corpse of a tender and succulent cyclist, the slightly healtier looking new arrival performed a flanking manoeuver. Wielding my pump as if it were a lightsaber from Star Wars, I felt ridiculosly ill-equipped to fend off the beasts, and I began to estimate how long I could hold out for. Just as I was trying to assess the feasibility of taking two penalties for Ireland simultaneously, my guardian angel appeared over the brow of a hill. The woman, who was covered in a red shawl, hissed a couple of barely audible retorts to the dogs and within a couple of seconds they had assumed disinterested positions, overlooking their flock of goats, casually gazing over in my direction as an old man might sit and watch young children playing. I said hello and thanked the woman in my best Berber and she looked at me as she walked over to the dogs, but failed to acknowledge my greeting or gratitude. I waved and smiled gratefully, thinking that body language might be a more effective means of expressing my appreciation, but still no acknowledgement of a presence other than a look that seemed to suggest everything was my fault. Finally, fearing that the lady could well change her mind and release the hounds on me once again, I jumped back on the bike and headed all too slowly on up the hill.

Overlooking Aday village and Tafraoute in the distance in the Anti Atlas

Tafraoute, Morocco

Trip distance: 5975 km

9: Lazy days in Tata

Since the last entry in Agdz I rode across to Tata, via Foum Zguid, an exquisite journey through a stark and desolate landscape. In the 270 km between Agdz and Tata I can almost count on two hands the number of settlements that I passed. Since I have yet to erect my tent in Morocco and have become accustomed to staying in affordable hotels, I tend to try and make a town each evening and find a place to sleep there. So after a long day down to Foum Zguid I ended up in Hotel Bani. The lobby of the hotel appeared to double as a motorcycle repair shop and after checking on a couple of the rooms I settled on one just off the repair shop floor, where I could wheel my bike into without unloading it. After throwing the remnants of a now petrified loaf of bread into a bin in the repair shop I dusted down the rickety metal table and plastic chair. A closer inspection of the bedcovers led me to suspect that it was not common practice to change the covers between the departure and arrival of occupants so I decided it would be prudent to camp on the bare concrete floor with my new and untried air mattress that I had bought in Spain. After a hearty dinner of yet another tagine and yet more bread in a nearby cafe, I retired to my concrete floor, tired from the day's exertions and eager to get an early start on the road to Tata the following morning. I had a restless night on the floor, however, and despite the comfort of my mattress, I found myself waking up in pools of sweat and wringing my new travel pillow dry.

I had been having some kind of pleasurable dream when I came to in the darkness of the cell. I checked my recently purchased, made-very-definitely-in-China alarm clock and saw that it was just after 5am. I wasn't sure why I'd woken up, and then it started again. A loudspeaker on a pole outside my room was piping in the Koranic verses that were being chanted by a sombre sounding gentleman in the nearby mosque. I pulled up the hood of my sleeping bag over my head and faded in and out of consciousness whilst the chanting continued for a further hour. Moments after the chanting stopped, the shrill alarm of my new clock told me that it was time to knock back more vanilla-flavoured yoghurts, and a loaf stuffed with banana and peanut butter and get back on the bike.

Early morning and late afternoon is my favourite time for being on the bike. Not only is the temperature generally more agreeable, but the long shadows cast by the light give the landscape more depth and contrast than the blinding light of the midday hours. Riding east towards Tata, there was a pleasant chill in the air and an even more welcome tailwind that carried me along the first straight 40 km very enjoyably. Such was the tailwind that I had begun to plot the day ahead and review my estimated time of arrival in Tata. Then, mysteriously the road seemed to get stickier and the bike heavier and I realised that I had passed an invisible line and that I now had a stiff headwind to contend with for the remaining 100 km to Tata. In Tissint, I found the only cafe of the trip and ordered my mid-morning staple of an omlette, bread and a coke, instead of the regular mint tea. Deciding on food and drink is really just a question of deciding how you like your sugar.

The dust clouds blown up by gusts of wind forced me to take shelter inside the cafe and I sat content to be out of the sun whilst groups of school boys studiously examined every detail of my bicycle, the younger ones being particularly impressed with Tiger. After ordering the food the owner-chef-waiter of the cafe set about visiting the various stalls in the vicinity, gathering up supplies to put the meal together. After a long spell in the latrine he emerged and with a worringly short and soapless rinse of his hands under a tap in the corner of the room, he set about preparing the food. Having just recovered from a week's worth of olympic sprints to the nearest toilet, hole or bush, I was sensitive on this particular issue, but I enjoyed my omlette and wonderfully fresh, still warm bread and headed back into the white light. A jolly police officer waved me through the checkpoint in the middle of town.

The ride to Tata continued into ever strengthening headwind. Despite the road's orientation varying from southeast to northeast and back to east, the wind appeared to be a constant headwind. Gusts of fine sand easily passed my wraparound sunglasses and stripped another layer of skin off my lips. I deemed the occasion a suitable time for my recently acquired headscarf and I have found the long strip of blue cloth to work admirably well at keeping me cool and covered up from the elements. In addition, and this idea is still in experimentation phase, but I believe wee terrorists are less inclined to pester me when I have my head covered. The combination of cycling gear and head-dress also provides endless delight and photo opportunities for the now dwindling number of tourists passing by.

With 20 km to go to Tata I had to stop by the roadside and dig into the remaining reserves of chocolate, water, and bread to stave off the shaky leg syndrome that I could feel coming on. Moments later, out of the apparent uninhabited wilderness, a fellow and his five donkeys were making a beeline for me. "Unbloody believeable", I groaned outloud. Expecting a demand of some sort I braced myself for the encounter. Rashid introduced himself, however, with a shake of my hand followed by the typical touch of your heart and outlined the journey he was making on foot from Rich to Assa. If you plot this on a map of Morocco this is approximately 1000 km of foot plodding. An incredible journey, which despite my non-existent Arabic and his virtually non-existent French, I determined would take him approximately five to six weeks at the pace he was currently traveling at. I handed him a half litre of water and the remaining half loaf of bread, which he ate hungrily, before thanking me and heading on his way. I headed on towards Tata, with renewed enthusiasm at the prospect of a shower, another tagine, and thankful that I had Rocinante rather than five donkeys to travel with.

According to wikipedia, Tata has a population of 40,000 people. I would have thought more like 400, but regardless of the population, Tata is proving to be a pleasant break from the road. I have found peanut butter that is sold in 2 litre paint tins, very useful for the weight-conscious cyclist. I've been invited to a splendid collective meal of camel tagine, which I had initially taken for mutton, accompanied with fresh, creamy goats milk, and I've drunk mint tea by the pint, whilst watching the world go by. There is even reasonably priced beer available, but the bar isn't all that inspiring, and like the couple of others I've poked my head into in Morocco, feels to me like a dirty, little secret, hidden as always behind covered windows and occupied by those whose main intent appears unfortunately to be reaching the bottom of the next bottle.

Anyhow, having settled into the joys of cycling through Morocco, life, and camel steak, tastes good.

Tata, Morocco

Trip distance: 5790 km