Thanks for the reminder - will try a Maxxis IT Desert next.
To be fair all that weight (me and pans) and road miles would be hard on any knobbly.
Re laptop - nothing really other than a sleeve and stuff it in a pannier.
It takes the beating better than I do (it's SSD).
Saw some cool stuff today - more pix to come. Now in Smara
WR-ing about in Morocco
Re: WR-ing about in Morocco - IV
After two full days off in Tan Tan, I’m up for more.
I decide to try a new but slightly shorter route to Smara, only 330km; half piste.
I set off for Mseid, passing the village of Tilemsen.
Some of you may recall a fake news story from a few years back about a French bloke whose 2CV ‘broke down in the Sahara’.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ation.html
From what I recall of the version I read, it was ’staged’ just out of Tilemsen where his only choice (apart from simply walking back to town?) was to merrily pass him time cutting and welding his car into a ‘Scrapheap Challenge’ motorbike, ride out and live to tell his amazing tale. Just like James Stewart in ‘The Flight of the Phoenix’ movie. Knowingly or otherwise, all the news feeds lapped up up this epic of desert survival. The 2CV bike was real - the bloke built them for a hobby, iirc. The survival yarn, most quickly deduced, was faked.
The road ends at Mseid, looking even more abandoned than usual. Someone told me later that, following recent massive rains (which broke a dam and cut the road bridge at Layounne), every nomad and his dog is out pasturing their camels and goats while the going is good. These villages are more storehouses, occupied only in summer.
I head through the gap in the range and pass these wind-bent trees, like you get in west Cornwall.
Good windsurfing in Western Sahara, I’m told.
Without a GPS tracklog, my faint turn off to the southeast would be barely noticeable. No cairns of anything.
GPS means you can attempt more adventurous stuff and literally string together your own routes.
In the pre-GPS era, unless you resorted to astro-nav or hired a local guide, all we did was follow main tracks, which of course felt pretty darned adv at the time.
The track is clear which is reassuring, as I don’t expect to see anyone. That’s the Jebel Ouarkaziz on the horizon and the Oued Draa behind it. They form a natural barrier separating Western Sahara from what I call ‘mainland Morocco’. Tbh the best scenery and riding is on the mainland, but out here you get a sense of space and solitude.
This must have been a former Dakar Rally stage as there are what I call ‘Dakar mounds’ straddling the track every kilometre or so. All helps with the nav.
But as always, riding one of two foot-wide twin ruts with loose rubble a few inches to either side takes concentration. You can’t look away for more than a second. At one oued crossing I dither over which track to take. The bike wanders onto the middle hump and flips out. I brace myself to be force-fed a dirt sandwich, but luckily it corrects itself this time.
WTF happened there? I think I looked left and the bike drifted with me.The deadly target fixation. It’s all over in a second but it takes just one second to blow it. And there are a lot of seconds in a day.
Wildflowers are out after the rains.
Bang on my 145km estimate I reach the crossroads with MW6 coming down from Labouriat where I camped a week ago. You could play noughts and crosses on that!
I now turn south along MW6. It’s more washed out so probably less used, but it’s only 50km to the road. Nearly there.
I get to a fork. Olaf goes left but the right fork might be a shorter, newer route. I crest a stony rise and see the big oued ahead with some nomad raimas (tents) at the back. Ah yes, I forgot bout the sandy oued which you have to follow for a few kilometres, rather than cross quickly. That’s the worst sort of desert terrain for a bike.
It’s never over till it’s over - as I’ve learned to say in the Sahara...
Re: WR-ing about in Morocco 5
I drop down, turn west and and plough into the oued, hoping for the best, but it’s not going to happen.
Soon I’m paddling madly in first, like something out of a Roadrunner cartoon, engine screaming. The temp gauge reaches 134°C. Normally 100-110.
With vigorous paddling and feathering the throttle I j u s t manage to keep creeping forward. On firmer terrain the bike leaps ahead, then sinks at the next soft patch. The rear spins, the clutch creaks, I’m panting and my mouth is parched.
I inch towards some shade to let it all cool down. This shouldn’t be this hard - I’ve made a mistake somewhere. Those nomads upstream use land rovers and wouldn’t camp in such a hard-to-reach place.
I set off on foot to try to find the track or recce a firm, rideable route. I’ve been lured in by a couple of car tracks – a common mistake to make when the way ahead isn’t clear. Thorny acacias and stony river banks limit options, but I work out a way to the south bank where I want to be.
Back at the bike I drop pressures to 1 bar - it can make a huge difference. I’ll need it as a 250 lacks the grunt of a 600 to hook up on soft sand.
Suddenly it’s all got a bit challenging, but if I ride short sections then rest, recover and cool the motor, I’ll make it out in a hour or two. Plus there are waterholes and even nomads if something like the fuel pump goes wrong.
Before setting off I suck down one of these gels - they were going cheap on Wiggle. I’m not usually into this stuff but it’s worth a go. The soft tyres transform the bike: traction makes faster forward progress – actual riding not paddling – and less spinning and revving and more airflow = less heat: win-win.
I climb onto the south bank and ride gingerly among the rocks on the flat tyres, working my way along the valley
I find and follow a stretch of track but it soon ends in a huge mound of flood-churned sand by a big waterhole. I set off on another foot recce to see if it gets better or worse and, like they do, a nomad pops out of the scrub.
Another tourist in a pickle, and he’d be right.
We do the greeting thing then I ask him “Hawza? [nearby army base]. Piste?”
He points across a spit of sand bridging the waterhole where the track once was (see pic above).
That’ll do me. I check it for firmness as I already trod in quicksand.
I start the bike, reach the waterhole and shoot over, but see no track on the far bank. Sod it, I take off up the rocky hillside to cut the last bend in the oued, hoping the soft tyres don’t pinch.
Elevation is always good when lost: from the top I see the track continuing south across the stony plain towards a pass.
Gnarly episode over, I air up with my trusty Cycle Pump.
Generally I don’t mess around with tyre pressures too much, but that oued needed 15psi.
And very soon I reach another thing I’d forgotten about - an amazing view from the escarpment down to the chott (dry lake bed). If you have the current edition you’ll see a picture of a 101 camper which stripped its gearbox trying to get up this steep climb.
Back in ’88 I used a 101 for my first desert bike tour in Algeria. They’d just been released by the army – a great all-terrain load carrier.
Only one guy actually came back riding from that tour, but after various tribulations, the Landrover limped home too.
That’s the climb from the base. Even on the WR it would be an all-or-nothing launch to get up it.
Behold the sun-baked chott. Surely, no more dramas.
On the chott. Like the famous Bolivian Salar, but without the electrics-eating salt.
Like you do, I get a bit carried away, looping some loops, but realise I need to head for some specific Dakar mounds on the south side to reach the track to the road.
Soon I’m back on the blacktop, the continuation of the restricted border road I was turned back from at Zag.
It’s another two hours to Smara. I pass a turn-off for the remote shrine of old Sheikh Sidi Ahmed Rguibi, the ancestral Yemeni forefather who led his people to this promised land, 500 years ago. The Arab Reguibat are the dominant tribe among the Saharawi nomads of Western Sahara.
For a good action-adventure book set here, try Michael Asher’s ‘Sandstorm’. It may be fiction, but Asher knows the Sahara and his Arab tribal genealogy. Other good books set here: ‘Wind, Sand & Stars’ (pioneering aviation classic); and ‘Skeletons on the Zahara’ about a notorious 19th-C shipwreck and the deprivations the survivors suffered at the hands of the pitiless Reguibat.
Smara: road’s end at the Polisario front line, but looking quite prosperous for a garrison town.
I roll up and down the high street and spot a few rough-looking joints.
I brace myself and pick the ‘Golden Sands’. The bloke in the office picking his nose is a bit bemused to see a sweaty Nasrani (‘Nazarene’ or Christian; ie: foreigner). Nevertheless he leads me to a windowless cell resembling a deleted scene from Homeland: a heavily soiled mattress and a dim bulb hanging on bare wires. Oh well, I’ve lodged as bad in Pakistan and elsewhere, and it’s only one night and three quid.
I’m just unpacking when the boss rocks up.
‘Come on mate, you can’t sleep here. Look at it, it’s shit!. Let us take you to a nicer place over the road. They got showers and everythink.’
Over the road feels a bit odd. My room has walls lacquered in ripe pig’s blood sprinkled with sequins, plus a matching satin duvet. And out in the corridor a highly scented lady gives the place the ambience of a knocking shop. Not sure this is what the g-friend had in mind when I told her I was off for some WR-ing about in Morocco.
I go for a wander and see a sign for Tfariti on the other side of the Berm, in the Polisario Free Zone.
The Dakar Rally used to cross here to get to nearby Mauritania, but I always wondered how that was negotiated. Since the actual fighting ended, Morocco has pursued a full-time propaganda war against the Polisario, with all sorts of fake websites making out they’re pork-eating, drug-taking smugglers and terrorists.
As always in these towns, I have trouble recognising a place to eat. Cafes packed with blokes watching football while twiddling their smartphones over a fag are everywhere, but they only serve tea or coffee.
People stare at me: ‘how did he get here?’
I try a couple of places - “sorry mate, we repair typewriters” - then stumble into this place, rough as a granite toothbrush.
‘Got anything to eat?’
‘Sure, take a seat.’
My brochette arrives. One thing I like about these basic places is the total lack of pretension, a genuine welcome plus the food is cooked right in front of you so you know what you’re getting - not yesterday’s warm-overs.
Ok, so there’s no fork to pull the brochettes off the skewer. He sees me struggling, comes over and just grabs the meat with his fist and pulls them off the skewers. That’ll work!
Smara by night.
Meanwhile a spy informs me my publisher was spotted at the London Book Fair, spreading the word.
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Re: WR-ing about in Morocco
Excellent stuff.....took me a whole coffee to read it a couple of times 
I need to get back there....
All the best for your onward travels
:)
I need to get back there....
All the best for your onward travels
:)
Will It Buff Out?
