Morocco Archive

revisiting some Moroccan streets

For the last couple of bicycle journeys I’ve travelled really light so just used a 7″ Android tablet as a tool for updating this journal – not ideal but it did the job and took up very little room along with my camera, a Fuji x100s – I think   the most perfect bicycle travel camera I’ve ever come across. The biggest weakness of the small tablet is with photos.. and looking back at recent entries from …

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Memory Dust

Sometimes it takes me even longer to get around to sorting it out. For the two weeks since the end of the journey my expedition bike has been sitting downstairs, propped against the table in dusty pieces, a final reminder of how good the journey was. It is always like this, finding the motivation to wash the dust away after a journey is a difficult thing. Not only is ‘clean’ an unnatural state for such a …

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Closing the loop…

Arrival back into Marrakech was something of an anti-climax after the truly fantastic riding of the last 8 days or so, since my last update in fact… I arrived back into the madness of the Djemaa el Fna, chugged a couple of glasses of fresh squeezed orange juice from one of the carts that characterise the square and then rode off into the medina in search of my digs… game over. 36 degs C doesn’t …

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Bikepacking the Tizi'n'Tazazert

via Tizi n’Tazazert…

It was a very definite sense of deja-vu. Not the first time I’d found myself sat by a fire beneath a wonderful starscape on a cold night on top of a mountain sharing a meal with a friendly Berber. That previous time, a few years ago, it was on top of the Tizi n’Test and I was on my way out of the High Atlas headed south to the Anti Atlas.. This time I was …

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N’kob

The ride from Agdz was an easy one with very little in the way of significant climbing, 30km south through the date palms and oasis villages of the Draa Valley and then just 40km east across a rocky, sun baked plain with the peaks of the Jebel Sahro on my left and a further dark and heavily eroded massif on my right. I stopped for tea at the turn feeling somewhat less than brilliant, and …

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Agdz

The instinct is always to keep pushing on when travelling by bicycle, but aside from the need to rest from time to time it is always good for me to occasionally stop for a bit longer. I stopped here in Agdz for an extra day, in part because yesterday, with the adrenalin of the last few days gone, I felt so utterly drained that I barely stirred from my shady alcove in the courtyard of …

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A head full of couscous

I’m not one of those lucky folk that is just ace with languages and that can switch effortlessly from language to language, rather I have to work hard to make a language stick and need to use it frequently to be even remotely  comfortable with it, although stuff does come back to me eventually… so having been working hard to add some Arabic to my vocabulary while at the same time scraping the rust off …

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When maps go wrong…

I’m resting up for a day in a dusty town on the edge of the desert called Aoulouz after a somewhat challenging day… my legs are toast and the temperatures here are in the mid to high 30’s still, despite winter being just around the corner… but more of that shortly… Heading south from Marrakech on the Taroudant road it is just 30km across a gently rising plain to reach the foot of the Atlas. …

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On the road again

I was sure I would have used that title for a post at some point in the past.. and a quick search revealed that indeed I had, but not since the shores of Lake Titicaca so I feel it is ok to use it again… Arriving late into Marrakech I decided to stay a day.. despite multiple visits in the past it is still a good place to hang out, although it has changed a …

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