At times over the past few weeks I’ve been suffering something of a malaise which at times extends to finding it hard to get to grips with the banality of life in general. January is always a bit like that, with no firm expedition plans made yet, just ideas, and having other friends that are on the road (seemingly all the bloody time sometimes ;-) I find all I can think about on frequent occasions is …
Cycle Touring Archive
A little bit of Anatolia…
In the absence of anything interesting to write about this week (I’m swamped with development work, and with the start of the race season less than 2 months away also spending a majority of spare time on two wheels) this post is just going to continue the theme started in the preceding post of ‘a few favourites from the road that were only ever published in low-res ‘crap-o-vision’ from the 7″ android tablet I carry when …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
two-wheeled memories
Haven’t been inspired to write of late.. figured there is no interest for my readers in just hearing about just lots of riding in pouring rain and gale force winds… and kind of busy with work too. Something I have been doing of late however is archiving old slides from past adventures. I can remember most of the cool stuff that happened no matter how long ago.. but this afternoon I came across a slide …
time to go…
cold, wet and windy in Istanbul for the last couple of days… must be time to fly home..
Beyoğlu
Rio, Jakarta, Fes, Istanbul… wherever you are in the world there is a law of nature that says that sooner or later you will stumble across someone playing the theme to the movie Titanic .. on pan-pipes. The only thing that can make it worse is if Celine Dion is accompanying the performance on a cheap tape player. Such was the soundtrack to my morning as I wandered around the Beyoğlu district for a couple …
while I’m on… Eskişehir
I understand that for some folk who received the email version of my last post, rather than clicking through to the blog , itself pictures were missing. No idea why, sorry about that. If you were missing pictures then click through to https://www.seasurfdirt.com/2013/10/13/eskisehir-the-end-of-my-road and all should make sense.. While I’m on.. here’s a couple more pics of Eskişehir, a really lovely town. I spent my last evening there sitting in a cafe on the canal, …