Like the best of Sunday dinners, the recent sojourn by a dozen GSers to the Saharan fringes was far longer in the planning than it was in the execution – that, in fact, may have been a weakness in the trip, but we did all get to have lunch in a Bedouin tent at the foot of the Erg Chebbi, even if we didn’t all ride our bikes all the way home!
The crew assembled at the P&O ferryport in Portsmouth two weeks ago (6 May) to catch the 8pm sailing to Bilbao. Bakerman turned up en-famille, his mount (the bike!) festooned with balloons, streamers and messages of goodwill from Mrs Soft-baps and the offspring. My guess is that they thought that this would be the last time that they ever saw him – I’m so sorry to have disappointed you!
Needless-to-say, the first night on the boat was not so much a ‘getting to know each other’ event, more a ‘we’ve been let out – let’s see how much we can get down our necks!’ bash, with the Colonel starting the festivities by handing out the most excellent team T-shirts.
Personally, I found the prospect of 36 hours on a boat quite daunting – my boredom threshold would, I was sure, be passed pretty quickly. This was confirmed when I took my GPS on deck on the Wednesday morning to find that we hadn’t even passed the Cherbourg peninsular. To make matters worse, the boat had slowed from 23mph to just 20 mph – apparently so that it wouldn’t arrive in Bilbao too early!
On Thursday morning (08.00hrs) the boat finally arrived, and a convey of 12 Beemers threaded their way through the streets of Bilbao heading for Cáceres – a World Heritage site about 2/3rds of the way down the map of Spain. With Roy Humphries acting as ‘sweeper’ (he and I both having bike-to-bike radios), the group was able to make good progress arriving at our hotel by early evening. With a few beers and bottles of regional wine under their belts, most of the group were ready for an early night, but the hardy decided to check out the Cáceres World of Music Arts and Dance Festival in the Plaza Mayor. It was here that Bakes was able to inspect the Magic Cakes being offered by an unwashed street-vendor. No judgment was passed!
The next morning we were once more heading south to the ferry at Algeciras but found ourselves sharing the road with numerous other bikes on route to the Moto GP at Jerez. Our route took us through Seville and an unfortunate error with the GPS (‘avoid highways’ checked) found us spiraling to the city-centre and wasting too much time in identifying the best route south. The planned route through the hills to Ronda was abandoned by all but Paul Grove who later regaled us with the details of what we had missed. Thanks! The short ferry ride to Ceuta abort a 40 knot fast-ferry soon had us parking up in the hotel car-park where an area had been set aside for us.
A 9am start on Saturday 10 May saw just take the 3 mile able to the Spanish/Moroccan border. Whilst the Spanish guards just waved us through, once onto Moroccan soil it was a question of parking up the bikes and digging deep into the paperwork. First of all we had to complete embarkation forms and hand those in to get a stamp on our passports. Once that was complete, we could fill in the temporary vehicle importation docket and shown that with green card and V5 at another window. Those without green cards had to queue elsewhere to get insurance first! When that had all been done, local plod came out to check that the VIN numbers on the forms were what had actually been stamped on the bikes. After about an hour and a half (and several bungs later) we saddled up to ride …. well, all of a hundred yards before we once again had to produce our passports! That done, we were finally let loose into Morocco.
Make no mistake, Morocco is 3rd world compared with Europe and despite the Government’s best efforts, the infrastructure is still very poor. Road surfaces are generally more tar than chip and before we had ridden a dozen miles, Bakes had a ‘moment’ on the low-grip surface. Regrouped, we headed for Tetouan, Chefchaouen and on to Fes. Trouble was that the Garmin WorldMap routed us straight through the Al Wahda reservoir – a piece of water on the same scale as Kielder! It clearly wasn’t there a couple of years ago, and we found ourselves traversing 20kms of unexpected ‘off-road’. This claimed the trip’s first fall with Jim Cam suffering a low speed fall from his 650 Dakar. The off-road also delayed progress towards Erfoud although I knew that the roads were faster south of Fes.
Not having filled up since Ceuta, we all stopped in a filling station in down-town Fes only to discover that it didn’t take credit cards and the pump boldly marked ‘Sans Plomb’ was in fact dispensing leaded super! However, with few of the riders using cats that wasn’t much of an issue.
From Fes the road rises into the Middle Atlas mountains. At Boulemane, where we took a much needed saddle break, we were already at 6,000 ft with higher passes still to come. A forty-mile straight road across an Atlas plateau took us towards Midelt where another fuel stop was needed. The weakness of the 650 saddles was taking its toll on Jim and Jon Colthart. With Michael Knight, I decided to ride with them the rest of the journey – knowing that we still had a couple of hours to run but only about 30 minutes of daylight. Both Jon and Jim found their second wind as we rode up into the High Atlas and we made good progress. But it was dark by the time we met up with Charlie Batty and Bakerman at the Legionnaires’ Tunnel so I rode at the head of the convoy to Er-Rachidia and to the Sahara Plain. Regrettably Michael (who, like me, hadn’t refueled at Midelt) ran out of fuel just 3 miles from our hotel. Like all of us with standard tanks he was carrying spare, so we were held up just a few minutes whilst he tipped it into his bike.
Sunday saw a late morning start on the ride to the beach; the Erg Chebbi dunes at Merzouga, some 30 miles from Erfoud. Taking the shortest route, the tarmac soon peters out leaving the bulk of the route across the barren desert. Roy excelled in the sand and led a small group through a sandstorm to the Erg. With the remainder, I took the tarmac route through Rissani where the same sandstorm was so fierce that you couldn’t see across the width of the road! That and the rain which came with the sand soon abated and the party regrouped for a light lunch in a Bedouin tent at Merzouga before we all returned to Erfoud to a few well-earned beers whilst bikes were fettled in preparation for the next day.
In fact a number of the crew decided to forsake a trip to the Todra and Dades Gorges and head north to take in the sights and delights of Meknes. As Bakes, Chris the Colonel, Mike, Keith Davies, Jim and Jon headed north, Roy, Paul, Charlie, Andy Metcalfe, Mark Dilloway and I headed south to Todra and Dades.
According to the map, you could ride up the Todra Gorge, over an 8,000ft mountain pass and back down the Dades. A local guide had told me that the pass road was ‘good piste’. So that was our journey planned. Stopping only to take photographs of a Saharan camel-herd, the trip to Todra was uneventful, compensated by the stunning sights of 1,000ft cliffs rising either side of a the narrow Todra Gorge. After the mandatory photo-shoot, we all rode to the top of the gorge only to find the mountain-pass road conspicuous by its absence. The boys of a barren mountain village at the top of the valley suggested in broken English that there was no road, although their relative youth led one to doubt their words. It was only when a man (with the worst teeth I have seen in years!), who spoke good(?) English (having previously lived in Birmingham!), confirmed the same that we turned around and rode back down the Todra to take the main road to the Dades.
Our progress was interrupted by another thunder and sand storm. Charlie and Paul having gone on, the rest of us decided that discretion really was the better course. With a beer beckoning in the Erfoud bar, we headed north with Paul and Charlie about an hour behind us.
Meanwhile, the homeward crew were sampling the delights of the Meknes kasbah – in particular Bakes’ professional curiosity over a market-vend snorker. Despite the local advice, Bakes consumed said prag and events (including Steve’s stomach) took a serious turn.
Next morning, the Erfoud crew made an early start north, stopping for a McSahara (really!) breakfast at McDonald’s in Meknes. Unbeknowns to us, the advance party had been forced to abandon the hotel just next door a few hours earlier when it was discovered that Bakes had used the hotel’s entire supply of bog-roll! Coffee downed, breakfast devoured, bums ogled, we headed for the ferry at Ceuta.
Morocco has few motorways, but it was on the road just to the south of Tangier that Andy’s F650 was stopped with severe overheating. Given that it had been across the hot Saharan sands, a short sprint on a motorway should have been well within its stride. In fact, it was the beginning of a several hours long process of limping the bike to the ferry port.
At Ceuta, we met up with Jim and Jon – Jim having had new rubber fitted to the rear of his Dakar. Bakes and the Colonel had gone ahead to find a fresh supply of bum-paper, whilst Keith and Mike had returned to the Moroccan border in a fruitless search for a lost GPS. It was late in the evening before we all arrived at our Marbella hotel, Bakes being too ill to show for a late dinner. Andy arrived in a hire-car at about midnight, his bike having been picked up by the Spanish RAC.
With just a few hundred miles to ride across Spain, we all set out the next morning with high expectations, the Colonel, in particular, determined to enjoy his last full day in Spain. Whilst the rest of us made our various ways towards Segovia, the Colonel found himself stranded on the side of a Madrid motorway with alternator failure. With the RAC being unable to work out his locations (despite GPS coordinates and road numbers), Chris threw himself at the mercy of the King of Spain’s armed forces and I understand that he spent a rough night in a secret location!
For the rest of us, the run to Bilbao was uneventful (save for Mike’s underpants!) and 11 weary riders with 10 weary bikes awaited our departure for Blighty – the tiredness only being stirred by meeting Timolgra (who arrived on the ferry we were about to board) and a Volkwagen Golf driver who had decided to give the local Bill a driving display.
Having now been back at work for a week, it’s as if I’ve never been away. But it was a great adventure, made better by some great company!
Greg
The crew assembled at the P&O ferryport in Portsmouth two weeks ago (6 May) to catch the 8pm sailing to Bilbao. Bakerman turned up en-famille, his mount (the bike!) festooned with balloons, streamers and messages of goodwill from Mrs Soft-baps and the offspring. My guess is that they thought that this would be the last time that they ever saw him – I’m so sorry to have disappointed you!
Needless-to-say, the first night on the boat was not so much a ‘getting to know each other’ event, more a ‘we’ve been let out – let’s see how much we can get down our necks!’ bash, with the Colonel starting the festivities by handing out the most excellent team T-shirts.
Personally, I found the prospect of 36 hours on a boat quite daunting – my boredom threshold would, I was sure, be passed pretty quickly. This was confirmed when I took my GPS on deck on the Wednesday morning to find that we hadn’t even passed the Cherbourg peninsular. To make matters worse, the boat had slowed from 23mph to just 20 mph – apparently so that it wouldn’t arrive in Bilbao too early!
On Thursday morning (08.00hrs) the boat finally arrived, and a convey of 12 Beemers threaded their way through the streets of Bilbao heading for Cáceres – a World Heritage site about 2/3rds of the way down the map of Spain. With Roy Humphries acting as ‘sweeper’ (he and I both having bike-to-bike radios), the group was able to make good progress arriving at our hotel by early evening. With a few beers and bottles of regional wine under their belts, most of the group were ready for an early night, but the hardy decided to check out the Cáceres World of Music Arts and Dance Festival in the Plaza Mayor. It was here that Bakes was able to inspect the Magic Cakes being offered by an unwashed street-vendor. No judgment was passed!
The next morning we were once more heading south to the ferry at Algeciras but found ourselves sharing the road with numerous other bikes on route to the Moto GP at Jerez. Our route took us through Seville and an unfortunate error with the GPS (‘avoid highways’ checked) found us spiraling to the city-centre and wasting too much time in identifying the best route south. The planned route through the hills to Ronda was abandoned by all but Paul Grove who later regaled us with the details of what we had missed. Thanks! The short ferry ride to Ceuta abort a 40 knot fast-ferry soon had us parking up in the hotel car-park where an area had been set aside for us.
A 9am start on Saturday 10 May saw just take the 3 mile able to the Spanish/Moroccan border. Whilst the Spanish guards just waved us through, once onto Moroccan soil it was a question of parking up the bikes and digging deep into the paperwork. First of all we had to complete embarkation forms and hand those in to get a stamp on our passports. Once that was complete, we could fill in the temporary vehicle importation docket and shown that with green card and V5 at another window. Those without green cards had to queue elsewhere to get insurance first! When that had all been done, local plod came out to check that the VIN numbers on the forms were what had actually been stamped on the bikes. After about an hour and a half (and several bungs later) we saddled up to ride …. well, all of a hundred yards before we once again had to produce our passports! That done, we were finally let loose into Morocco.
Make no mistake, Morocco is 3rd world compared with Europe and despite the Government’s best efforts, the infrastructure is still very poor. Road surfaces are generally more tar than chip and before we had ridden a dozen miles, Bakes had a ‘moment’ on the low-grip surface. Regrouped, we headed for Tetouan, Chefchaouen and on to Fes. Trouble was that the Garmin WorldMap routed us straight through the Al Wahda reservoir – a piece of water on the same scale as Kielder! It clearly wasn’t there a couple of years ago, and we found ourselves traversing 20kms of unexpected ‘off-road’. This claimed the trip’s first fall with Jim Cam suffering a low speed fall from his 650 Dakar. The off-road also delayed progress towards Erfoud although I knew that the roads were faster south of Fes.
Not having filled up since Ceuta, we all stopped in a filling station in down-town Fes only to discover that it didn’t take credit cards and the pump boldly marked ‘Sans Plomb’ was in fact dispensing leaded super! However, with few of the riders using cats that wasn’t much of an issue.
From Fes the road rises into the Middle Atlas mountains. At Boulemane, where we took a much needed saddle break, we were already at 6,000 ft with higher passes still to come. A forty-mile straight road across an Atlas plateau took us towards Midelt where another fuel stop was needed. The weakness of the 650 saddles was taking its toll on Jim and Jon Colthart. With Michael Knight, I decided to ride with them the rest of the journey – knowing that we still had a couple of hours to run but only about 30 minutes of daylight. Both Jon and Jim found their second wind as we rode up into the High Atlas and we made good progress. But it was dark by the time we met up with Charlie Batty and Bakerman at the Legionnaires’ Tunnel so I rode at the head of the convoy to Er-Rachidia and to the Sahara Plain. Regrettably Michael (who, like me, hadn’t refueled at Midelt) ran out of fuel just 3 miles from our hotel. Like all of us with standard tanks he was carrying spare, so we were held up just a few minutes whilst he tipped it into his bike.
Sunday saw a late morning start on the ride to the beach; the Erg Chebbi dunes at Merzouga, some 30 miles from Erfoud. Taking the shortest route, the tarmac soon peters out leaving the bulk of the route across the barren desert. Roy excelled in the sand and led a small group through a sandstorm to the Erg. With the remainder, I took the tarmac route through Rissani where the same sandstorm was so fierce that you couldn’t see across the width of the road! That and the rain which came with the sand soon abated and the party regrouped for a light lunch in a Bedouin tent at Merzouga before we all returned to Erfoud to a few well-earned beers whilst bikes were fettled in preparation for the next day.
In fact a number of the crew decided to forsake a trip to the Todra and Dades Gorges and head north to take in the sights and delights of Meknes. As Bakes, Chris the Colonel, Mike, Keith Davies, Jim and Jon headed north, Roy, Paul, Charlie, Andy Metcalfe, Mark Dilloway and I headed south to Todra and Dades.
According to the map, you could ride up the Todra Gorge, over an 8,000ft mountain pass and back down the Dades. A local guide had told me that the pass road was ‘good piste’. So that was our journey planned. Stopping only to take photographs of a Saharan camel-herd, the trip to Todra was uneventful, compensated by the stunning sights of 1,000ft cliffs rising either side of a the narrow Todra Gorge. After the mandatory photo-shoot, we all rode to the top of the gorge only to find the mountain-pass road conspicuous by its absence. The boys of a barren mountain village at the top of the valley suggested in broken English that there was no road, although their relative youth led one to doubt their words. It was only when a man (with the worst teeth I have seen in years!), who spoke good(?) English (having previously lived in Birmingham!), confirmed the same that we turned around and rode back down the Todra to take the main road to the Dades.
Our progress was interrupted by another thunder and sand storm. Charlie and Paul having gone on, the rest of us decided that discretion really was the better course. With a beer beckoning in the Erfoud bar, we headed north with Paul and Charlie about an hour behind us.
Meanwhile, the homeward crew were sampling the delights of the Meknes kasbah – in particular Bakes’ professional curiosity over a market-vend snorker. Despite the local advice, Bakes consumed said prag and events (including Steve’s stomach) took a serious turn.
Next morning, the Erfoud crew made an early start north, stopping for a McSahara (really!) breakfast at McDonald’s in Meknes. Unbeknowns to us, the advance party had been forced to abandon the hotel just next door a few hours earlier when it was discovered that Bakes had used the hotel’s entire supply of bog-roll! Coffee downed, breakfast devoured, bums ogled, we headed for the ferry at Ceuta.
Morocco has few motorways, but it was on the road just to the south of Tangier that Andy’s F650 was stopped with severe overheating. Given that it had been across the hot Saharan sands, a short sprint on a motorway should have been well within its stride. In fact, it was the beginning of a several hours long process of limping the bike to the ferry port.
At Ceuta, we met up with Jim and Jon – Jim having had new rubber fitted to the rear of his Dakar. Bakes and the Colonel had gone ahead to find a fresh supply of bum-paper, whilst Keith and Mike had returned to the Moroccan border in a fruitless search for a lost GPS. It was late in the evening before we all arrived at our Marbella hotel, Bakes being too ill to show for a late dinner. Andy arrived in a hire-car at about midnight, his bike having been picked up by the Spanish RAC.
With just a few hundred miles to ride across Spain, we all set out the next morning with high expectations, the Colonel, in particular, determined to enjoy his last full day in Spain. Whilst the rest of us made our various ways towards Segovia, the Colonel found himself stranded on the side of a Madrid motorway with alternator failure. With the RAC being unable to work out his locations (despite GPS coordinates and road numbers), Chris threw himself at the mercy of the King of Spain’s armed forces and I understand that he spent a rough night in a secret location!
For the rest of us, the run to Bilbao was uneventful (save for Mike’s underpants!) and 11 weary riders with 10 weary bikes awaited our departure for Blighty – the tiredness only being stirred by meeting Timolgra (who arrived on the ferry we were about to board) and a Volkwagen Golf driver who had decided to give the local Bill a driving display.
Having now been back at work for a week, it’s as if I’ve never been away. But it was a great adventure, made better by some great company!
Greg
