A little Aside

On the travels we met Jeremy- a pleasant nutter who rode a KTM 690 to Morocco and back.... this is a little beyond the Road to Barcelona but it just shows what happens when you have the spirit of adventure, time, petrol and a cool bike..... Over to you Jeremy

Our Guest Columnist Jeremy Torr writes: 

Marrakesh and the Rif mountains - very different places. I reached Marrakesh after a long and sweaty day to arrive in small town France, circa 1950. The shady, cavernous cafes, the uniformly mustachioed bowing waiters in shiny shoes and waistcoats, the groups of unshaven men in swanky leather jackets hunched in earnest yet discreet conversation over small dark coffees in the corners. It was like being in a film set. Outside the sun made shadows of every kind of street inhabitant you can think of - jugglers, acrobats, shoeshine boys, DVD salesmen, dentists, butchers selling sheep heads, teenagers on mopeds, donkeys pulling carts laden with cement or underwear, women in full chadors and black African transvestites in high heels. Astonishing. 

Even more astonishing was the complete lack of tension on the streets. There were beggars asking for alms, hustlers looking for gullible tourists and the occasional shouting match over some potatoes or the urgent need to get a donkey through a doorway, but nobody was intimidating. Everything was good natured and OK. “Take a photo? That will be 10 dirhams” - with a grin. Mostly, I offered five and got a photo, a handshake, and a “salaam aleikum” thrown in. Even the hustlers, like Mejid who rescued me when I was lost, seemed to take pride in being amusing as they hustled. 

Mejid looked like a teenager, was married, had a great smile, and really liked riding on the back of my bike to look for needles (to mend my jacket) and soap powder (to wash my socks). He showed me bike parking, where the good food was, the key attractions, the sewing accessories shop with needles for repairing everything from lace bodices to camel saddles, his mate who used to play football in France (“la dolce vita, oh yes”) and the Café de France where a cat came and sat on my lap for no reason at all. 

All Mejid’s directions, no matter the object of the trip, seemed to bring us to the shops where his relatives worked. Just like in rest of the city, nobody at his family’s places tried to push anything I didn’t want, just showed me stuff and let me chose or not. In one tiny and jammed full shop, I was interested in buying a small drum for Mallika, but the guys there were so busy playing violin and guitar and singing that they ignored everybody that came in. A photo on the wall showed Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin had been there a while back, 

so it wasn’t because they had a rubbish clientele. They were simply too busy enjoying the music.

The place I stayed, Riad Amiris, was run by Hadijah and her daughter Fatima. Somebody told me it was good when I was in M’Hamid, so looked it up when I got to Marrakesh . It was in the souk, down a teeny tiny side alley, and had a massive iron-studded wooden door with no handle, set into a stone wall. So you could only get in if somebody let you in. It was wonderfully quiet and sunny behind the door, and Hadijah always seemed to have at least three jobs on the go at any one time. She was the kindest and most generous hotel manager you could hope to meet. “Do your washing - sure. Then put it out on the roof to dry.” “Dinner? Yes, tonight - how about a tagine with lamb, roast almonds and raisins in a sweet gravy, with Moroccan salad?” “A book to read - I think I have one in English.” Hadijah told me she didn’t get paid much by the owner, so I gave her a bonus in Euros to go towards buying daughter Fatima a PC, who needed one for her studies. She looked a bit damp-eyed and gave me a huge hug as I left, unusual for an Arab woman. If you go to Marrakesh, look her up. Lovely person.

Then there was the Rif mountain range. 

In terms of scenery, it poops all over Marrakesh . Incredible views, picture-book villages perched on steep crags and small white houses dotted around the valleys, even the odd Roman ruin or two. Add to that superb twisty yet almost empty roads winding along the edge of a alpine meadows or the crystal blue Mediterranean, and what more could you ask? Well, you could start with fewer packs of attack dogs, a few more smiles from the orange sellers and a general lightening of the atmosphere. Initially I thought I was imagining it - a couple of blacked out Mercedes hurtling past me on twisty mountain roads in the middle of nowhere; a kid throwing stones at me in a small town, old men watching unmoving as their dogs tried to bite my legs. Then when I booked into the hotel in El Jabbha, the manager asked me to give him my passport for an hour or so. I was reluctant to hand over my most precious personal document to a stranger, so asked why. “To take to the police station,” he explained.

Normally when you check in to a Moroccan hotel, you write down your ID details in a register, sign in, and that’s it. Not in Rif country. The policeman (I took my passport to the police station myself) took my documents and entered all the details into his computer. With the extra info of where I’d come from, where I was going, where I lived, what I did, the registration of my bike and what country it was registered in. All for one night’s stay in a $10 hotel. He explained laughingly it was for my own security, but I had a sneaking suspicion it might have been something to do with the fact that about 80% of Europe’s cannabis is grown in the Rif mountains. 

Next day as I was having breakfast in a village cafe by the road, a car stopped and three men stumbled out of it, tripping over each other. It thought the middle one was disabled or something, then I noticed, as they hustled into the building next to me, that the middle one was handcuffed to the other two - which explained the stumbling. Nobody commented, looked interested or even took any notice of some guy either being arrested or maybe just being taken somewhere for a quiet chat by some business associates. None of the men was in uniform.

That’s the Rif then. Having said all that, the countryside is stunning and staggering by equal measure. Every bend in the road has a new and breathtaking view; the Med sparkles a few hundred metres below, the cliffs plunge off hairpin bends to tiny villages below cave-pocked rocks or next to centuries-old forts and the chicken strips on my tyres got smaller every bend. I love Morocco .

Memories...