Six and a half go mad in Morocco

Day 3

The landscape was flat, dark and stony, but as we were heading along, I noticed, rising up in the distance the orange of high sand dunes.  We stopped a few hundred yards from the dunes for a few last minute tips from Patsy while John lowered everyone’s tyre pressure.   There was plenty of slightly OTT laughter and a few photos as everyone slightly nervously prepared themselves.  Patsy led us into the dunes carefully, stopping us regularly and going ahead to check it was OK.  It was late morning and the sun was high.  This meant that there was little definition of the slopes we trying to ride across.  The danger we had been warned about was approaching perpendicular to the sharp knife edge crest of a dune too quickly and then sailing over the top, bike and rider landing in a tangled heap some way below.   The advice was not to approach the summit too fast and cut the throttle just as the front wheel reaches it.

Everyone was riding with a bit of trepidation, so Patsy stopped us in a little bowl and gave us the chance to get some practise.  It was unbelievably hot and riding in circles, struggling with the bike was hard work.  It suddenly got a whole lot harder when I cut the throttle too much turning into a slow corner, the front wheel dug in and I was on the sand.  Wrestling the bike out again and getting going had me panting for breath and dripping with sweat.

We then continued across this stretch of dunes which at a few kms seemed quite narrow.  After our first quick foray into the dunes we met up again with the Unimog under some trees for a drink.  Waiting there for us were about 8 young boys with a variety of trinkets to buy.  A Sprite, a bracelet and a fossil later we set off back into the dunes to tackle something a bit larger. 

We wended our way into the dunes and then stopped in front of a big dune.  Everyone was getting pretty nervous now, and it was about to get worse.  Patsy set off to show us the way, and at that point we really started to get a perspective.  Patsy and her bike kept getting further and further away and getting smaller and smaller and still she kept going up.  This really was biiiiggg!  She was heading toward a saddle to the right of the peak, and then she just went over the top.  The last we saw of her was her back wheel in the air.  She did not reappear.  Now we were worried.  We found out afterwards that John had been watching through binoculars at the Unimog and saw Patsy fall heavily over the top.  He jumped on a spare bike and appeared on the scene quickly.  Patsy reappeared after about 5 minutes, failing to mention that she had had a bit of an off.   Despite our nerves, we all had a go at this huge dune.  Donna went a slightly different route and got caught out by the flat light and a large bank 20yds short of the top.  I followed Patsy’s line, nervously keeping the throttle wide open and although it was seemed to go on, up and up, judging the stopping point was helped enormously by John guiding us all in.  An unbelievable thrill.

We came off this dune field and headed toward our lunch stop and in doing so passed a shop (?) with skis and boots outside.  Bizzare.  It turned out that it wasn’t our lunch stop.  Change of plan and it was off up the cathedral dunes of Urg Chebbi.  At around 124 metres high it is apparently the highest in Morocco and the second highest in Africa.  Again it was a real nerve-wracker with us all sitting looking up at this beast.  John gave a demo.  It started with a downhill stretch where he changed up to fourth gear, then blasted up this massive slope.  The light contrast created by the sun high overhead was non-existence again, and so judging the top was going to be difficult.  The slope was unbelievably long, and the temptation to slow needed to be avoided as the bikes could get bogged down in the deep sand and consequently fail to make the top.  I set off, heart racing and changing up through the gears, picking up a fair speed by the bottom before the long, long charge up the dune.  Sit back, throttle open, don’t hesitate, don’t back off.  Toward the top change down again keeping the throttle open, then chop the throttle just as you hit the top.  I had stopped just in time, the reverse slope was steep and Mel’s bike 10yds down was testament to the dangers.  After a few near misses, we were all at the top euphoric at our achievement.  The view from the top was magnificent.  It must have been possible to see 30 miles, and on the plain about a dozen dust devils were clearly visible.   These mini-cyclones looked like something from a Hollywood disaster movie.

The reverse slope which looked so daunting was exactly the route we were taking down from the top.  The technique was to stick your bum as far back as you could, and have just a little throttle to lift the front wheel.  Another big adrenaline buzz.  We wound down through increasingly small dunes feeling euphoric.  My conquest of the high dune had given me a false sense of invincibility and I had forgotten the need for concentration.  As I deserved, I was suddenly and violently ejected from the bike as my front wheel dug into, then twisted in soft sand. Other than taking a sharp blow to the wrist, I was fine and had received a good reminder.

Lunch was in a very smart restaurant, although we soon managed to change that as we shed ourselves of our gear and spread it liberally across the room.  After lunch we needed to refuel, and so it was down to the local town where we stopped outside a nondescript building which turned out was the petrol station.  We relaxed in the shade as a small team came out of a doorway carrying large plastic bottles full of petrol and started to refuel the bikes.  We quickly became a source of much interest and were surrounded by a group of small girls who shyly looked on and with whom we tried to communicate.  All spoken communication quickly proved fruitless and so I reverted to trying to pull silly faces which seemed to cause some amusement in a ‘come and look at the mad foreigner’ sort of way.   A large bag of sweets was produced by John and this overcame some of the shyness. 

Our afternoon was spent riding along a section of the Dakar rally route.  Very exciting.  It was made a little more authentic at one point when we were behind the Unimog in a sandy section.  It was simply impossible to see anything as I became engulfed in the impenetrable cloud of dust kicked up by it.  Once passed the Unimog, we moved onto a fast section of “piste” as the experts call it.   The Dakar effect was at times ruined by having to pass minibuses crammed to the gunwales with people, and a man on a 1970s motorbike going surprisingly quickly.  A little later on I came up behind a stationary minibus.  I manoeuvred around it, to find the passengers out and trying to do a bit of road repair.  There was a river bed to cross and the far bank was too steep for the minibus to get up so they were out shifting rocks.  And we complain about the British roads.