Tom Diegel’s Gallivants (and Occasional Rants)

After a great time riding through Languedoc with our pals the Jamiesons and then carrying on through the Pyrenees Orientales to Barcelona, it was time to head for Morocco! Our mode of travel was to ferry from Barcelona to Tangier, which is a bit unusual; Spain is separated from Morocco by the Strait of Gibraltar, the only connection between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and is only eight miles wide at its narrowest. It probably is most sensible to ferry eight miles instead of halfway around the Iberian peninsula for over 30 hours, but in order to get to Gibraltar we would have to either take regional trains with our bikes intact, or find boxes for our bikes to take the high speed trains, and in the fall bike shops don’t really have bike boxes. So it was probably going to take just as long to train as to ferry, with a lot less hassle. Of course, we are on a bike tour, so we coulda rode, but we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to ride much of that route 2 years ago with the Megans and it’s a long ways, so we were on the ferry this time.

The ferry was actually more of an industrial Love Boat without the entertainment; it was gigantic in order to carry lots of cars and many vans hugely overloaded with mostly junk:

Pretty basic but fine food, and totally fine cabins for the one night we spent on it. The seas were mellow, which was nice for Ash since she can be prone to seasickness, and it was quite a pleasant cruise all in all for a day and a half.

We landed in a port about 20 miles east of Tangier proper (the main town across Gibraltar) and it was quite mellow, which is a big contrast from what we have heard about Tangier itself. Getting off the ferry was an impressive cluster; the ferry went into the port with the butt-end first, so all the cars – including the many vans with overloaded trailers – had to either turn around on the ferry or back out, and we had our first custom-clearing after we hit the port but still on the boat, and everyone was getting through at random times, so it was chaos trying to exit the boat. We then had to clear 2 or 3 more official spots – where fortunately they fine with waving cyclists through! – and we found ourselves in Morocco!

We had booked a room/auberge nearby in anticipation of indeed getting delayed on the boat, and it turned out to be good planning; though it was not far away, it was a few hundred meters above sea level, and the grades getting up there were super steep; a good introduction to many of the roads we were to encounter in northern Morocco. We arrived at the Sanae House, where a short Moroccan woman came out to welcome us; I was surprised that her English was so good and said so, and she said “that’s because I’m English!” So hers was better’n mine.

Our general plan for riding Morocco was to follow the dramatic-sounding “Route Of The Caravans”, a route that the fine folks at bikepacking.com had spent years developing that is almost due north/south down the middle of the country before turning west as it hits the desert. En route it goes through the lowish-but-rugged Rif Mountains, the appropriately-named Medium Atlas mountains, the High Atlas that go over 12,000 feet, and the smaller Anti-Atlas mountains before plunging into the Sahara desert that Morocco may be most noted for with the epic rolling sand dunes and ferociously hot temps. I don’t really think of “Caravans” as rolling through big mountains, and we weren’t too psyched to ride through the hot sandy desert, but most of the route sounded great to us.

We rolled south for half a day and hit The Route, and after some impressively steep climbs (12-17 percent grades) in the foothills of the Rif we plunged back down equally-steep to the Mediterranean port city of Tetouan, which gave us a good sense of the jangley nature of Moroccan cities; the traffic (cars, vans, trucks, peds, burros, Motos/scooters, etc on ancient narrow cobbled streets were a far cry from the orderly Euro streets and mostly-protected bike lanes that we’d had for the last coupla weeks. But one of the great beauties of established routes – and apps like Komoot -is their ability to navigate the best route through cities, and even if it’s not necessarily nice riding, it’s efficient and just as we do with Google maps in US cities we don’t know well we were able to get turn by turn directions that led us out of town pretty quickly, and with more steep climbing found ourselves in a national park.

We’ve realized that Moroccon national parks aren’t quite like ours with outrageous natural features or notable historical sites; they are really just the equivalent of protected national forests, which makes for Great riding! Like national forests there are lots of great little roads – both paved and gravel – and because there aren’t incredible things to see there is very little car traffic. And the Route of the Caravans takes advantage of these parks that at times are practically strung together for a lot of great riding.

The only problem with the first week of the trip was the heat; of course we knew that Morocco was hot, but by arriving in early October we hoped that they would be moderated. Perhaps they were – slightly? – and it didn’t sound too bad: 80’s for a high. But I was putting this into my own perspective of living in an environment with sub-10% humidity and conveniently forgot that we were quite near a large and famously-warm Meditteranean sea, which was manifested on land as looking like a desert, but the air was actually around 60% humidified. I’d love to say that I was being cooled by the rush of air flowing past me as we blissfully sailed along on our bikes on delightfully-rolling roads, but creeping up 15% hills for surprisingly long periods of time just turned me into a sweat machine with no evaporative cooling. So I got hot. For a coupla days I did okay with trying to take it pretty easy and drinking a lot, but since we were so roasty and salty we were not keen to camp and were looking for places to stay and did what would normally be a fine distance/vert combo to get to a random guesthouse kinda in the middle of nowwhere, but I kinda spiraled into heatdom despite copious drinking and between resting and pushing my bike up hills it took me 2 hours to make 6 or 7 miles. We veered off the main road onto a gravel track, went flat for a bit and asked where the place was, and the kids pointed upwards…way up a 20% lane. The kids were bugging me asking for money, and I had an idea: offer them the equivalent of a dollar for pushing my bike up the hill…what could go wrong? They started pushing up, and suddenly I see the kid is going into my bag! I dive for him and the bike, my leg cramps up, and I fall into some sticker bushes as the kids laugh and run off. I’m writhing around in the sticker bushes and all of a sudden Ash is there with a guy speaking English and it’s the proprietor of our place. My cramps fade briefly, he throws my bike (and me) into his van, and we head up the hill where I stumble into his place while Ash seemingly, effortlessly (to me) rides on up.

Feeling better the next day, and glad to be taxiing

Our next stop is the city of Fez, a day’s ride away, and a glance at the map shows not only kinda bleak terrain that’s also hilly, but the temps climb a few more degrees. I’m out. As always in developing countries, there are people who will make anything work, and our guesthouse owner finds a taxi driver who will strap our bikes onto his roof rack and drive us to Fez. I’m in!

Fez is a famous city, not just for its namesake hat (which isn’t that popular, actually) but for it’s “medina” (market) which, according to whom you talk to, is the biggest in Morocco or the world. It was created a zillion years ago and is an incredible maze of little streets stuffed with tiny shops selling everything from baked goods to shoes to rugs to hardware to spices, meat, cheese, fruit, clothes etc. As always on a bike tour we were not tempted to buy anything we couldn’t consume pretty quickly, but though we aren’t necessarily “shoppers” per se it was amazing to aimlessly stroll the labrynth of alleys and then try to find our way back to our little guesthouse place (that was super quiet, despite being just off the heart of the Medina).

As we decompressed (and I recovered) in Fez we discussed the fact that we’d now been out for a few weeks and not touched our camping gear, and had bumped into a couple of Germans riding the route:

Who had minimal gear: “for $25/night in a guesthouse and in this heat, why would we camp?” so we made the decision to ditch our camping gear as well. So our sleeping bags and tents and such are now en route to Innsbruck, though we kept our stove; one of the things that enabled me to keep chugging along on the worst hot day was a ramen we sparked up midday to get more salt into the system, and that has proved valuable.

Out of Fez we had a long gradual climb into the Mid-Atlas mountains, and finally we got up over 4000 feet and the temps – and humidity, finally farther from the sea? – moderated a bit. We ended that day in Ifrane, which they call “Little Switzerland”, which is probably a little optimistic but is clearly kind of an enclave for rich Moroccans to hang with each other? Supposedly there’s a ski resort there, and though it’s nicely forested, we literally didn’t see any hills that one could ski on…..

Weird housing for Morocco, and probably for Switzerland as well!

But in the nearby national park were some incredible trees:

And some super mellow monkeys; so mellow that they are rare since people tend to grab them for pets? Crazy.

There’s also a couple of Great Snags:

As we anticipated, we have been riding the Route of the Caravans….some of the time. An interesting aspect of these bikepacking.com routes is that they are pretty focused on gravel roads. I like gravel roads for sure, but of course, like everyone: “good” gravel! Sometimes we’ve been on embedded limestone kitty heads and we just bounce bounce along, really slowly. A couple of the gravel sections are dry creek beds, which feel kinda silly trying to actually ride them with normal, non-fat tires. We haven’t hit any “gravel” that’s so fine that it’s actually “sand”; apparently the RoC gets plenty of that in the southern part of the route and we are avoiding that section completely. And there have been times where there’s a gravel road next to a paved road where there are virtually no cars, so why not ride the pavement? I’ve come to understand that it’s not necessarily the stones that make gravel riding great, it’s that gravel roads typically have less/no car traffic, and that’s what’s great about gravel. And virtually all of the alternative routes that we’ve taken on pavement have been stellar, with indeed very little/no traffic. And we’ve ridden faster, which is more fun! Especially on the many fast, swoopy descents off passes….

One aspect of the trip that has loomed for us the entire time is that our friend Tim Halder and his partner Sarah have also been riding the route, but they started a few days ahead of us and then – also getting roasted by the Rif Mountains heat – jumped ahead by bus. It’s been great staying in touch with them because they are providing great beta for us, but we wanted to connect with them! So we made a bit of a push and veered a bit more onto (good!) pavement and finally caught them yesterday!

So fun to reconnect with Tim; it’s been a few years and since our last adventures he’s gotten way into distant-locale bikepacktouring, Tim’s a super friendly, hilarious guy, and it was great to meet Sarah. We were only able to spend one evening with them, but we had lots of yuks and got a good social recharge!