Morocco offroad

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• published: 05 Dec 2010
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If you want to ride on rocks, harsh arid land and mountains I guess Morocco would be the place to go, and yep thats what I found. This is definitely a hard barren place and the country is all made upon rock. I arrived by plane into the town of Ozauzazite at 2:30 am and met my guide who was going to take me on my tour. I wanted to travel by myself on this trip as I love to take photos and wanted the opportunity to stop were ever whenever I wanted and take photos without holding up a group. The experience of getting out of Casablanca to Ozauzazite was something out of a circus and arriving in a strange place in the early hours of the morning kept my guard up a little, and traveling for over 22 hours to get to this desert town I was eager to get my head onto a pillow and get some sleep. My guide informed me that a tour group of girls had just had an accident and had been hurled out of a car with no safety belts on and were in a very bad way staying at their house waiting for a plane to arrive to take them back to Holland. One of the girls was too beaten up and had to stay in hospital with 6 broken ribs and a punctured lung, the other 2 girls at the house had a broken foot, broken back and shoulder and various cuts and grazers to the face and other parts of the body. Welcome to Morocco! It certainly was a wake up call in how dangerous this region is and with my 8 day trip off road on dirt bikes certainly made me rethink my safety. I got to sleep at 3:30 am and was a wake again at 6 am, I had breakfast with the girls and we then carried them on stretchers to the ambulance to take them to the airport to be flown out, I think their travel insurance company were eager to get them home and away from the local medical "state of Morocco"!. By 10 am we were off on day 1, I was riding a Yamaha TTR600 and my guide was riding a KTM 950 Super Enduro, I had the option of getting a KTM 630 but as I was filming on the bike, the Yamaha gave less vibration for the camera, I was using a GoPro HD camera mounted to my chest, this is a great camera and is full HD, even though other parts of my male anatomy wanted the KTM (mustang) my safe brain intelligence suggested I should have the Yamaha!. We were off, we first rode to the foot hills of the High Atlas mountains, we crossed over flat desert type terrain and we rode on rock type roads in the mountains, occasionally we would go of the track and head up and over hills and also a lot of riding up dried river beds and also wet river beds, I enjoyed getting wet in the streams while riding as this cooled me down a little. The terrain is epic in Morocco, at some stages you feel you are riding in the Grand canyon, and traveling between 60 and 100 km's,took on a fast adventurist and thrilling ride the lack of people and cars around meant we could open the throttle a little and experience what its like to do Dakar style racing!!!. We spent a couple of days traveling to the dunes on the edge of the Sahara desert, to get there we rode for 8 hours in 47 degrees C,the amount of water I had- would be in the gallons AND I didn't expel any liquid at all the whole day, the body really needs the fluid in these conditions, I had a camel pack on my back and I was drinking hot water from it all day, I would drink litres in one session and still be thirsty, in this dry heat and the type of clothes I wore while riding I didn't sweat much either, I guess when I get back home in 2 weeks i'll be sitting alot on the toilet!!!.We rode over sand dunes in the evening as it was a bit cooler to ride in. It was a different way of riding in the sand, with deflated tires we would ride over the dunes at about 40 k's p/hr to keep the momentum going so we wouldn't get bogged down. Also a technique you need to have is to slow down at the top of the dune as you can't judge the other side, I found this out fast as I cart wheeled down one slope after I went over too fast. Another moment was when I was climbing one dune and released almost at the top that I was riding over Erg Chebbi, the highest sand dune in Morocco with a height of 300 meters I realized that this girl was to epic to go over, so I freaked out and rode off to the side, the video footage of this is hilarious as all you can hear is me freaking out whoa whoa whoaaaaa!!!! might have to put it up on you tube for a laugh. Lines on the horizon and thats about it, just flat hot dry land, we would cruise across these parts sitting on 100ks/p/hr awesome riding occasionally standing up to carry the bike over the occasional ditch, if its a deep ditch or hole the bike at this speed tends to glide over. I loved the ride through the mountains, the terrain changed constantly, some hard tracks than others, we would venture up rivers with no tracks and you would see the odd Moroccan Berber riding his horse or donkey somewhere in no-mans land, what were they doing out here! surely I thought if they just moved twenty kilometers that way there is a oasis with palm trees and sp