My winter migration South followed the usual pattern this year – leaving France as soon as the weather turned cold and wet to head for the sun ! It was early November when I loaded the van with the KTM, Sirrus and Trek, plus the usual selection of tools and accessories (and a few clothes), and set off down through Spain to the south coast of Portugal – Alvor in the Algarve. Tim and Helen have an apartment in Alvor and spend 6+ months of the year there, rather than endure the usual dreary winter weather back home in Preston. I had booked a rental apartment for four weeks in Alvor and then planned to head even further south to Maroc for December, returning in early January for another couple of months before heading back home again. This post covers the Maroc part of the trip…
On previous trips to Maroc I have done a certain amount of touring around, either by bike or in the van, but this year I thought I would mostly stay in one place, which is one of my favourites – Essaouira on the West coast. It’s about 1500 Km from my place in Cahors to Alvor and the trip to Essaouira adds another 1200 Km to that, it’s a long way South and the December weather is perfect.
In previous years I have made a few stops on the way South, but this year I decided to try and do one stop, which was in Kenitra.
I stayed at the Relax Hotel, and arrived in time to have a very cold beer watching the sunset by the pool. This was my last beer for a month as alcohol is not easy to find in Maroc, and not very good when you find it. In previous years I have taken on the challenge of finding the back street hole-in-the-wall vendors doing an illicit trade in booze, but as the local stuff is not great I gave up in the end. And Dry December alliterates(!) better than Dry January.
As I had a lot of ground to cover I used the toll motorways along the West coast to head South. These are generally very good and little used, with regular service areas. I pulled into one for a coffee break and, apart from a few staff, it was completely empty – like the scene from some sort of scary movie where everyone has been abducted by aliens.
Once further South the motorway ended and I was on minor roads crossing some quite barren landscape – no services so coffee stops became a JetBoil affair.
On previous visits to Essaouira I have stayed in a cheap hotel, but as I was going to be there for a while I had booked an apartment. There was some confusion as to my arrival time – the owner was expecting to meet me at 2, but having driven all the way from Kenitra I didn’t arrive until a lot later. Turned out he had misunderstood my message saying I would need parking for my van (2m high).
The apartment was on the ground floor and facing South, with sun all day. There was no outside space, so I just got out my camping chair and pitched up on the pavement, much to the entertainment of the local children – most of the other apartments in the block seemed to be occupied by young families.
I soon settled into my familair (some might say boring !) routine of getting up early, sometimes before dawn, going for a run along the beach followed by breakfast at a local cafe where I would come up with a plan for the day usually involving getting out on my electric mountain bike or the KTM. However, on this trip I had a few additional activities to pursue…
My first experience of surfing was during my visit to Canada to see Georgina earlier in the year. She had arranged a surf lesson, which I thoroughly enjoyed and was keen to do more. I had taken a couple of lessons in Alvor in November and was looking to continue in Maroc.
The second area of interest was Yoga. I have been running and cycling for many years (forever ?) but don’t really have any sort of stretching routine, so I was keen to try and develop some suitable exercises that I could do on my own in 15-20 minutes a day. I had been to one evaluation lesson in Portugal but there was a bit of a language barrier and I’m not sure the teacher really understood what I was after. I contacted three Yoga schools in Essaouira, one of which seemed to understand exactly what I wanted, so I booked in for some 1-to-1 sessions.
The last activity, which I hadn’t considered at the outset, was to go Quad biking on the dunes.
The nearest cafe to the apartment (about 50m away) was the O’Phare, run by two lovely ladies, so called because it looks out at the lighthouse. It was such a friendy and convenient place that I was there for breakfast every day!
Essaouira has a long strip of beautiful sandy beach, with the Northern half reserved for families and sun bathing. The southern half is where you can take horse and camel rides and where the water sports begin. The place is a Mecca for kite surfers as it is often windy and the prevailing wind blows along the beach, but is also very popular with surfers when less windy. The beach continues South of Essaouira and runs for almost 20 Km – endless and largely unspoilt sand (washed up plastic aplenty). Inland from this vast and empty beach is a huge expanse of sand dunes, about 5 Km wide – a wonderful play ground for anyone with the right toys. Although my Trek mountain bike is electric it quickly reached its (and my) limits in the dunes, so I had to be fairly careful when exploring and stick to the more established trails.
Playing in the dunes on the KTM was a different matter, but is still had its limits, as did I. I had fitted the KTM with a set of supermoto wheels running slick tyres – these are ideal on a race track or for enthusiastic trips to the coffee shop back home in Cahors, but not much use in deep sand. For a bit of fun I decided to try them anyway and found they worked amazingly well – lots of grip on the hard, wet sand on the beach with the tide out and even in soft sand they did a great job – floating on top of the sand rather than digging in.
If you manage to make it to the southern end of the beach, or the dunes, they give way to a rocky headland and perched on top of this is La Grotte cafe, which I call the Surf Shack – it’s little more than a shed and overlooks one of the local surf spots.
Back at the apartment it was time to refit the original enduro wheels with knobby tyres…
With the KTM switched to off road tyres I was able to make better progress through the dunes. The technique seemed to be to get up enough speed so that the front wheel would start to float across the sand, rather than digging in – but in this condition the bike doesn’t respond to steering inputs and you have to use your body weight to turn, or slow down a bit to regain grip at the front. This video was an attempt to give some impression of the dune riding experience, but it’s only GoPro footage and not up to my usual standard…
In deeper sand things get more difficult and it was very easy to get bogged down, usually when trying to climb a dune without enough momentum. Once the bike is stuck there is no option but to manhandle the bike round to head back down the dune, which is hard work. I wouldn’t want to attempt the dunes on a heavier bike, but I’m not a Dakar legend – they seem to manage OK.
While riding in the dunes I never saw another motorbike (perhaps because it’s a daft idea), but did see plenty of people out on quad bikes, and the occasional camel. The quad bikes were usually in a group being led by a guide and always looked to be going at a sedate pace. However, they were able to access parts of the dunes that I didn’t have the confidence (or ability?) to attempt, which piqued my interest.
I had some private Yoga sessions with Paola at her studio buried deep in the Essaouira Medina. These sessions were for her to explore what I could and couldn’t do and identify areas that I needed to work on with a view to creating a “sequence” I could use on my own. I have to say that these sessions were a real eye opener for me into the world of Yoga. In particular the use of controlled breathing techniques and meditation to listen to your body were very powerful and made a real impression on me. After a few sessions she put together two 15 minute sequences that we were able to practise together, and I have subsequently carried on doing on my own. I still have a long way to go with some of the poses, but was pleasantly surprised at what I was able to manage.
There are a plethora of water sports centres along the beach front in Essaouira and I had no idea which one to choose to talk about surf lessons. In the end, I simply walked into the nearest one to my apartment at the South end of the beach called KSE (Kite Surf Essaouira). The place was busy with young, tanned “surf dudes” waxing their equipment or getting ready to get out on the water. I was a bit anxious that they might not cater for someone older and incompetent, but they were very welcoming and explained the options – the prices for a private lesson were cheaper than the cost of a group lesson in Portugal! I initially booked a private lesson and subsequently had some group sessions with other people of mixed abilities. As a beginner you only surf in the “white water” – this is after the wave has broken and is rolling in towards the beach – it is very turbulent but still has plenty of power. A big advantage of this approach is that you are never out of your depth. You wade out with the board until you are waist deep, wait for a suitable wave, jump on the board and try to “catch” it. You start off lying face down on the board and paddling to catch the wave, then once you are on the wave you have to “pop up” to your feet and ride the wave into the shore. Or, if you’re a beginner you can just ride in lying on the board which is easier but still fun. Karim, my instructor, was incredibly patient and encouraging – he would hold the board for me to get on and into position, then push the board into the wave at the right moment. I have found surfing to be strangely addictive, because every time you ride a wave there is always something you could have done differently/better and you just want to get back out and do it again – in search of the “perfect” wave. It is also surprisingly tiring because after each ride you have to fight your way back out through the surf, dragging the board, to start again. And then you look a bit further out to the just breaking “green” waves and see the young dudes carving perfect bottom turns and generally ripping it up and realise you’ve got an awful long way to go..
Having explored as much of the dunes as I could on the Trek and KTM, I went to talk to one of the Quad Bike Tour outfits to see what they had to offer. I was afraid the ride would be a bit pedestrian and not very exciting, but they assured me it would be fun, so I booked a 3 hour guided trip for Christmas Day ! My guide was Mobarak, who turned out to be a lovely chap, but a bit of a nutter. We started off fairly gently and it took me a while to get used to the Quad – plenty of drive to get you across the soft sand, but it felt like there was no grip at the front end. I was slowing right down for the corners to avoid understeering off into the scenery, with my guide disappearing into the distance. I gradually got more used to the feeling and he gave me some tips – the trick seemed to be to use the front brake to load the front wheels on inital turn-in and then steer through the corner on the throttle. Great fun when you get it right but a bit scary. As I developed more confidence and picked up speed, he just went faster to notch it up a level and by the end we were flying. So much so that, when we got back, his quad was missing one of the headlight assemblies and neither of us had noticed it falling off – which explains why he looks a bit grumpy in the photo. What a fantastic way to spend Christmas Day !
After four weeks in Essaouira it was time to head back to Portugal, for which I simply followed the route in reverse, with an overnight stop in Kenitra. Arriving back in Portugal in early January I was quite shocked by the drop in temperature, maybe I should stay longer in Maroc ?
Already looking foward to getting back there again next year…
