Day 1 : Over The Water and Up The Rif
After somehow getting two XRs onto a trailer designed for one bike, and the three of us inside a tiny Renault Express van - Patrick in the back with the third bike (we had to remove both wheels, both fenders, the handlebars and the left footpeg) - we drove the eight hours from the meeting point (Madrid) to the southern Spanish seaport of Algeciras, where you catch the ferry to Morocco.
Here, after reassembling the bikes and setting off for the ferry terminal, we got our first taste of something which was to be fairly constant over the next two weeks: unwanted attention from touts, who have something to offer you and are very persistent. In this case, it was ferry tickets, which they assured us we should buy from them and not from the ferry company's office, since:
(a) the office was closed;
(b) it was impossible to buy tickets for motorbikes from the ferry company; and
(c) it was much more expensive to buy direct from the ferry company.
Since from where I stood I could see the ferry company's representative waiting at his booth swatting at flies as he waited for the next customer; and above his head a large sign with pictures of a car, a motorcycle, and a lorry on it, with the corresponding prices for each, I decided to cut out the middle man, and headed over to the office. Sure enough, there was no problem: the company man even called the ferry captain on the phone to delay the ferry five minutes to give us time to ride onboard.
An hour and a bit later we were in Africa, and the first challenge arose: Patrick hadn't had time to do an engine-oil change, and wanted to do it asap as he was carrying two litres of Mobil 1 and a fresh filter in his pack and it was taking up space. "No problem", we thought. "Let's just find somewhere to dispose of the used oil." After half an hour riding around Ceuta asking at all the garages where we could leave used engine oil and receiving blank stares or offers to sell us more new oil, we realised that it wasn't our broken French or broken Spanish which was causing problems, simply the fact that over there, used engine oil goes on the local rubbish dump. Reluctantly, and encouraged by a local mechanic, we left the used oil on the local dump and set off to pass through customs and into the real Morocco (Ceuta, where the ferry arrives, is a Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast).
Another two-and-a-half hours later (see Customs/border problems) we were finally on Moroccan territory and winging it south on a fast tarmac road, in order to get as far south as possible before stopping for the night. People walking along the road seemed very friendly, turning round to watch us pass and waving at us. There was very little traffic on the road, and it suddenly felt like Africa after the busy roads in Spain. All the same, there were regular police roadblocks with vicious-looking big spiked chains draped across the road. We followed the locals' example and stopped to have our papers checked but were waved through immediately as soon as they saw we were foreigners. Indeed in the whole two weeks in Morocco we were never hassled by the police, but always let by with a friendly wave.
As we approached Tetuan, two locals on a tiny 100cc roadbike somehow passed us and flagged us down, waving excitedly at our bikes. We stopped, and after they had enthused over our bikes for five minutes, and found out where we were heading for that night, assured us that we should stay instead in Tetuan, as it was dangerous to travel by night into the Rif mountains (a major marijuana-growing area): people put large rocks on the road and order to cause drivers to crash, so they told us; and the local police would stop foreigners and stamp their passports to show that they had visited the Rif and were thus drug smugglers. Furthermore, they said, that very night only there was a special unique annual Berber folk festival in Tetuan, with traditional folk music, dancing women with snakes, hand-woven carpets etc. They both spoke excellent English, but assured us that they were not professional tourist guides and wanted no payment for their services: "No Coca-Cola; no Fanta" was their rather cryptic slogan to emphasise this. It all sounded like a wind-up to me, and the 'festival' a bit much of a coincidence, but the others were keen to go and check it out, and besides, I told myself, "you can't spend the whole two weeks suspecting people: sometimes you have to believe them and check it out: there's nothing to lose..."
"Except the motorcycles and all your money", myself told me, ten minutes later, as the guides led us up a small side street to a lock-up garage in the old part of town and proposed that we leave the bikes there and proceed on foot. We declined the offer and carried on on the bikes into the ultra narrow alleyways of the old medina; Patrick's SuperTrapp racing muffler causing windows to rattle in their frames, small ornaments to fall from fireplaces and young children to run away screaming.
It was rather a relief to arrive at the guides' uncle's souvenir shop, where they simply wanted us to come in and buy some carpets and handcrafts, and not rob us at knifepoint. After showing some polite interest and regretting that we didn't have enough space in the panniers to fit a 9-foot by 4-foot carpet, we left Tetuan much the wiser on how to deal with touts. The guides parting comments were "OK, now you give us some Dirham" (one Dirham is about 10 US cents), to which we replied, "But I thought you said No Coca-Cola, no Fanta". "Yes we did, but we didn't say No Dirham!" At least they have a sense of humour, these Moroccans..
As we headed up into the Rif mountains trying to make some distance south, it was getting dark and a storm was building. Big sheets of lightning lit up the windy road, and a little rain started to fall. We stopped for something to eat at a roadside cafe (1 kilo of meat cut from the carcass hanging on the veranda, chopped up with onions and spices and fried into tasty meatballs, served with fresh bread and washed down with sweet mint tea, all for 110 Dirham for the three of us).
After some heated discussion, we decided to continue a little further and stop at the first thing that looked like a hotel, and spend the night, as the road was a little greasy for the knobbly tyres and although the story about the big rocks on the road was probably untrue we didn't want to take any chances. The first likely hotel we arrived at turned out to be a restaurant which was already closed for the night, but the local who told us this offered to put us up in his house for free. We gladly accepted and he jumped on the back of a passenger-footpegless XR and we slithered along the tarmac and up a dirt road to his house. He prepared us some more mint tea by candlelight (the house, like most rural houses in Morocco, has no electricity nor running water: the toilet is the field beside the house) and told us in fairly good English that he had learnt to speak English from some Scottish friends who came to visit him every year. It turned out that he was a marijuana-grower (his father had a large farm higher up in the mountains) and small-scale hashish exporter, hence the Scottish customers. We declined the offer to sample and/or purchase and went to bed.