The next morning we were again awoken by a herd of goats; althought this time the shepherd didn't bring us breakfast: we had our own! After some hot coffee and stale-ish bread we set off. After an hour or so, Patrick stopped suddenly, saying he had no front brakes. Sure enough, on closer inspection it turned out that his front brake pads were missing : the retaining bolt must have worked loose and fallen out. After a few minutes of searching on the track a couple of hundred metres back, Patrick found the pads but not the bolt. We had brought plenty of spare bolts of different shapes and sizes, so this didn't seem to present a big problem. Unfortunately it turned out that the lost bolt was rather long and with two different-diameter threads on it. So Patrick set off to search further back down the track while Mark and I gratefully accepted the offer of some mint tea from a little girl (brought to the track from her house 100 yards away, and served in a silver teapot!) and tried to work out how to rig up a fix.

An hour and a half later we were back on the move, everything fixed up OK with a long but thin bolt which looked strong enough to hold.

After passing the turn-off for Imilchil we headed off on what we thought was the road south, without checking the compass. After three quarters of an hour I noticed that the sun was consistently on our right, and not ahead of us as it should be if we were heading south. Sure enough, on checking the compass we were headed due east and were on completely the wrong track. Another hour and a half lost! This was not our lucky day! We retraced our tracks.

As the sun lowered in the sky we arrived at the impressive Todra Gorge, which is a canyon 250 metres deep and 10 metres wide at its narrowest point, with a small river which runs through it. Right at the bottom of the gorge and dwarfed by the soaring cliffs was a hostel, so we stopped for a drink and to consult the guidebook to see what it said about hotels in Tinherir, the nearest town. Eventually we followed the hostel owner's advice and headed for a three-star hotel with swimming pool just out of town, to give ourselves a treat after sleeping rough a couple of nights.

There were virtually no other guests at the hotel, so we had the pool to ourselves. We took advantage of this by washing some clothes (in our room,not in the pool) and laying them around the swimming pool to dry.

Day 7 : Zagora or bust !

Next morning we set off due south for Zagora and the desert. By now we had passed the Atlas mountains and the landscape was basically rocky desert, with the odd bush and scrub. We saw our first camels of the trip, running free in the scrub and trotting along hurriedly but gracefully when disturbed by our bikes' arrival.

Again we took some wrong turnings, and on one of these we had a memorable experience with a would-be gem salesman: As we arrived towards a very isolated house in the middle of the mountains, a figure came hurrying out towards the track, clutching something in his hand and motioning excitedly for us to stop. We stopped, since we suspected we were headed in the wrong direction anyway and needed to ask him directions. It turned out that what he had in his hand was a glass jar full of quite pretty minerals and rocks. After inspecting them and choosing a purple one which was more eye-catching than the rest, we asked him how much he wanted for it. There was a slight hesitation before he replied, "Five thousand dirham" (about $500). We had a quick moment's discussion before agreeing it was probably worth about $5 maximum. "Fifty dirham", we offered. A complex expression crossed his nearly toothless face; a half-smile of someone who has been found out but didn't really expect to get away with it anyway, mixed with disappointment that we hadn't offered him more, and probably some relief that we were going to buy something, anything, from him. After we handed over the fifty, he half-heartedly motioned for us to give him more money, but his heart wasn't in it. Clearly too honest a soul to be a real salesman.. he should pay a visit to Tetuan and see how the professionals do it.

We reached Nekob as the sun was low in the sky and decided to eat something, then head for Zagora on the tarmac road, as it was still over 100km away. After an alarming night ride (I collided with a bat when travelling at over 100 kmh: thank goodness for my chest protector, sorry for the bat..) we finally arrived at Zagora around 9pm and in a fit of celebration/indulgence checked in at the best hotel in town, the four-star Redaa Club, a cross between a sultan's palace and a Club Med resort. Again we had the place virtually to ourselves, since it was off-season. We had a few over-priced beers to mark our arrival at the desert.

Day 8 : On the dunes !

We felt we had finally arrived at our objective, so the next day we spent lounging around the pool, writing postcards and reading. However Mark was keen to get into the real desert (sand dunes, that sort of thing), so at 4pm we set off on the road for M'Hamid, the last town in Morocco and the end of the road. As we arrived in M'Hamid we were accosted by boys offering, for 20 dirham, to show us the way to a big dune 10km out of town, in time to climb it and catch the sunset. We decided to take one of the boys with us, as our map showed no tracks out of M'Hamid into the desert, and it was probably better not to get lost this late in the day.

We headed out of town on some vague tyre track marks and pretty soon were into patchy sand, lumpy rocks and whoops, which was fun but a bit technical. Then it opened out onto a flat hard expanse where we could see the dunes in the distance and 5th gear wide open was the order of the day. Then back into sand and 3rd gear wide open was all I could do to keep moving at 5mph: my first experience of serious sand!

We decided to try to blast up a 60-foot-high dune, and set off on a long run up to it. Unfortunately what we didn't know was that at the top were some Dutch tourists who had all paid their 50 dirham to be driven out there in order to enjoy the tranquility of the desert sunset, and who were less than pleased when Patrick arrived at the top, covering them in a fine cloud of sand and 110dB of by now barely-muffled SuperTrapp. Woops..

Having conquered a dune we felt we had achieved what we set out to do, and once we had consumed an immense cous-cous that evening and bought a carpet the next morning, it was time to head home. Since Mark had to be back in the UK to resume work the following Monday, all that remained was to hack it back homeward as quickly as possible on the main roads via Marrakech and Casablanca. We did, however, have time for one more excellent off-road section, past the 'biblical' village of Ait-Benhaddou near Ouarzazate and over the pass towards Telouet. Just before Marrakech, Patrick noticed that his rear sprocket teeth were sharpened to needle-thinness, and indeed some teeth were completely shorn off. There were 650km to go to Tangier, and things were not looking good, XR rear sprockets being difficult to find in Morocco. But somehow, by tightening the chain every 100km or so and not accelerating hard, Patrick made it last to the ferry, by which time the teeth were slight bumps on an otherwise smooth and polished disc.

All in all we had done around 2000km in less than two weeks, and managed to survive without too much damage to us or the bikes. Looks like we'll be on for the 1998 Rallye du Atlas at this rate....