On a Bike and a Prayer
day 11. coke & kittens
The alarm bleeped into action at 6.00am and I crawled quickly into life - regretting the sardine can I'd been lying on most of the night. My back groaned and clicked as I climbed out in the cold and went in search of a toilet place.
The tent took over one hour to dismantle and we cycled up
the south side of the valley towards a nomad tent for a breakfast. The musty
tarpaulin, that was their home, crouched low on the hill side, smoking like a
snoozing dragon as the fire inside was puffed at with wheezing bellows. We ate
a flat, light and crusty bread with oil as the sweet minty tea was poured to and
fro between glass and pot and glass.
With the sleeping dragon tent dozing behind us, we peddled up to the western end of the valley and shouldered the bikes to climb the steep wall up to the plateau above. The peoples of the valley seemed reluctant to leave us, and clambered still unbelieving with us, giggling and tugging at the useless bikes that hung around our necks.
The top of the crags bought a vast stony desert plateau. Football sized boulders sat stuck in a smooth red mud that coated the wheels and clung to the brakes. Between these stretches were huge tables of limestone and basalt.
We carried and bounced the cursed bikes for over two hours
to cross it and descend the other side to a tight and sinuous river gorge.
Climbing up the other side we hung the bikes across our shoulders again, front
wheel and handlebars bumping on our stomachs. At the shadeless burnt summit,
we had to stop to patch up bleeding knees, elbows and fingers. We had used a
lot of water to prepare the Tajine the night before, and now only had half a
litre left between the four of us for the rest of the day.
It was almost midday when we left and managed to cycle lengthy stretches which took us up to the stunning ridge above our destination village of Anergui. We stood on the edge at 3953 metres. The village below was at 1465m; a difference as great as the height of Ben Nevis.
The rocks dipped in huge red and grey beds into the cliff side. The descent was down a cotton wide thread of shingle path which crisscrossed and dropped the 4000 ft. in under 4km. Said forbade us to ride the bikes down - as the shingle rendered the brakes useless, the gradient was over 45 degrees and the hairpins were sudden and potentially fatal.
To our dismay the descent was more draining than the ascent
or the crossing of the plateau. For almost four hours back wheels skidded and
bucked with locked brakes and front wheels jittered and jumped. Clenched fists
and taught fraught brake cables left our hands numbed and trembling. The mule
fell twice in front of us, and Said twice as well. I lost count of my tumbles
and they were only recorded as scratches and scrapes on the bike.
We were promised water just round the next corner - but the silty spring was just a tantalising glimpse of water we daren't drink. We splashed it on our clothes and hair before pressing on down the dry debris strewn river bed to the village. With Anergui's roofs and smoke plumes in sight, all that drove us on was the thought of an ice cold coke. I arrived in the little square at the centre of the village first, after a punishing last few kilometres across the pitted creek bed.
Miming a coke advert I was directed to a hole in the wall
of a box-shaped building. The `shop' was stocked with mummified biscuits and
ancient fizzy drinks in buckets of warm water. We bought a couple of bottles
each and gulped them down in the dusty heat. The village junior soccer team -
a gang of under eights with a pigs bladder and a whistle, had stopped their game
to come and watch us.
With the drinks out of the way we peddled off again after Said to his friends home. The steep track up to his home proved just too much for my poor bike, and the handlebar bag frame snapped as I reached the building, bouncing all my cameras onto the front wheel.
The house seemed more Central American than Moroccan and squatted straw roofed below a piercing blue sky and those formidable cliffs we'd just descended behind. We bathed in a small bucket whilst our host poured water over us in an improvised shower. It was my first proper wash since Rich, four days before.
Our room was overwhelmingly spacious after the tent the night before. The floors were carpeted, the walls clean and white, and the ceiling adorned with a pleated blue plastic sheet. The tiniest three month old kitten scrambled and tumbled about the place, as it took sanctuary in our luggage from the strutting bantams that periodically strayed into the room.
Stephane chased the birds provocatively round the floor in a clumsy waltz as I tried to tune a SW radio we'd discovered into something newsy and informative. We settled for France-en-air and a music show of fluctuating volume. The Beegees crackled in a corner as we wrote our journals and played chess until the light from the candles died.
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