On a Bike and a Prayer
day 12. mud!
Said was up at 5.30am and kissed us all goodbye before he left to return to Imilchil. We were woken at 8.30am when the first of the neighbours arrived to have a look at us. We were watched like a TV as we tucked into the usual breakfast of bread and oil.
At 9.00am we were summoned to the head man's office to present our passports. A type writer with a dust cover was ceremoniously carried in before us. The office, like all the bureaucratic buildings inside was painted in green with a white ceiling. The room was meticulously clean and the window looked onto a priceless view reminiscent of the Rockies on a crisp Autumn day.
The head man was a big hansom figure with a royal grey cloak as proud as his profile. We stood infront of his desk like three naughty school children expecting the cane. In turn, each held out their passport. Each was scrutinised and an attempt made to pronounce our names. Keen to please we praised each awkward attempt as we stood there shaking in our boots and expecting the worst...'You must return to Imilchil, or Marrakesh....'
Three forms were fervently filled in and with a `Bon Voyage' and a firm handshake we were released into the blinding sun. Back in our Mexican style beach house in the cliffs we spent the morning fixing the bikes and doing our washing. The main problem was my broken handlebar bag carrier. After a lot of trials with bungees and balancing I opted to strap it on the handlebar map case, thus still allowing easy access to the cameras.
Not used to fully laden bikes again, we wobbled off down the steep path to the village souk-place and begged them to open the shop again. This they gladly did and we stocked up on sardines and biscuits. As we left, a school teacher rushed up with arms full of furry green peaches. We crammed them into rolled up mats, and pannier pockets and set off along the new track from Anergui, northwest along the banks of the river.
The path would dive and jump rhythmically from the river level, to several hundred feet above, like a speeding dolphin. The lower sections had suffered from flooding the day before and still had several feet of red mud across them. We splashed through emerging the other side, coated like clay figures and climbing the rutted stone ribbed track - cubes of tyre-tread moulded mud shooting off at all angles.
For the whole afternoon we swooped and sawed along this
roller-coaster of a road like swallows migrating west, hypnotised by the road
ahead and oblivious to the dangers of the shear drop on our left. The rutted
shaking caused screws on rear carriers to be shed like dandruff, and we had to
stop to replace them, until our spares ran out as well.
The route was cool and shady and the constant rush of water and the prolific pine forests took me back for an instant to the steps of Emei Shan, (China's highest sacred mountain) that I'd climbed the summer before. This dream was reinforced when I stopped to wait for the others below the brow of a hill and found myself watching a troop of monkeys hurling rocks at each other on the cliffs above.
By 6.30pm it was almost dark and we still hadn't reached Cathedral Gorge and the road junction for our turning to the next mountainous stage. Forced to stop in the dusk, we found a smooth piece of ground just off the road to the right. Once we'd built a rather over-ambitious fire, we settled down to our usual Sardines, bread and olives - Stephane opting for cheese instead of sardines, to try and stop his allergy which we suspected was to the oil.
As we munched we discussed our apprehensions for the journey ahead. `Why were we doing it?' asked Stephane. It was a question I'd been trying to avoid - as when I thought hard about the journey, there seemed little point to it - lugging a fully laden bicycle over a load of inhospitable mountains. The whole thing reminded me of a stupid French expedition from the 1930's to take an early Citr”en car across the Himalayas - another occasion where the mode of transport didn't match the terrain. Stephane pressed me for an answer and I mumbled something about combining my passion for cycling and travel.
Andrea was simply doing it for her own satisfaction - an ambition already satisfied and now daunted by the prospect of the rest of the trip. As Stephane put it, Crane was a professional with a back up of three Landrovers and a budget of ś100,000 behind him. We were just three people carrying all our own spares, medical kit, and trying to find food and water along the way. What hope had we of crossing the next section of track-less mountains 2-3 times as far as the stretch out of Imilchil. We had lost all our screws today and a spare inner tube. Our water was lower than our moral with not even enough to spare for a cup of tea.
We stamped the fire out and bedded down for the night as the ants scurried round picking up the crumbs.
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