On a Bike and a Prayer
day 13. unlucky for some!
I had a very upset stomach all night and woke feeling as if someone had held a disco in my intestines. I put it down to the offensively spicy sardines and tried to cure myself by going to the loo. Not impressed by the thought of bread and jam for breakfast I had three sips of water instead and set off down the roller coaster road again ahead of the others.
We reached Cathedral Gorge in fifty minutes - but now desperate for water, and with me bent double in pain. To the right lay the prospect of an early wash and some food. To the left lay another forty kilometres of flooded dirt track with no respite before Zaou‹a-Ahanesal. With the help of a passer by we searched in vain for a water source, but they had all been buried by mud from the flood waters.
In utter despair and with my stomach cramps worsening we
opted for the right route and reached a collection of dwellings within a few
minutes. One with a corrugated porch turned out to be a shop and we tucked
into more biscuits and coke. I felt no better for this, and so we loaded
everything onto a passing Mitsubishi truck and perched ourselves on the piles of
calcite and metal piping at the back.
The truck was bound for Warwizarth to the north. From here we planned to take the better populated, better surfaced road towards Marrakesh, ducking south into the mountains again to rejoin our planned traverse further on. They said it would take three hours to do the forty kilometres. Three hours in the mid day sun, was at least better than eight hours on a bicycle.
The track writhed and wriggled north through volcanically
altered rainbow soils. 
High plateau villages lay along tightly knotted
paint-brush lines of the road above the river Carcusses. Stephane and Andrea
sat above the cabin taking it in turns to look out for marauding branches which
threatened to scalp them.
We bumped and bruised ourselves over the pass and down towards a vast reservoir oozing round the hills and swamping the villages in a huge turquoise mass nestling amidst a jumbled volcanic chaos of rocks.
Wawizarth loomed small and friendly exactly three hours after boarding the truck. The hotel Atlas at the top end of town was recommended so we peddled higher and higher, attracting clusters and clumps of children who swept us on our way like applauding spectators on the Alp Duez stage of the Tour de France.
The hotel was owned by an elderly, Indian looking gentleman, with a proud white turban and Roman nose. He brandished a pen sketch of a snow leopard, signed by an English couple who had come to find the beast in 1990, and presumable stayed there as well. It was an intriguing building with numerous ancient Moroccan tourism posters faded and ageing on green walls. It was 20Dh a person, and we were told we could occupy as many rooms as we wanted, although it seemed only one was free. Andrea took it and Stephane and I agreed to sleep on the landing.
It was late in the afternoon when we set off for a stroll round town. An ancient well stocked hardware shop was our first port of call, to try and repair my front carrier. A little man with a large moustache tried everything he could think of to repair the break; copper tubing, rubber tubing, tin wire...etc.. but nothing would hold it.
In the end we settled for a pair of pliers and some spare nuts and bolts. Our stroll round the rest of the village square bought us some figs, paw-paws and tasteless postcards. I wasn't even sure what some of the pictures were. Stephane and Andrea went back to do some washing before supper. I went for a stroll round town and soon found myself beneath the neon lights of a seedy cafe - talking to students about their dislike of the King.
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