On a Bike and a Prayer
day 19. father Christmas visits the children of the Atlas
The trucks and buses came and went through the night and horns squawked and roused me from my dreams and sent me dreaming again. We woke by 7.30am and were on our bikes by 9.00 for a hard day of climbing to Amoughar, over a kilometre vertically above us.
We stuffed chocolate biscuits and set off at a racing pace. Taddert was fifteen gently climbing kilometres south amidst the tourist coaches and snap happy Dutch holiday makers. Three kilometres outside Taddert I stopped at a fossil shop to await the others and incurred a rapid puncture which flattened my rear tyre in seconds.
The mend was awkward, on a join in the tube, and kept lifting off in the heat. I managed to secure it long enough to reach Taddert, and on the invitation of a travelling Dutchman we sat in a shady garden and sipped tea. He had been coming to Morocco for 18 years, had married here and now had a house in Marrakesh. He flashed out pictures of the house and wife. In 1962 he'd first visited the region to deal in rocks, or stones as he called them, to sell in Paris, Amsterdam and Bonn. The market had collapsed in 1970, but he continued to visit Morocco each year, to stay with his many friends in the mountains. His early travels had been by a large, ungainly vintage coach which he'd converted into a camper van. He brandished pictures of the old bus proudly, with villages of beaming people standing infront of it, like children on a school outing. His bussing days were behind him though, and now with the wind in his hair, he cruised the tracks and roads of the Atlas on a chunky scooter which he kept in Marrakesh. The orange scooter sat opposite us, and a large US army stuff sac lay like a pregnant green sea-elephant bungied to the back. It was full of clothes for all the children and friends he stayed with along the way.
Like a tropical St. Nichollas on holiday he lumbered over with it and opened the draw string top. Soon the little courtyard was full of brightly coloured children's clothes and shoes, Father Christmas in the middle beaming up from the jumble-sale pile in the dust.
We stayed in a small spotless hotel on the edge of town and slept and ate and mended punctures and rested in preparation for North Africa's highest surfaced road - the awesome Tizi-n-Tichka pass.