On a Bike and a Prayer
day 4. no turning back.
An over-efficient pension manager woke us up at 5.45am explaining that we had to start before the sun. Rich lay some seventy kilometres to the south across flat open plains with brain-numbingly straight roads and wind swept rides to oblivion - an agoraphobic's nightmare. Telegraph poles stretched across the panorama and huge smeared rain clouds smudged grey across a vast blue sky - promising rain that never reached the dusty earth.
Young Berber children in flocks of inquisition swarmed from
the countryside legs tripping and stumbling, arms and grubby hands blurred in
frantic waves. Small settlements of squatting red plastered buildings sat
chameleon like in the buff plains of tundra and cacti.
The morning bought a climb of some eight kilometres and a difficult descent into strong winds. At 11.30am and over halfway to Rich we stopped to shelter against a mud wall in the shade of a yew tree. Before we could even begin to eat our yogurt and bread two sisters with inky black hair tied back with tight scarves appeared and enticed us into their home behind the wall. Their young brother and buxom jolly mother joined us and we munched through home made bread, butter and cheese as we talked of their life on the edge of the desert.
Rich didn't come soon enough and nestled beneath a ridge of
foreboding banded limestone crags. More red plastered buildings lined
shell-shocked dusty rubble-strewn streets. Children skipped along beside us,
fingers in everything as they played their happy pranks. Old men swept them
aside and they returned moments later like drifting piles of Autumn leaves.
Our hotel was the taller one of the two in town. We stored our bikes in the bar downstairs beneath a TV set showing the Tokyo games. The room upstairs was compact and airy and we dined on the roof that night under a single moth shrouded lamp.
In a street at the edge of town men were scrambling around erecting strings of coloured lights and flags. In the house opposite young girls old women and all ages in between where crammed into a single ground floor room. Rhythmically they clapped an accompaniment to pipe and drum music and one red haired women stood in the centre and shook her hips and chest - craning her neck back and starring at the ceiling.
I peered in through the iron work round the windows and into the bright lights - at this most feminine of Muslim occasions - a `hen night'.
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