This is a video I have just found which gives you an idea of just how much the Djemma El Fna square comes to life in the evenings.

Search You Tube to find other videos ......

King of the Road

In Morocco it's usually that the biggest vehicle has right of way but if the biggest vehicle (usually a truck) is king of the road then the scooter or moped is heir to the throne. These little vehicles come in all shapes and sizes (see pics below) and are used for an unending variety of things.

Most of Morocco is poor in wealth but nearly every household has a scooter or moped. These can range from the newest and fastest of vehicles to the oldest and slowest. On a recent trip there I was speaking to an old man who had used his particular moped almost everyday for as long as he could remember .... and he was 68 years old .... he even said his father had also used it for a couple of years before him.  Note the flat front tyre .... I mentioned this to him and he just shrugged as if it was too much trouble to fix.

Below is an extract from my diary written in May 2013

One thing that amazes me in this country is the way in which owners of mopeds utilise them in so many ways....for work, for pleasure, as an alternative to a pack horse....everything. Last time here i saw an elderly man transporting a sheep, on its' back....in an orange box type crate. The sheep showed no signs of distress and wasn't struggling, perhaps showing that this was a regular occurrence for it.

Today I saw the other extreme....a small family of just 3 people, on the moped in their Sunday best. The moped doing probably a little over 20 mph with the 3 occupants. It is hard  to explain just how versatile these vehicles are unless you see them in action. The most I have seen on 1 scooter is a family of 5 in the configuration of .... father(driver) 2 young children (around 3 - 6 years old), and mother with a baby carrier on her back with a baby in it.

You need something moving but don't have a truck to do so ...... not a problem .... use one of these:

We've probably all seen the films with busy traffic in foreign countries but Marrakech seems to take this one step further. Madness is taken to a new height in this, and probably many more North African cities. There seems to be a common goal to get somewhere, anywhere......but nobody seems to know where this magical Shangri la is. They come from all angles, with little thought for anyone else. If someone wants to turn left, across the oncoming traffic....they do so without a thought for the oncoming vehicle. I suppose if you all drive this way then it is expected...... But to me and many others it seems chaotic at best and suicidal at worst.

 Seeing the above you would think that pedestrians must be mad to try and negotiate this traffic....well...you're wrong.

Pedestrians seem to have some kind of magical power to make the cars, wagons and mopeds stop in their tracks. This magical power, it seems, is of insurance. If there is an accident with a pedestrian the police are called and documents are checked and double checked. When you have a police force that walks straight into the middle of the road to stop moped riders and ask for their insurance papers then I'd be scared of such a man.

Today there was a crack down on people riding scooters mopeds without insurance and here they don't mess about. The uninsured rider is relieved of their moped and sent on their way. The bike is then loaded up onto a flat bed truck and once this is full it is driven away. I don't know if they are able to go to the police, like in the UK, with new insurance documents to reclaim their vehicle but in a country where the moped is more or less king of transport I'm sure it is much cheaper to just buy another moped and ride around and risk getting caught all over again.

Route

For those of you interested .... here's the route I'm taking

Manchester To Marrakech

The Nearest Far Away Place

The choice of Morocco for a destination was the easiest part .... in the biking and overland adventure world it's known as the "nearest far away place". The hardest part was deciding where in Morocco to ride to.

Having visited as a package tourist, I have only stayed in Marrakech and find the city utterly fascinating .... spending time in the Djemaa el Fna, the centre of the Medina in Marrakech itself (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jemaa_el-Fnaa), watching the snake charmers, henna tattoo ladies, the monkey wallopers (a bit like the snake charmers but they use spaced out monkies in a cash for photo's way) and a hundred other type of sales / scam / hustle merchant ply their trade, it's amazing to watch how a passerby can be taken in by the merchants and then encouraged to part with their money.

The best one I have seen yet is the guy who walks around with a old style SLR film camera and offers to take your picture in the square .... he then takes your email address and promises to send the photo onto you ... and all for only 15dh (£1.25). It takes a special kind of person to accept this offer .... but many do. :-)

Having looked at Marrakech as a bikers destination there's lots of places to stay but very little secure parking. When you're travelling with your pride and joy you have to make sure it is safe at night. You can pay someone as little as £2.00 for them to look after the bikes overnight and they will sleep next to them as security but there's an ever present risk of them finding it more profitable to strip the bike of some of it's parts or to "dispose" of it to someone so they can sell it on the black market so I decided that for this reason we needed somewhere a little quieter with a garage.

I found such a place at Imlil. A small village approximately 40 miles south east of Marrakech that is used as a jumping off point for people trekking into the High Atlas mountains to the highest point in North Africa, Toubkal, some 4165m in height.

Why Marrakech

I was only 7 when my father took my then 14 year old brother and joined 10 of his ex-army buddies on a Boys own trip to Morocco and I have been fascinated with the place ever since.

They travelled in a rented Ford Transit minibus down through France and Spain then into Gibraltar to catch the ferry to Tangiers.

My own travels in the past 3 years have seen me visit Marrakech twice but I took the more accepted route of a package holiday and flying there.

Many times I have thought about recreating the drive down through France and into Spain but not until last year did I think about riding my motorcycle down to Marrakech.

Having organised and taken part in a few motorcycle based charity rides in the past I knew of a couple of friends who would be up for the challenge. I contacted them and sounded them out and "The Marrakech Express" was born.