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.