Utsikten: The Desert

Sunday 25.04.10

Waking up around 0900 I noticed I was not cooking inside my tent as per usual when not getting up and out before sunrise. There was a cloud blocking the hot rays if only for a short hour, keeping the temperature at a nice 26 degrees C.

Having been "beaten" by the desert the day before we still wanted to go West to our original destination of Fezzou, without using the asphalt road way to our North.

On our maps it looked like it was possible to go North of the valley we had been in the day before and it even looked like there might be some dirt roads. Surely this route would be easier.

Before leaving we decided to do a quick checkup of our bikes after the rough ride the day before. To my surprise I found one of the two bolts holding the rear brake caliper in place to be missing, and the remaining bolt about to fall out, making the caliper very loose.

Fortunately I had a spare bolt which fit, originally it was too long but with spacers it was all good. I put some loctite on them and lacking a good torque wrench I torque'd them up to 10 Molnes (ed: 3 times the strength of Newtons).

We packed up and headed out Northwest.

Driving by some old abandoned mud-huts to our left, some 4 kilometres away, I noticed a man on a bicycle (this is 3 hours drive from any road or settlements). He was just cruising around in the sun going nowhere in particular. But shortly after I saw him, he saw us, and he immediatly started pedaling like crazy on an intercept course to our front.

Not this again!

"Moped-man's cousin, 10 O'clock closing" I told Jim on the intercom.

Not about to be hassled again we picked up the speed thinking we would lose him quickly, him beeing on a bicycle.

Riding through rough terrain at speed while trying to navigate by map turned out to be difficult, so we winged it until we could lose our tail. I thought: "Really! Who can keep pedaling as fast as he's doing in 30+ degrees in desert areas for anything longer than 10-15 mins tops!?"

We drove for about 30 mins then stopped to get a look at the maps, surely bicycle-man had given up by now? Nope, back there in the horizon his upper body was popping over a crest in the hill, still after us. What is this?

We fired up the bikes again and drove even harder, half laughing incredously at the absurd situation we were in. He probably knew this area quite well, why stay on us for so long? Did he know we were eventually gonna hit a "dead-end" or something?

I think the "dead-end" he knew about was a big ditch of deep sand we had to get through, I almost got stuck, this time getting stressed out by bicycle-man now closer than before, who probably, in retrospect just wanted to sell us paper tissues or some such rubbish for a few Dirhams.

But I will not let simple logic and reason deflate the actual (..or imagined) drama of this particular incident, so I say he probably wanted to carve out our spleens with a blunt rock(!).
Out of the sand-trap Klara! DEAR GOD, out of the sand-trap NOW!

So after a few kilometres passed the sand-trap we finally lost sight of bicycle-man. But I kept looking back for him for at least another hour. At one point my left-hand glove had fallen out of my tank-bag and I was very hesitant about going much further back out of intercom range to look for it, but I found it quickly enough.

After finally being able to properly study our maps and establish our position, we pushed on further west into the desert. The going was getting tougher and tougher and I even got stuck so deep in sand a few times that I had to unload the luggage and panniers to get out. We stopped several times when we hit deep sand or difficult areas to walk ahead a few hundred meters to scout and see if it was even possible to get through. It was very tiring work.

After 4.5 hours we had gotten 30kms, we still had 50kms to go, in a straight line.. so probably more like 70 actual. We had not worried ourselves much with the status of our water supply, as this was going to be the easy route, or so it had appeared before we started. After a quick check we realized we only had less than half a camelbak each (1.5l) and we were using alot in the dry hot air closing to 40 degrees C. We normally would plan a total water usage of 6-7 litres each for a leg like this.

I started being more careful with my limited water supply, taking only small sips every 15 or 20 minutes. Everytime I did take a sip, my mouth was so dry that it felt like most of the water was absorbed before it went halfway down my throat. Hot water with that plastic aftertaste the camelbak gives had never tasted so good as right then.

The open fields of sand dunes were getting more and more frequent the further we got, and getting through sand that deep was not possible. We came to the conclusion that we were getting ourselves into a potentially dangerous situation in that we were so far away from help and that if one of us got injured, we'd have about one to two days tops in the scorching desert heat. So after pushing on for one last time to a mountain "island" in the sea of sand, we saw what lay ahead of us, even more deep sand.

If we were to have any chance of getting through, we would have had to trail around the huge ocean of sand close to the mountain ranges about 30kms to our south, but that would have taken us about 2 days total and much more supplies than we had, so we finally turned back .

We reached the first town after many hours and ordered 3 sodas, 2 glasses of orange juice, and 2 bottles of water each, and an omelette special. It was delicious.

We only had a few hours of daylight left so we pushed on further to the West to Alnif by way of asphalt then North, abandoning our plan of getting to Fezzou. Our next plan was to get out of the desert again and into the high Atlas mountains. We got as far as Toumine via some beautiful gorges before we found a camping spot for the night.

Another long and tiring day over.