Heading For Music

Would you ride to Morocco for a music festival? Jeremy Torr did, on a KTM 690.

- Jeremy Torr

The story so far: Jeremy rode the KTM across Spain, caught the ferry to Melilla and spent his first night in Morocco in a dirt-floored room cut into the side of a hill. The owner warned him of rain, snow and wind in the Atlas Mountains, but he rode over them anyway. He managed to avoid snowdrifts, washed out roads and dehydration, then the bike blew over at the top of a pass and he picked up a hitchhiker before finally cresting the last rise and heading downhill through alpine scenery before finally reaching the desert. Now read on...

It was all massive dry sandstone canyons, windswept mesas and buttes and views as far as my eyesight could cope with – yet no trees or signs of life at all. There were a few clusters of low square houses here and there, but I saw nothing moving. Then, further on, in the bleakest and most windswept and remote places there would be a man or woman sitting at the side of the road. Or maybe a shepherd keeping an eye on a few sheep on a rocky hillside. All were completely alone, wrapped tightly against the bitter cold. Where they came from or how long it took them to get there was a complete mystery.

The road swooped down a valley, getting smoother and more welcoming by the bend. Eventually I squeezed into the Todra Gorge and popped out the other end a few thousand metres below the Tizi n’Tiherhouzine into a red, warm, dry, oasis-like climate with waving palm trees and camels by the side of the road. Bizarre, and all within one day’s ride of lush alpine meadows and blizzard-ripped mountaintops. But that’s Morocco.

With the challenges of the passes now behind me, I rode triumphantly into Tinerhir along the Tazzarine road where, just to complete the contradictory components of the day, camels wandered and desert sand was blowing across the tarmac. Milestone posts indicated distances to somewhere called Si’id Ifni which was a mere 730km away across stony, arid, burning desert.