As I slumped on to the handlebars after our first morning, having thrashed and
crashed across 40 miles of Moroccan rockery, Jens Griffiths the tour-owner
asked me: “Do you realise that you do everything wrong on the bike that it’s
possible to do wrong?”
Well, no one said it would be easy. But that’s the attraction of adventure
motorcycling – the rough, tough, adrenaline-squirting world made suddenly
popular by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman in Long Way Round.
Growing numbers of bikers are coming to decide that orbiting their local
bypass every weekend doesn’t quite cut it any more – and if a pair of old
luvvies can manage to venture off-road, then they ought to try it too.
If you want to swap crowded Britain for the real wild deal of mountains,
deserts, plains, gorges and dunes, then Morocco is your nearest stop. It’s
here that I joined nine other riders for a seven-day tour of the heartlands,
starting at Oarzazarte, riding into the Atlas mountain range and down into
the Sahara.
I soon learnt that my fellow bikers had varying levels of advantage over me.
The boys (yes, all boys) spanned the social spectrum from Southern financial
advisors to Northern garage-owners, but shared one thing in common: they had
all gone on specialist off-road training courses. Most had done this tour
before and loved it so much that they’d returned.
This didn’t help poor Norman (back for the third time) who looped over the
handlebars on day one and broke his collarbone in three places, or Tony
(back for the second time), who’d somersaulted face-first into the desert on
the penultimate day and busted his cheekbone, finger and wrist.
The hard fact of riding life is that you are going to fall at least once on
the tour. I averaged one splat a day, and can thank the tour-supplied body
armour (plus Lady Luck) for the fact that I got only bruises.
You certainly can’t blame the bikes for your mistakes – the orange-liveried,
450cc KTM dirtbikes are hard-ass Austrian-built rock-hoppers with a great
combination of grunt and agility.
They are maintained by Hussain, the mechanic on the tour’s support vehicle,
which carries a spare bike and workshop abilities.
More importantly, the 4X4 all-terrain Unimog carries a comprehensive medical
kit, including a back-board for spinal fractures. Griffiths, who drives the
Unimog and has run off-road tours for 12 years, is paramedic-trained and
learnt his “safety first, last and always” approach as a diver on oil rigs.
That back-up is vital if you get badly injured somewhere desolate, and it was
alarming to cross tracks with two other guided desert motorbike tours whose
support vehicles couldn’t even go off-road.
I also received welcome support in the shape of an afternoon’s crash-course in
dirtbike skills from Jens, the tour’s lead-rider, who convinced me to forget
most of the on-road biking instincts I’d developed over 28 years, and taught
me instead the Zen of offroad racing. His training paid off handsomely,
especially when I faced the tour’s biggest challenge – and its literal
high-spot – trying to surmount a 350ft “cathedral” sand dune in one blazing
glory-rush.
