10/08 Broken down in Fes, Morocco
As arranged the previous evening, the “Honda mechanic” Ali arrived at 10am. I was immediately concerned.
The bike which carries you (up to now) 8000 miles through desert, up mountains and along motorways is a precious thing. If something’s wrong you want a specialist. To me it looked like I’d gone to the Doctor with an ingrowing toenail and been referred to the butcher next door. Ali arrived on a smoky and battered scooter, with a dirty t-shirt stretched over his large belly, oily jeans and well worn sandals. He set about examining the patient with our self-appointed guide translating all the while. No tools were brought which concerned me further and Ali made use of my small selection, dismantling half the bike, disconnecting fuel hoses sending fuel pouring over the ground and finally roughly removing the fuel tank, snapping off the fuel tap in the process.
Nevertheless, after much to-ing and fro-ing and with a few lengths of blue wire, which I swear he just picked up off the ground nearby, he’d rewired the fuel pump direct to the battery. Unfortunately my battery was flat after so much attempted starting so we swapped it out with Steve’s and after a couple of attempts the bike fired back into life. A proper repair apparently could only be effected back at Ali’s workshop so, leaving Steve to wander around town on his own, I hopped on my ailing steed and followed him and the guide back there whereupon the bike was backed down a steep ramp and through a tiny doorway into a small subterranean workshop.
Reassuringly there were tools on the wall, in some sort of order and pictures of bikes pasted to the walls – he proudly pointed to a picture of a Dakar bike ploughing though a desert sand dune then pointed again at my bike. Maybe he knew what he was doing after all. 2 or 2 hours passed while Ali dug around in boxes of bits and bobs and toiled with various relays and wires, surfacing every now and again to declare via our guides translation that “this is the problem!” and holding up some relay or other that he’d pulled out of somewhere, before reassessing, refitting and burying his head in the wiring again. Eventually the root of the problem appeared to be a dodgy wire with a tiny and frail looking connector beneath the fuel tank that supplied power to the fuel pump. Seemingly this had not stood up to the excesses of the previous days heat very well either. He sharply snipped the connector off with a huge pair of shears more suited to trimming wool from a sheep and produced and alternative from his box of tricks.
“Another one like this you will not find in all the world” translated our guide as Ali, beaming through his own genius, held up a little electrical connector of the type you might wire a domestic lamp with. One of those little plastic ones with the screw connectors. Anyhow, it seemed to do the job. The bike was reassembled, Ali fashioned a crude home made fuel tap to replace the one he’d snapped off and I was despatched, with our guide as pillion, for the test ride. 1/4 mile up the road the bike died again.
Ali had forgotten to turn back on the fuel tap, and my recently half recharged battery wouldn’t start the bike again so the guide flagged down a passing scooter to relay the message back to Ali who turned up a few minutes later. Fortunately I’d come to rest at the top of a bit of a slope and Ali leapt at the chance, hopped on the bike and with a push from another onlooker was off down the road, the bike bursting back into life. He then disappeared into the distance. I was left with the guide standing in the baking heat.
5 minutes passed and Ali was nowhere to be seen. No probs I thought, he’d told stories of riding a Tenéré, a similar bike, so I imagined he’d be off getting a bit of a charge back into the battery. We retired to the shade and another 10 minutes passed. I was getting concerned.
Coming over the hill I heard the familiar sound of the big Twin engine and before we could get out of the shade back to the roadside Ali shot past, standing on the pegs. Moments later he circled back and declared the bike fit and well. But of course he had to demonstrate. I was instructed to hop on the back while he showed me it was working fine. I jumped on, donning my helmet, and with shorts, t shirt and sandals for protection off we sped.
Ali was like a man possessed. Using the customary “horn instead of mirrors or indicators technique” we shot through the new town centre and out onto the ring road. I’m not a fan of pillion, I’ve maybe done it 2 or 3 times in my life and have hated it each time. Maybe I’m a control freak, but I think riding pillion requires a lot of trust. Usually at least the rider is someone you know. Usually you know they’re a decent rider, usually you know they know the bike. Not so now.
Here I was, shorts, t shirt and sandals hanging on for dear life as someone I didn’t know rode my bike, a bike they didn’t know through busy streets at speeds I wouldn’t have ridden myself. I’m not sure whether the horn technique was to urge traffic out of the way or to attract as much attention to Ali riding a big bike fast through his city. We stopped for some water and shared the big bottle out of a plastic cup which when the bottle was half gone I was instructed to carry. The cup was wedged into the instruments and off we sped again.
Out beyond city limits I began to worry. Not least because we we now reaching speeds of 100mph, but because I felt at any moment I might be cast off and Ali would speed off with my bike, either intentionally or otherwise. At one point, lurching over the second speedbump at 80mph both my feet came off the footpegs and I let out an involuntary yelp. Ali turned round and laughed at me as I urged him to slow down. Barely without slowing we shot off the road and down a dirt track under some dense trees. A track unquestionably leading to the slaughterhouse of unsuspecting tourists I felt.
Still doing 40 or 50mph we bumped along, over tree trunks, down a dry river bed and finally there it was before me.
Green Diamond Camping. And a lovely place it was too, swimming pools, grass and everything. Clearly we’d taken the back way in. As we rejoined the main road a black Mercedes pulled alongside and asked us for directions. Ali spent the next 1/4 of a mile looking into the car while still riding and passing on the route. As the car pulled away, and still riding, he grabbed the plastic cup, turned round and asked me to fill his glass. I hadn’t dared to loosen my grasp on the bars, and had had to carry the bottle too so politely requested that he stop while we had a drink. Very refreshing it was too.
I explained that he may be riding a little quickly for me and the ride back to the workshop was slightly less terrifying than the ride out there. Once again I was sent off for a test ride with the guide as pillion and this time returned without trouble. The trouble began when it came to paying though. Various prices kept cropping up, each one higher then the previous. He had done almost a full days work on the bike but it seemed he was out for what he could get. After about on hour of arguments, a visit to the main shop and Ali’s Boss, back to the hotel and our guide offering to fight him or call the police Ali was despatched with 1300 Dirham for his trouble, a fair price indeed I thought.
Later that evening we’d agreed to a tour of the Medina, the labyrinthine walled old town of Fes. We jumped in one of the ubiquitous Petite Taxi’s that abounded, and were deposited by one of the “bab’s” or gates where we were met by a friend of our original self-appointed guide. There followed a whirlwind tour where we were shown, I suppose, the usual touristy things, ancient narrow street, a mosque, a leather tannery and various shops selling everything you could imagine.
It was genuinely like stepping back in time to the middle ages – at one point, en-route to the tannery, we stepped over a pile of rags in the gutter of a particularly dark alley. As we passed, the rags moved to reveal the figure of a man asleep there. Rats were commonplace it seemed as nobody gave them a second glance and, despite what I consider to be a rather well-formed internal GPS, I never once got my bearings. I think had our guide left us it would have taken me days to navigate a route out!
As a parting shot, we were ushered up some creaking wooden stairs to a shop/residence (as they mostly seemed to serve both functions) where we were presented with an array of rugs, carpets, leather goods and various other trappings of the home. The owners family were asleep in the rear of the large room amongst the looms and weaving equipment and stirred themselves as we were given the grand tour. We weren’t really in a position buy any of these things, either financially or space-wise in terms of carrying them all the way home on the bikes, however we felt obliged to browse.
I spotted what I thought was quite a nice round leather pouffe/footstool type of thing and thought actually it might make a nice memento of the trip and would sit quite well in my flat. The shopkeeper demonstrated that it could simply be rolled up for transport on the bike and stuffed with old clothes or whatever upon returning home.I didn’t entirely intend to buy it, but more just to see what the price was, not really having clicked at that point that in this part of the world nothing really has a fixed price. The owner gave me his opening price, I can’t remember exactly what, but let’s say £100. Clearly way high, and he could see from my reaction I wasn’t buying it, metaphorically or literally. “Now” he said, with a wave of his hand and a twinkle in his eye, “If you are a good Berber man, you give me your best price!” Despite my protestations that I really was only enquiring after the price with little intent to buy, I was drawn inexorably into the haggle.
My first counter offer was met with mock-affront and quickly sub-countered. This age-old dance continued for a few uncomfortable minutes as I clumsily knocked the price lower and lower. When we reached £30 or £40 I was done and said “Ok”, which the shopkeeper to to mean I was going to buy it rather than OK, that sounds like more of a reasonable price. Before I could blink, he had whipped it away and had it rolled and wrapped before I even made it over to the till area. I genuinely didn’t know whether I could even fit it on my bike anywhere, let alone whether I actually really wanted it. I began protesting at which point his demeanor entirely changed from friendly shopkeeper to menacing hawker. I attempted to calm the waters by saying I’d check if I had room on the bike to carry it and would return the next morning if so, but to no avail.
Jabbering and shouting, he physically chased us back down the rickety stairs and out into the narrow alleys of the Medina. Other locals appeared from nowhere and began berating us too at which point our guide helped us make a sharp exit back to the gate, into another Petite Taxi and back to the sanctuary of the Hotel Errabie.
