Not your average weekend blast

This just isn’t good enough, you can almost hear the other guests thinking. There’s sand in the pool of the supposedly swanky four-star Hotel Salam. And blokes fully-dressed in enduro gear. Next to a patio table lies a dusty pile of boots and gloves, goggles and helmets. On the table stands a phalanx of cold beers.

The beers, boots and helmets are ours. So, in a manner of speaking, is the sand. We’ve just spent all day in the desert collecting the stuff. Well, some of it. The rest has blown in on the Sahel wind. We’ve just blown in on Hondas XR400s. And boy, do we need those beers.

The town of Erfoud is used to troublemakers. It was built as a military base by the colonial French to control the region’s fun-loving Bedouin tribesmen, who thought the main use for a Frenchman was target practice. But tonight we’re using it as a base for tomorrow’s assault on Morocco’s biggest sand dunes – ” we ” being the 10 of us on Moto Aventures’ five-day desert tour into the Sahara.

We began in Ouarzazate after a breakneck ride in a battered Merc taxi across high mountain passes from the airport in the old hippie capital of Marrakesh. Known as the ” door of the desert ” , Ouarzazate is another garrison city created by the French. Now it’s mainly concerned with tourism – and movies. Parts of Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia were filmed nearby. The hotel was good, too – air-conditioned and spacious, with its pool fringed by a shady bar. Obviously, this desert dirt riding was going to be tough.

The Sahara, in case you’re likely to confuse it with a kiddies’ sandpit, is HUGE, stretching for 4000 miles to Somalia. You can ride for two weeks and trace just a squiggle in one corner of it – in fact, that’s precisely what the Dakar Rally does most years. Our squiggle would be far more minuscule. But it promised to feel pretty epic.

After breakfast the next morning, we’re introduced to our bikes by Moto Aventures boss John and his blond Swedish assistant, Annie. Those of us more interested in the bikes than in Annie’s shapely backside note they’re all fairly new, knobbly-equipped XR400s. These specialist machines are easy to start, tough, capable and hugely reliable – even in hard desert use.

Then we follow Annie’s comely bum out of Ouarzazate. The first 20 miles is on Tarmac road as far as Skoura. Tarmac is a good place to remember that Morocco is Arab, so accidents — and everything else — are subject to the same force: ” Insh’Allah ” . God’s will. Allah’s whim governs everything, from punctures and ignition boxes, and the likelihood of getting the runs, to the path of the sun. If Allah wills it, it will happen. If not, shrug and find a peaceful spot in the shade. Luckily for us, getting lost in the desert isn’t on Allah’s agenda this afternoon.

Instead, we head up into the boulder-strewn ” Valley of the Roses ” and the southern foothills of the High Atlas mountains. I don’t see a solitary rose, but big scenery is in abundance. There are no tourists. In fact, no-one at all. Just you and the XR’s exhaust, echoing off towering orange cliffs in an arid landscape crammed with emptiness. Most of the time, you swear there can’t be a living soul within an hour’s ride. Then we stop for lunch – and a small crowd appears, as it always does, apparently from nowhere.

So far the going has been rocky, sometimes through pebble-strewn wadis (dry valleys), but nothing too tricky. But by the time we get to Tenihir and another four-star hotel, most of us are ready to flop by the pool with a beer. That was 180km – about one quarter of a typical day on the Dakar Rally.

The hotel at Tenihir is our second attempt to change money and no more successful than the first – or the next three. You can’t buy Moroccan dosh abroad, and if your plane’s late you can’t get any at the airport. And the desk jockeys at every hotel in the land preside over drawers full of banknotes, but insist they haven’t a dirham between them. Luckily, John has spare local cash.

Day two begins with a nine-mile amble through palm groves on Tarmac to the magnificent Todra Gorge, whose sides soar to almost 1000 feet at their highest, at which point the gorge is a mere 100 feet wide. Below the overhanging orange rock walls lies a crystal stream and an improbable pair of hotels. Being British, we take tea.

We hit dirt again with a fast passage across bare, stony desert to Goulmima and another picnic lunch. Then it gets serious. First, up comes the wind, hurling a wall of dust at everything in its path. Then the nice firm going we’ve been used to disappears. Now our tyres are rolling on sand. Some of it’s firm, but most is technical and tricky over chaotic ranges of low dunes.

Desert sand is like nothing else. It wraps its bottomless embrace around the front wheel and just takes over. First of all, the frame develops a hinge. Then the front spindle falls out and the rear wheel develops Parkinson’s disease.

In theory, at least, the technique is simple. Keep the front light… weight well back… just a light grip on the bars… and above all, stay on the gas. The hairier it feels, the more you want to shut off, but you daren’t or you’ll be on your nose.

But it works, even though your mind says: ” No way. ” Suddenly, this lump of yawing, pitching hardware floats across the fine, soft sand. The front wheel wanders through the ruts, the rear fishtails, but it goes more or less where it’s pointed, most of the time. And when it doesn’t, everyone else has a laugh.

Meanwhile, Annie’s worried. Visibility has dropped and she’s concerned some of us will get lost. ” We must stick close together, ” she yells above the gale, before cogging into first, gassing her XR like it was Santa Pod and disappearing into the blinding murk. We catch up with her. We had to. She had the GPS. All we had was Insh’Allah.

And that’s why jumping into a swimming pool in motocross gear seemed like such a good idea. And I can confirm the only thing that washes the dust out of your throat better than a cold beer is two cold beers.

After breakfast the next morning we aim our hangovers south-east from Erfoud. After a few miles of blacktop, we hit fast open desert, taking us past an abandoned fort straight out of Beau Geste and on to Erg Chebbi and the giant red dunes at Merzouga.

These slow-moving sandy monsters tower above the little village at their foot as if ready to devour it. And they are not the sort of puny lumps you find at the seaside. The tallest dune is over 1300ft high – or about the height of the Cat and Fiddle pub in the Peak District. And, naturally, it has to be conquered. First, dump some air out of the tyres. Then head on up.

Momentum is everything, but at least the bike’s easy to stop. Just grab the front brake and deceleration is instant – of the bike, that is. You lob out of the front door. Eventually, we make it to the top. There we discover that was the easy bit. Now we have to get down.

After lunch in the auberge below the dunes, we head south into the true Sahara – and it feels like it as the wind blows up even fiercer than yesterday. For two hours we battle into the maw of a blinding sandstorm, before mercifully dropping into the relative calm of a winding wadi. It’s filled with soft sand and tricky to ride, but great fun. We eventually emerge on to a firm track crossed by drifts of soft sand and on to the night’s digs.

Here, at Ouzina in the middle of nowhere, there are no four-star hotels. Normally we’d have spent the night in a traditional Berber tent, but the gale forces us into the only solid structure for miles, Mohammed’s bar and B&B. You can tell a bar is remote when it doesn’t have an address – just a GPS latitude and longitude reference.

As the sun became a dusty orange ball low on the horizon, the wind drops and most of us go out to thrash about on the nearby sea of sand dunes. I chat in pidgin French to Hammi, who earns his living collecting and selling fossils – to whom, God only knows. The other local economic opportunity – other than us – is gathering meteorites. The Ouzina region boasts a particularly rare kind which sells for over $400 per gram.

Meanwhile, I ask Hammi for advice on tomorrow’s weather. Evidently the easterly wind which had been battering us is known as the Shargi, whilst a westerly is called Sahel. The Shargi usually blows for a few hours, as today, but the Sahel lasts much longer. But if I really want to know, reckons Hammi, I should listen to the radio. So much for local knowledge. For what it’s worth, John’s tours rarely get such a battering as we suffered.

To the Arabs the Sahara is known as ” bahr bila maa ” – ocean without water – and over 190km the next day we find out exactly why. From Ouzina it’s 20km of barren nothingness to a village with the only ” petrol station ” within half-a-day’s ride. Fuel laboriously and mysteriously appears out of a hole in a wall and is decanted into any container that happened to be lying about, an odd assortment of old oil cans, pop bottles and even a Jameson’s whiskey bottle.

Then we hit the worst fesh-fesh country so far. Fesh-fesh – bull dust – is dust so fine as to be almost weightless. Hit it and it explodes in an impenetrable cloud through which you can’t even see to the end of your own nose. But, John explains, there’s ” good ” fesh-fesh and ” bad ” fesh-fesh. We’ve already encountered a fair bit of the ” good ” variety. Shaun, a 16-stone Geordie, did a passable impersonation of a nuclear explosion when he crashed in some the previous day. Now we were in for some of the ” bad ” stuff.

Bad fesh-fesh is just like its good cousin except that it maliciously hides deep ruts and holes. And since it has as much physical substance as a bad idea, you crash into every hole in the region. After ten minutes, we look like a squadron of flour-graders.

After a few miles of this comedy, we emerge into less vindictive desert – the flat, dried up pans of former lake beds, with winding sandy trails, rocky pistes and barren mountains lining the horizon on either side. Best are the fast, sandy pistes, holding the bike flat as it fishtails wildly.

We take lunch at the Auberge Lac Maider, a grand name for the most seriously remote mud shack so far.

Today is the warmest so far and the desert shimmered under a sky of pure cloudless blue. The afternoon brought mainly fast, easy piste with more fast sand, plus 30km of bone-jarring rocky going.

Zagora, our destination, is claimed to be the hottest place in Morocco, but luckily not in March. Somewhere in town is a road sign saying it is 52 days to Timbuktu — by camel train. The haven of the Hotel Sirocco lies under purple cliffs in a verdant oasis on the edge of town, so you drop on its palm-shrouded cool unexpectedly. Again, there’s a pool. And cold beers. And still no dirhams even though it’s French-owned, by Brigitte and Giles. ” We have none, ” they say, like everywhere else. Ah well, we’ll just have to put the beers on the credit card tab, yet again.

Our final day on dirt finds us winding through the Draa Valley, through an endless succession of villages, so unlike the open desert. Every mud hut seems to sprout a satellite dish. Camels, goats, children and donkeys are everywhere and each as bad a pedestrian as the other. Just three colours define the landscape: The vivid green of the palm canopy, cradling bright orange mountains under an azure blue sky.

Finally, it’s on to blacktop again for the magnificent pass over the Jebbel Sarhro mountains and on down to Ouarzazate once more. Brilliant. And I never did get to spend any real money.