September 18, 2014
Thursday / Easy Afternoon Of It: Boumalne to Skoura.
I wake at the usual shortly after dawn time feeling no, do I have to rise with the prospect of another day like yesterday ahead of me. Eventually without enthusiasm, I sit up in the tent at seven-thirty.
Breakfast in the campsite main building is unappetising dry bread; no milk for the coffee, but with the redeeming glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. The citrus zest revitalises me like a good cup of coffee.
On a hilltop the campsite café where I sit looks out down a slope at the town in the valley below. The view is upon narrow parallel streets and on flat floor mud coloured houses that bound them. A highway with cars moving in both directions as in slow motion along the bottom of the slope almost a kilometre away opposite skirted by verdant green shrub palms in contrast with brownish red of the plain beyond.
I set off around eight-thirty, slowly back down the potholed broken asphalt street I'd rode up in the dark the evening before. My rear tyre feels soft and looking down there's a lot of sidewall showing. I check and the tyre apparently has a slow puncher, so I lean the bike against a wall to the side and pump it up hard, hoping it'll remain hard for the day. I think that perhaps it is time I switch the tyre to the front as even though I've ridden the same tyre from home, of Chinese brand bought in Turkey, there's still enough tread to take me home if used as a front, with the relatively new Continental now on the front swapped to the rear.
The highway drops down a steep hill pass old colonnade fronted shops selling all kinds of ware. The inside of the street crowded with people scrambling round parked and partly moving cars and scooters. Then Levelling out turns left across a bridge for the road onward.
The urban stretch of Boumalne continues along an irrigated belt as villages and roadside cafes with groups of school children to the side calling out "Bonjour! Cest va?" and local cyclists plodding along that I speed up to get round onward almost to the next town, An something; beyond which it is back to arid desert and about fifty kilometres to the following town, Skoura. Presently it is ten o'clock and I should get there in time for lunch if it remains calm.
I make it before one. On the way in a restaurant is signposted, but there is no customers when I get as far. Not a great advertisement. Nor does a couple of other places I pass. I come to a kiosk type café, still with no-one sat eating but stop anyway as there is a nice shaded garden to sit in outside.
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The man behind the counter shows me a card listing fare. All of the options are 70 Dh, but include a bottle of water, starter salad and desert. I order kofta and take a seat out in the garden. I manage to write up the diary and still nothing has come out. Then he comes out with a silver pot of green tea and a glass, something extremely refreshing as I'm parched. I realise I most be the only person eating today so the food is being made from scratch. I sit waiting and watch the wind rise blowing the palm trees back and forth. Then the salad comes. A mix of chopped tomatoes, onion and cucumber on a bed of lettuces and slices of orange, which is refreshing; but later when the main course, the kofta comes, it is a small plate with four double size tooth-picks containing small chunks of skured meat. And desert is a tub of yogurt.
Riding on the wind isn't yet as strong as yesterday's, but all the same it is tough going. I'm for riding the further forty kilometres to Quarzazate, but then on the edge of town there is a camping sign arrowed in along a track on the right, so decide on an early stop.
It is so good having the tent up early and spend the remainder of the afternoon reclining inside reading my book while the wind flutters the tent furiously.
Today's ride: 80 km (50 miles)
Total: 5,818 km (3,613 miles)
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