Soggy day

Woke up this morning feeling a bit groggy with a head cold. Maybe there is some truth in the old wives tale about having wet feet. My little bathing experience a couple of days ago may have come home to haunt me. My mood was not improved when I opened the curtains to discover it was raining cats & dogs. The french have a nice saying which translated goes 'raining like a pissing cow'. Felt like the whole herd was at it up there.

I looked at the map and decided to check the conditions further up the road with the locals. I was planning to take a scenic route along the edge of the mountains towards Azrou. Rain at Beni Mellal would mean snow at Azrou and very difficult road conditions in the mountains. I saw yesterday what rain does to mountain roads and decided to be sensible and take a roundabout route to Fes. Even one ford with a good flow over it would be a real problem.

Passed by this Oued in flood and decided that I made a good decision. I have crossed hundreds of Oueds over the past weeks and almost none have had any water in them. Normally, they are pretty wide with very heavily eroded bank and a lot of rocks and sand in the bottom. When it rains, you dont want to pitch your tent anywhere near! Mostly, it just spitted at me all day but sometimes there were proper biblical proportioned showers and I was left riding along through slurry that flowed onto the roads from the surrounding fields. Slippery as hell.

Passed through some beautiful red and green countryside just inland of Rabat and then turned east again to Fes. The green I am now aware is because of the rain. I had my first experience of a Moroccan motorway. Looks just like a normal one, complete with toll booths, speed cameras, roadsigns that you can actually read and with a very good surface. Weird thing was that the cars didn't belch smoke and fumes and moved at a reasonable speed. I put this down to the cost of driving on it. For a motorcycle, it costs the equivalent of a restaurant meal to go 90km. This is beyond the means of many people here. So instead they walk on the hard shoulder, graze their sheep on the embankments, hitch lifts and I even saw a guy crossing on his donkey. Rode into Fes and despite the rain, the scooter guys managed to find me and try to get me to follow them to a hotel/carpet shop/restaurant. Amazingly persistent and speaking most main european languages, these guys flock like vultures round the recently arrived tourist carcass. Told them to bugger off...