Heading home.

The time had come to start heading north. The tour agenda had us crossing the Atlas off road, however, there had been no chance to reccee the route since the rains. It was too big a risk to ride the high pass as there were no roads should we find the route impassable.

We had another problem to solve first though. Mark (also known as Wally or Wol) had a problem. His ignition key would no longer fully slide home. There was a foreign object of some description at the bottom of the keyway. Whether this had been put their deliberately or whether the lock had failed with the vibration was hard to say. Wol felt someone had tried to steal his bike, I felt it was an equipment failure. The debate over this would continue throughout the day, but it didn't alter the basic fact that Wol was going nowhere.

But lady luck (depending on your point of view) was smiling on us. Way back at the Erg Chebi desert we'd run into a bunch of professional riders practicing for the Dakar rally. They also had the fully equipped support truck with mobile workshop. As we had gone from hotel to hotel they to had rolled up. It had become a bit of a joke between the groups, not that they spoke much English or us much Spanish.

But a broken bike is a universal language and they were eager to help. We dragged the bike over to the massive truck and as we did so the side of the truck swung down to reveal the workshop complete with generator and compressor. If the Landy had got a face like all the things in Bob the Builder then it would have looked jelous as we all drooled over their setup.

Their engineer tried initially blowing the blockage out with a compressor but it was wedged too tight. After some trials with other tools there was only one option left. Out came the disc cutter and the entire lock barrel was cut off the bike.

The remaining base part of the assembly could then be operated with a screwdriver. Not very secure, but at least we were up and running once more.

All this drama had delayed our departure, which only added to Julian's pace as he guided us towards Meknes. Not a lot to say about the ride really. It was long and my bum ached. However, there was still the stunning scenery, occasional twisty bit, unseen policeman and near death overtaking experiences to punctuate the time.

Once at Meknes we headed into the Medina to look around the market for some fake designer goods. It was rammed and we had no idea where we were going, just jostling or being jostled by the crowd. After a little while and a few dead ends we found some watch sellers. The fakes were really poor quality though and we left empty handed.

We got a taxi back to the hotel with a mad Moroccan driver who did his best to kill us, but unfortunately for him the other vehicles kept on getting out of the way. We celebrated our survival with a couple of ales.