On November 10th 2008, Oemoemenoe (Jan for friends) started a thread on Motor-Forum tossing the idea for a motorcycle trip to Morocco. That he intended to go was already clear, but he would like some company. The plan was to leave in October 2009. After a while, a couple of guys turned up that wanted to go on the trip. In the end, this is what the group would look like:
- Oemoemenoe (Jan) BMW R1100GS
- Aad900 (Aad) Suzuki V-strom650
- Ninjawil (Wil) Kawasaki KLV1000
- Maroko (Tom) Kawasaki Versys650
- MikeTheBike (Mike) BMW R850RT
- Maurice46 (Maurice) Triumph Tiger 1050
Meanwhile, we’re quite far in our preparations and we have met a couple of times and even did a few tours together on the motorcycles. We know we can get along, which is important if you plan to travel together for a couple of weeks. Trough this blog we’ll keep the world informed of our adventures and preparations.
The team bikes
The route. Jan made a rough sketch, summing up a couple of places we should visit, and I guess we’ll stick to that mainly. We’ll drive through France, Spain and cross over to Melila (Morocco) in Almeria. Because our holiday starts when we start the bikes, we decided not to drive to Almeria using highways. Morocco may be the target, but that doesn’t mean we have to take an uninteresting highway to get there. So, one of our forum friends provided a route through France over the Route National, so we’ll not use the Pèage (highway, toll road). This will take more time, but it’s much more interesting to drive. This route is a fairly quick route as it won’t cross small villages every 5 minutes. Through Belgium and Spain we’ll take the highway. In Spain we take the highway along the Mediteranean Sea, so it’s not too bad. In Spain we have a planned pit-stop at the holiday settlement of Mike The Bike’s mum. She offered us lunch, and we can’t possibly refuse that!
The route looks like this:
(If you press the red magnifying glass, the map will go full-screen)
From Almeria we take the ferry to Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco. From there it is Melilla-Nador-Guercif-Ar Rachidia-Erfoud-Ouarzazate-Marrakech-Kasba Tadla-Azrou-Fes-Quazzane-Chefchaoen-Tanger. The Moroccan leg of the trip looks like this:
(If you press the red magnifying glass, the map will go full-screen)
Take note of how wrong Google Earth draws the roads. If you zoom into the N9 in the direction of Ouarzazate, it looks like my line completely misses the road (that is drawn by Google Earth). But if you zoom in far enough, you can see the actual road on the satellite map and that is closer to my line… I’ve drawn my route using Mapsource (a Garmin program) using the so called ‘Olaf‘ maps because the aren’t any good maps from Garmin. Correct maps of Morocco are in short supply by the way. The Olaf Maps are made by ‘amateurs’ who tracked the route with GPS. They’re not 100% reliable, because you can see the ‘Olaf maps’ sometimes miss the actual road. But better 5 meters next to the road than nothing. We have good (paper) maps, various GPS boxes and a normal compass, so we won’t get lost.
At this time, the route is drawn in until Chechouen ingetekend; the rest will follow later (maybe). From there it’s just a short stint to Tanger of Ceuta (Spanish enclave).
In Ouarzazate we already arranged a sleeping place with a Dutch guy who owns a off-road center over there called Bikershome.
