2 december - Marocco

We follow the Atlas mountains passing some nice desert towns and arrive in the city Tinherir. Here we decide to take the road into the Todra Gorge. It’s a great road, fantastic mountain landscape. The canyon narrows to just 10 meters with walls rizing 300 meters on both sides. After the narrow part the views stay superb and all traffic has dissapeared. Here we are, two tiny persons on bicycles in this amazing mountain landscape. We stay for the night in Tantatouchte a funny village, it is very cold but people are on the streets warming themselves by small fires.

The next day is beautifull, sunny but very cold. Temperatures hardly rise above freezing point. The road turns into a track in Ait-Hani. It’s a rough path but at least it’s mostly dry. We climb the Tizi Tirherhouzine Pass, more snow up here and a cold biting wind, understandable because we are at 2700 meters altitude. In the afternoon we arrive in the mountain village Agoudal. People here seem to have a simple live. They sit against the walls covered in blankets warming themseleves in the sun and drinking a bit of tea now and then. Main product in this region are sheep and most of the sheep have been transported to lower areas where there is still enough to graze. So there is little work to be done by the inhabitants of this village. Although we have seen young and old women carrying firewood and other stuff towards the mountains, they sleep in caves or under a sheet of plastic, a tough life it seems.

We stay in a primitive hotel without water because the taps are frozen. It snows that night and the next morning it is hard to find the road to the Dades Gorge where we want to go. We follow some horse tracks in the snow and cycling is still possible through the thin snow. After a while the road starts to climb to a 3000 meter high pass, the snow is getting deeper and deeper. Cycling is getting impossible. We have to push our bikes, together we push one bike up a bit, return to the other bike and push that one up. We advance very slow, in this way we will reach the next village in three days. I walk a bit further to see if there is any improvement, further up it looks like the North Pole, knee deep snow and more is falling at the moment.