Peace: Salam Alaikum, this is supposed to be the first lines you are reading after the winds of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) have granted me their favors and brought you here, so hearty Welcome. “Salam” means peace in Arabic, so I hope you will find peace and also enchantment in the stories I will be narrating.
My stories will be accounts of my previous and future bicycle rides and touring trips around Marrakesh, the city where I live, and Morocco. My objective is to share with you my cycling experiences and cogitations about these experiences, about roads, about places, villages, people and every single instant immortalized by the magical invention called camera, and the surviving inspired feeling.
I started biking not long ago, precisely in august 2008 after having received a Triban Trail 7 that I had bought 6 months earlier and left in Belgium. As my intention was, and still is, to explore Morocco by bike, I had to practice and learn everything about bicycle touring. In this respect, forums have been an inexhaustible and exuberant source of information but as experience stands by far as the most infallible source of information, my Sunday rides in the high Atlas Mountains and few longer touring trips around Morocco have been the real source of knowledge about travelling by bike in a country like Morocco. These trips constitute the core material with which I am starting this blog today, with delay.
With approximately around 3000 km of bicycle touring, I still consider myself as a beginner and still have many cycling plans, not only in Morocco but also abroad. This blog will give possibility to these plans to grow and come to reality. Some of these plans would probably necessitate a different bicycle, a mountain bike for example but I already have two bikes after having purchased a second hand Kona lava dome mountain bike converted into a touring bike and hence think that’s enough. Different gear would as well come in handy but financial considerations make it impossible to make any extra expenses now.
The choice of a bicycle as a means of discovering Morocco differently can be explained by the following:
• Love of sports and physical activity though bicycle touring is not primarily about physical achievement. There nevertheless is a certain stamina aspect involved.
• Love of my country, Morocco. This is not to be understood in any tight patriotic scope but rather an attempt to reach for my kinsmen Moroccans everywhere in Morocco, especially in remote parts of the country. Morocco is also a beautiful country and seen from the perspective of handlebars, Morocco is majestic.
• Discovering new roads, visiting villages I have never visited, exploring tracks and places only locals know, and lastly cruising unprecedented itineraries, all this, in an attempt to know Morocco better. I have mostly visited every part of morocco by car or bus but there is still plenty of regions left to be visited by bike: some parts of the Atlas Mountains, Rif Mountains, Ouarzazate, the Sahara…etc,
• A sense of freedom only a bicycle and two wheels can provide.
Have a nice ride with me.
Hicham Ait Almouh, January 24th 2011
