Tafraoute: wheeling with eagles.

SOME ROADS are highways and others experiences. In every sense, this was an experience, one of the most stunning roads we have ridden.

It began as we rose out of Ait Baha, dropped to skirt a recently drowned valley, then rose again. We climbed and

dropped on a narrow, slow road that turned round the harsh, brown face of the mountain. The ascent, hard enough normally, became all the tougher in a upland wind that came close to pinning us to the spot.

But what reward! We climbed for 14km, winding all the while like lumbering eagles wheeling above a glorious landscape of brown and green thrusting valleys. Flowers of blue or yellow marked

our route, those and strange piles of stone like fairies' houses. They stood not only at unpredictable intervals beside the road but in the steep fields, not marking their otherwise invisible boundaries but dotted like giant pepper from a shaker.

Cone-shaped hills were topped by fortress settlements, the original Berber villages, still occupied.

Their walls had inaccessible windows to discourage invaders. More villages, still old but more recent now, ran in occasional lines along ridges beside the road.

Everywhere was a crumpled blanket of shades of brown and sometimes green, not a combination you'd expect to be enticing but so striking that we stopped to gaze.

It took more than an hour to ride the first 10km, and that with few halts. One moment the wind brought us close to a halt, the next it attacked from the side, and only just rarely when the road turned the right way did it press from behind. And then only for moments. The traffic was light, the occasional bus making its way from one valley to the next. It was too early for 4 x 4 desert adventurers to have stirred from their coffee and croissants. We wouldn't see them until later.

We reached the col at 1 200m. A single-room café waited at the top, built of breezeblock and painted white. It looked weatherblown, which doubtless it was. A straggle of metal chairs and tables stood in a line outside but it was a relief to sit indoors. Two men ran the place, an overwelcoming, large man in a jalaba over western dress and a smaller, smooth-faced man who looked surprisingly like Stephen Roche, the Irish Tour de France rider - but was called Mahomet.

The noisier man said he had worked in Paris, as a baker, in the 1980s. "I know all France," he said. "The French, they are like brothers."

He asked where we lived and then looked puzzled.

"It is near Hendaye?" he asked. It's not a town most people know but it, and Irun on the Spanish side, constitute the westernmost border crossing in the Pyrenees. We agreed that, viewed from a mountain top in Morocco, we didn't live that far away. In reality it would be three days on a loaded bike.

The wind was blowing harder as we left. "Bon courage!", Mahomet said as we stepped outside, the only words he'd spoken. He didn't get much chance to talk with a chattering colleague.

We descended and then rose again. We rode beside houses nailed to the mountain's side, then past - or rather around - the gem, cone-top village of Tinizgane. Morocco is preserving it as a national treasure.

The desert explorers had arrived before us: they drove by faster than they needed to in 4 x 4s with French or Moroccan licence plates. At every chance, they stopped beside the road, ran out with their cameras, snapped wildly and then pursued their race against time.

Three more cols followed, the scenery still beautiful but less striking now. We freewheeled into flat valleys, the cone-top villages behind us, crossed bridges and then rose again. The last peak soared to 1 550m, high enough to notice the lightness of oxygen in the stifling, dry air. I had to walk the worst, my heart beating hard.

And then the reward - 14km of snaking descent at 70kmh. And it'd have been more had the hairpins not been there. We relished it, awash in rushing air and that exhilaration of descending known only to cyclists and skiers. Our tyres whistled on the road. The wind roared in our ears. The air, once hot, felt cool. It was glorious, like being slightly drunk, light-headed, but coldly sober.

Just four more kilometres at the bottom, into Tafraoute, a happy, busy little town. We got there tired. We had earned it.

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