Tiznit: Sahara dust in the air

THE FACE OF MOROCCO keeps changing. We reached the southernmost point of our loop today and nobody could doubt that all that remained of the country was the Sahara.

I flew over it once and it went on and on and on. I was flying north and I kept looking for at least one green patch before we reached the Mediterranean. It never came. The Sahara was the beach. Shipwrecked sailors stumbling ashore there and gasping "At least we've only got to walk to the top of the beach and we're safe" must have been horribly disillusioned. They'd have had a long, long walk.

Today we passed groves of palm trees, we rode beneath huge walls of broken rock and earth, we crossed a bleak mountain plateau and we sensed even if we didn't see the Sahara.

The ride out of Tafraoute was flat and peaceful and scenic except for the walled parks of camping-cars. There are thousands of them here, two thirds of them French. France is the world's most visited country but when the French themselves go abroad, their first choice is Tunisia. According to Le Monde yesterday, tourism in Tunisia has plunged "and Morocco hasn't fared much better." Well, if this is French tourism in a lean spell, what can it be like normally?

Riding out of Tafraoute, the road filled in the opposite direction with convoys of them - small RVs, if you're an American - all of them white and each carrying a yellow sticker in the windscreen. It showed they were On An Adventure.

I never like decrying the way other people spend their time or visit the world because to most people cycling on loaded bikes is the most preposterous activity of all. But I do wonder how much anyone but the convoy leader sees of the countryside they have driven so far to see. I suppose it was fear of being separated that kept them within spitting distance of

the bumper in front. The first driver would have seen everything but the best those behind could enjoy was a long-term view of the interior furnishings of the van in front. Furnishings, probably, exactly like their own. There is only so long a man would want to gaze at someone's Formica table.

We were spared all that. Instead we had a challenging but delightful ride through the valley from Tafraoute and then up through a narrow gorge, rock pinnacles on each side, to an open mountain plateau. Space wasn't short. There was room to bowl a hoop. Or to build large, generous houses, partly western, partly North African, always walled and usually with burglar alarm. This is where the rich people moved.

Unlike our ride into town, which had been into a powerful wind, today we rode into the mountains with the wind at our back. It bowled us up a regal curve to a modern hotel on the peak. We were its only customers, so far as we could see, and the man employed to sit outside and open the door must have resented the disturbance. We were at 1 360m and the land fell in all directions around us, green, brown, golden in the sun. And then, after omelettes in a courtyard, the wind blew us down a slalom descent of fast hairpins.

Well, not everything lasts, the good least of all. We fell into a dusty, wild, untended plain and turned to face the wind at an angle. The road was bumpy, aching, slow and permanently rising. To the right, nothing to recount. To the left, a sandy plain that spread to low mountains that marked the start of the Sahara. This was the southernmost part of our loop. Only the brave go further.

It was hard, pressing into Tiznit. It was hot, it was windy and it was survival riding. But there's been worse in life.

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