Lost in the Mid-Atlas: Fez-Marrakesh
Route planning with a good map is one of the most enjoyable aspects of life on the road. Take two cities,  Fez and Marrakesh as an example. Linking the two will be a clear red line. This is the highway – the quickest, easiest and most convenient road on which to travel. It’s also likely to be the busiest, most dangerous and least enjoyable one to ride a bicycle on. Yellow lines, the secondary roads, are better. The real adventure however is often to be found on the minor roads – the narrow white lines that wiggle their way between small villages. The road surface might be broken, the local people will assume you’ve lost your way and the journey will take much longer,

Into the Rif Mountains: Gibraltar-Fez
The ferry to Morocco was quick and uneventful. I’d hoped to be able to stand out on the deck, contemplate my departure from Europe and slowly survey the mountainous contours of the north African coastline, but instead found myself confined to an air-conditioned passenger lounge with hardly enough time to work out how to recline the seat before a tannoy announced the boat’s arrival. I wasn’t quite yet in Africa proper, having opted at the last minute to take a ferry to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. It was a far more relaxed experience than the chaotic scenes I remember when entering this quarter of

Africa approaching
I had hoped to write a longer post here, but for now it will have to wait. This time tomorrow I´ll be in Tangier, Morocco. The Big Africa Cycle is finally leaving the conveniences of Europe for the adventures of Africa.  For the next two weeks I´m fortunate to have a good friend joining me on the road. For now here are some photos from the last week, one in which I clocked the longest daily distance of this trip so far (155km), the fastest speed (69km/hr), met an Englishman who has cycled over 160,000km, was attacked by

The guided ride south: Sintra – Tavira
There was little need for a map when I finally departed Sintra. Martin, whom I’d met when I first arrived in the town, and whose house I’d been staying in for the previous week, had the route planned out for us. He’d cycled most of it before as a tour guide, or had at least visited many of the places at some point during his childhood. At first I was a little hesitant when he expressed an interest in joining me for a week. Despite being fluent in Portuguese, well informed about the history and culture of the country and altogether one of the funniest characters I’m likely to meet on the road, he was also used to a style of cycle touring where b

Trade fairs and trail rides
I’m surrounded by bikes and big names from the bicycle world; Cannondale, Trek, Specialised, Scott, Giant, Shimano…. The names are familiar but the context is new. The models in front of me here are fresh off the production line; shiny creations of carbon fibre and titanium with suspension forks that would look more at home on a motorbike. The four-figure price-tags  would equally be more familiar to someone buying a new motorbike, in some cases a car. Touring bikes aren’t popular in Portugal, at least if this trade fair is anything to go by. Mountain biking on the other hand is.