I decided that after 11 days solid riding I deserved a day or two off. This is meant to be a holiday! I'll mess about in the desert.

I followed one of the pistes up the way for a bit. Looking forward

and looking back

I then went for a tootle down the road to Mhamid at the end of the road. It was all very deserty.

I then discovered that this famous sign was actually at the back of my hotel

I found another piste that turned into pure sand and decided that now I was free of luggage it was time to learn sand.

After that first foray I felt I was lucky to recover my bike on my own and retired for the day.

There were three Frenchmen making repairs to their bikes on my return. They too were on their first Moroccan trip quite possibly identifiable to regulars because they were carrying luggage. Either way they'd just had a torrid time in that rather than come down the main road they'd followed a piste parallel to it with a couple of rather innocent looking river crossings. The rivers were dry but rocky and like my experience on the steep slope they'd had a terrible time. One of them was limping having had his 1200GS land on him after one attempt. Two of them had to repair their luggage which had been torn off.

Still, we enjoyed a bottle of wine and shared our tales of woe!

The next day I was determined to do sand and so found a different piste with a couple of 50m sand sections. I went back and forth half a dozen times getting increasingly nervous about either the barbed wire or tree clumps impinging my increasingly wayward falls.

In the end the matter was decided for me. After a last hurrah had yet again gone inexplicably wrong resulting in a fatal weave I fell off to the side turning and had my leg trapped under the pannier frame. I untwisted myself but the damage was done, I'd twisted my ankle (something I wasn't expecting wearing MX boots but then no-one was probably expecting a dunce like me to be floundering around in them).

I retired injured for the rest of the day.