BMW field test - Morocco (epilogue)

Over the next couple of days, the remainder of our trip in Morocco was a climb back over the Atlas and down to Marrakech once more, where we left the bikes in Matteo's capable hands, ready for the return home.

Now heading away from the desert, we encountered more towns, though still among vast expanses of nothingness that were very scenic.

One such town was called Kourkouda, where we stopped for the millionth tajin of the trip, though this one stood out as being particularly tasty.

As we sat on plastic chairs in the shade overseeing this intersection in the middle of nowhere, I couldn't help but wonder what it would take to escape the tyranny of the West and disappear down here.

Waking from my daydream, we finished our mint tea and got going again, only to run into a silly electrical problem on the Yamaha, easy enough to bypass but fiendish to diagnose.

One last tricky climb on rocky slopes cut across mountain ridges led us to a spectacular vista, before a descent into an immense plain, truly the last before the High Atlas.

This marked the end of our offroad adventure, after this it was all tarmac and tourists. The descent from the Tizi n'Tichka pass heading towards Marrakech was perhaps a little too spirited and I may have overworked the brakes: the front caliper started seizing up and was not releasing. I stopped immediately to see what was happening, it's possible I may have had a little too much DOT4 in the reservoir and it had no room to expand as it got hot. It could also be that the pistons had accumulated so much dirt and sand by that point in the trip that they could no longer retract fully, or the master cylinder itself may need to be flushed out and cleaned. Anyway, a couple other guys pulled up and they helped me bleed the system a little bit. Not impossible to do on your own but always easier if one guy pulls the brake lever while the other one cracks the bleed nipple and shuts it off again - and yes, you can also do it by yourself using a strong rubber band or a piece of string or a luggage strap to keep the brake lever squeezed: back on the road and no more issues (I may need new brake pads soon though).

If this feels rather rushed, it's because the last couple of days went by as a blur; it seems impossible to recall every detail, though luckily the most important things are captured in memory and on this blog. Above all, I can call this field test a complete success for the R100GS, and that's satisfying.

Back in my university days, my good friend Graham was fond of saying "it's all a matter of perspective", so inevitably a trip like this puts the other trips we do back home into perspective and allows us to see them as less stressful but certainly no less rewarding: a Majella tour will always be a world-class trip no matter what. I wonder if I'll take the Fastback or the Sportster for the next glorious loop...