Day 27: Towards Imilchil – Ilpo Juvander

Had a bit lazy morning as we had some ideas about keeping resting day and some camel riding. Both of these were abandoned during the morning: Camel’s were not available so we decided to move forward.

Breakfast was normal, coffee, bread and some unknown stuff.

Few more pictures during the morning from kasbah.

And some important stuff to show that there were someone from Finland.

A bit after 10:00 am we were finally ready to ride again. Took some frozen water to go, would keep plain water cool anyhow.

Cost for double room in Kasbah le Touareg was 500 MAD which is about 45€.

Our first stop after leaving kasbah was to drive as close to dynes with these big BMW’s as we could, take some pictures and to get Janne some sand.

After taking the pictures came a bit boring ride through bigger road towards our next destination. Took a stop at some village to drink.

And then continued towards Gorges du Todra, one big tourist trap where we were also photographed a lot by other tourists.

From here we continued to main target for this day, road R704. Just before getting there we refueled bikes and made sure that helmet cameras were working.

Stopped few times on this road R704 to take pictures. Some scenes on the way included Gorges du Dades which is also listed as well in dangerous roads website.

Really nice paved road to begin with, but last 60 km or so it showed totally different nature. Road turned into gravel road and went almost 3000m high like this.

It took us some 3 hours to drive last 60 km of this road before reaching paved road again.

Video from this road gives much more better view on what we experienced.

Road R704 in Morocco

At Imilchil we spotted quite easily the place for the night – Auberge chez Bassou. When we stopped by the road there were already guys running towards us and they opened the place for us. There were no other guests at a time. As we arrived it was already getting dark. Bikes were left in front of the auberge, it was promised to be a safe place.

Quick shower and to get dinner. While waiting for the dinner we also got Wi-Fi working: hotel stuff picked an prepaid 3G card and put it into router. They did not have any fixed line but all was through cellular network. Good service for us!

There we also some not so western ways of heating the place during the winter time.

This driving day was planned to be a bit lazy, but turned out to be quite long and hard one: 447 km in 9 hours. Riding on tough surface in altitudes over 2000 m is much harder than doing same at sea level, especially when we cannot really practice for it in Finland.