Eco Challenge Morocco 1998 by James Henderson
There’s more rock in Morocco than even a name like Morocco can hint at-- limestone, sandstone, table-mountains, cliffs, pinnacles, buttresses, boulders, scree, schist, sand-dunes. For a week during the 1998 Discovery Channel Eco-Challenge we were grinding away at the rockface, so to speak--walking over it, traversing it, scrambling up it, abseiling down it, pedalling over it, falling over on it and in places taking the whole hillside with us. But then, in a race that touts itself as one of the toughest races in the world, you couldn’t have it any other way, of course.
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Start minus Three Days
Arrival in Marrakesh. Vast kit-bags and bike-boxes clutter up the carousel. We bump into some legends of adventure racing: Mark ‘Ox’ Foster, Vivien Prince and Andy ‘Gnome’ McBeth, from Team New Zealand, where adventure racing began. They have been winning races like Eco-Challenge for years. Their rucksacks have been specially designed for them by Macpac--extremely lightweight, but with 50 litres carrying capacity. Our faces turn a ripe jealous green.
But we haven’t done too badly ourselves as it happens. For the biking we’ve been fixed up with some Scott bikes--mid-season Boulders (with a name like that, they’re particularly suitable for the Moroccan terrain, somehow). Boots by Neebee. And there’s an advantage in being sponsored by a company who make the material for outdoor sportswear. I’ve never seen so much kit--bivvi bags, kayaking kagoules, waterproof jackets... and socks--as many pairs of Porelle Drys as we could use.
Start minus Two
The course is kept secret until a couple of days before the start. We know the disciplines--kayaking, canyoning, coasteering, abseiling, horse and camel riding, mountain-biking and high-altitude hiking--but today they reveal just the first leg.
We’re told it’s beginning with a camel sprint along the beach (14km). Race organiser Mark Burnett, is quoted as saying:
‘I honestly have no idea what’s going to happen when we start you off on the camels. You’re adventurers. Deal with it...’ Could be interesting, then.
Next up is ‘coasteering’--a little known sporting activity, scrambling along the rocky coastline, invented in Wales, as it happens. And then there’s an 80km kayaking section. This is potentially hideous and the organisers declare it a ‘dark zone’. This means we have to be in a checkpoint by nightfall--every minute after 6.15pm brings a crucifyingly large hour’s penalty later on.
The rest of the course they keep till later, when we’re tired. That way the planning is more difficult. Later we discovered they were saving the mountain-biking section for last. The course, all 190 kilometres of it, has been designed by Sebastian ‘Bas’ Pot, an Englishman who knows Morocco like the back of his hand. He has been leading tours for Exodus Mountain Bike Adventures in Morocco for the past two years. He is taking us from the Atlas Mountains to the finish line in Marrakesh, a descent of 1300 metres in all. (This implies a mainly downhill section, but somehow, in a competition like this, I just know that that won’t be the whole story.)
Start minus One
This is turning out to be more of an E-coli-challenge than an Eco-Challenge--one thing that’s less than rock-solid about Morocco. We have our share of it. Viv is gagging and feeling rotten and Richard has the runs. We’re transported down to the start-line in the resort town of Essaouira--a one-time hangout of Jimi Hendrix--and camp on the beach.
Start
Two hundred camels gather at dawn--probably the biggest collection since Lawrence of Arabia--and a sure recipe for chaos. Weird animals, these camels. They groan like dinosaurs when you sit on their backs and if they don’t like you, they simply stretch their long necks round and stare backwards at you--spooky.
And they’re off... (mostly lolloping down the beach, but a couple of involuntary dismounts aswell). Considering they’re herd animals, it’s lucky that the leader chooses to go in the right direction. Lester’s saddle slides off and dumps him into some rocks--God knows how he isn’t injured. After two hours of compressed vertebrae, bouncing and hanging on for dear life, screaming ‘zeet! zeet!’ (camel for fast!), I use the only other word of camel I’ve learned--‘ooch’. It means sit-down, which my beast obligingly does.
We collect together as a four, and set off for some coasteering. We skitter down a sand dune and for 30 minutes we follow the coastline, scrambling and scuttling, wading and dodging the waves, swimming across the small bays. Then it opens out onto a long stretch of beach and we jog to the start of the kayaking section.
We load up as fast as possible and set off into the waves to try our luck. The seas are huge--a six foot swell that increases to eight or ten feet as the afternoon goes on. Mountains of Atlantic water are moving in from behind our right shoulders.
Getting back into shore is an issue. When the swell reaches the beach it breaks in massive waves, big enough for board-surfing. Surfing in a kayak is slightly less easy to control--you end up skimming, hurtling at breakneck speed towards the beach. Or you are turned you sideways and flipped. Then it’s a bit like being in a washing machine.
We skim into PC (Passport Control) 3, upright, and have ourselves ticked off. A quick look at the map showed that we have an hour and a half to cover eleven kilometres. A high risk strategy, given the penalties, but we go for it. We make it to PC4 with twenty minutes to spare. Only six other teams have made it. A lucky break.
After a few exercises to stretch out our backs after the camels and a hearty meal (a luxury in an event like this, but you can carry plenty of food in a kayak of course), we bed down for the night. It’s another luxury in an adventure race to get ten hours’ sleep (we can’t leave again till 6.15am), even if it is somewhat disturbed by the sound of eight foot breakers crashing fifty yards away.
Day Two
At dawn the seven teams set off and try to break through the surf--we are lucky and get both kayaks through on the first try. Even the Aussie team (in which there were some former world champion kayakers) has trouble. They are caught by the last wave...and are duly surfed a hundred yards back into the beach, backwards. Only they wouldn’t have capsized... Checkpoint 6, the first changeover, is another Persil test--we’re dumped, along with just about everyone else--but we drag ourselves and our canoes out onto dry land to Camp One.
As we check in, we’re given the maps for the next section of the course--107 km of hiking, canyoning, a humungous abseil, more hiking and then a 50 km horse-back leg... We get into dry clothes and pack our mountain gear, with three days of food and energy drink-powders. Then we load into vehicles for transportation to the Atlas Mountains.
We reach the mountains at ten at night and set off again, in fourth place. The race is really starting now--there are no dark zones and no reasons to stop. We walk through dawn--Day Three--across a barren plain, and then descend into the Mgoun River Gorge. We criss-cross the river as it snakes over the valley floor, through villages with their neatly tended cornfields, irrigation canals and bamboo thickets. We continue for thirty kilometres--most of the day--as mules and their drivers pass the other way. The locals are a bit bemused to see us. Perhaps they think we’re on some sort of punishment...
In the third night we climb into the high ground--and as dawn approaches (always the worst time), the sleep monster strikes. Lester falls asleep on his feet and wakes up when he hits the ground. We snatch half an hour’s sleep and the sleep monster goes away with the dawn--Day Four. We have topped 11,000 feet but this is only a taster of what’s to come.
First it’s back down again, into the Tafia canyon--a vast, vertical sided gulley which has been carved out by millions of years’ of waterflow--we descend by scrambling, jumping and abseiling. And then we pick our way up a rockface, on a ridge with special guide ropes--to the 300ft abseil.
It’s always nervous moment this, leaning back into space, with nothing beneath you. But abseiling is fun too. For some reason my rope spins me round and I descend facing outwards, with a fantastic view of the Berber Village hundreds of feet below.
Now, back to the walking--to the summit of a table mountain on goat paths. The fourth night is spent walking over miserable terrain, clambering over rock strata that run diagonally across our path. Our best guide to locate paths is goat and mule shit. After our third hour of sleep in three days, we find the mountaintops scoured by vicious, cold wind.
Day Five
At the foot of a huge scree slope dawn we reach the start of the 50 kilometre horse-riding section--Moroccan Army stallions, flighty, nervous and extremely highly strung and with stirrups are set for midgets (which pleases Richard, who is 6 ft 2. Three want to gallop off... Viv’s will only go backwards, until they tell her to let the reins go loose... There is a plain where we are encouraged to gallop. Not bloody likely!
After an hour we get them into their stride and ride them hard. They’re used to that and they rise to the challenge. There’s an enforced vet stop (two hours’ sleep for us) and then four or five hours in, we come across the New Zealand team again. Bob Foster (no relation to Ox) has been kicked and then rolled on by his horse and he’s in a bad way. They stick with us.
At Camp 2 we get the final set of maps--more walking, up into the high mountains of the Mgoun, more navigation by goat dropping, and then the mountain biking.
Day Six
We summit Mgoun itself, over 13,000 feet, the second highest peak in North Africa. I hallucinate whole slopes of scree and slabs of rock, not a growing thing for miles--which is exactly what there is. Thin air and a high wind, exhaustion, nose-bleeds, sore throats from the Sahara dust, but plod on, plod on.
I’ve never been so glad to collapse into a warm tent, to get out of the wind and scoff a Penguin biscuit. I’m asleep in seconds, delirious. I could have slept for a week, but we take five minutes. There were other teams not far behind. Lester starts getting antsy (quite rightly) about moving on, so we drag ourselves out into the wind and cold. [then continue as before] As a team we make it through, but behind us plenty of competitors were pulled off with altitude sickness.
The navigation has gone well until this night, and we have our most serious ‘geographical embarrassment’. We find ourselves half way up a cliff of Morocco’s most crumbly rock, barely daring to move. We wait it out until dawn, sitting upright in our bags, fearing that all the other teams in the event will pass us. The New Zealanders will definitely be ahead. Of course, when the light comes, we see that we only need have gone another three hundred yards and we’d have been ok.
Day SevenWe’re down off the real heights and walking a ridge-top. At a checkpoint, there’s a message from the New Zealanders, now ahead, to say that it’ll be ‘a cold day in hell before we catch them up.’ They’re a few hours ahead, but still not out of range. To our amusement, we catch up with them at the bike changeover, at midnight on the seventh day. They apologize. The message was for someone else.
Unpacking and assembling the bike is like a Krypton Factor test. Which way does the left pedal screw out on the wrong side of the crank? But in 50 minutes we have them built and checked off. The bike staff wave us off, saying that we should be able to make it in about twenty-four hours. Normally this would be all right, but we’ve just spent a week burning the excess fat off our backsides. A day perched on bone and gristle turns out to be a bruising experience...
Riding on headtorches and odometers, we follow a landrover track that weaves along a valley wall, the sound of a river crashing far below. Sometimes the surface is rocks, elsewhere it is compacted sand with a dune running down the middle. More than once the sand grabs my front wheel and dumps me, but it doesn’t matter much--we’re doing less than ten miles an hour and I manage to flip over onto my rucksack before I hit the ground.
To be honest, I was so tired, and mesmerized by the red flashing lights of the other bikes, that I can’t remember what sort of countryside we went through. I found it curious that I was riding over so many broomhandles, in a country where they can barely afford brooms, until I worked out that it was rocks pinging off the spokes. I’ll leave the description to Bas:
‘The trail was single-width piste that followed a steep-sided gorge with semi-arid vegetation, dipping down to the cultivated terraces below. It took the teams out of the high mountains and down to the plains. It wasn’t overly technical, but it was a good, hard ride and a really good look at Morocco.’
The sleep monster strikes again, making its usual call at 4.30 am. Rather than fall off the edge of the path (as one Finnish woman did, tumbling forty-five feet down a slope, though miraculously not injuring herself too badly), we decide to bed down, the four of us in bivvi bags again.
The Eighth Day
At dawn we wake in a pine forest with a long descent before us. We spend the day chasing the New Zealanders, through villages, over salt flats, peaks, plains and palm groves. At each checkpoint we find that they’re a few minutes ahead. Then, as dusk approaches we run them to ground. We battle for a few hundred yards, trying to get ahead, making decisions too quickly, going wrong, changing places. In the end we meet up and decide to ride the last fifty kilometres together.
They’re in a pretty bad way, as it happens. Bob Foster (the guy who was rolled on by the horse), says he couldn’t understand why the ground was getting steeper in front of him. In fact his neck has given up and his head is dropping forward. So he’s ridden most of the mountain-bike section with only one hand on the handlebars, using the other to hold up his chin. Uncomfortable or what? But then, most people would have given in after they had been rolled on by a horse, to be honest.
The organisers don’t pull any punches on a course like this and they keep us thinking and navigating right down to the line. We twist and turn through a dusty palm grove which seems to go on for ever. But finally, after following a canal for twelve kilometres we come out onto hardtop. Relief.
We’re on the way in now, to the finish line. The road is good, so the eight of us set up a pace line and tank it--there’s not many places in Africa where you’d dare to do that in the middle of the night. For the last fifteen kilometres we have an escort and we race beneath the palm trees and city walls of Marrakesh. We come into the mechouar, the royal parade ground, and weave through the city streets beneath the battlements, guided everywhere by policemen with cyalume sticks. Just like the Tour de France, except that it was at about a third of the speed.
To add insult to injury, or at least to his sore neck, Bob gets a puncture. He has to run in the last half mile, still holding up his chin... The eight of us cross the finish line together after seven days, fourteen hours and 30 minutes, equal fifth.
With cries of ‘Yes!’ and balled fists we punch the air. To be fair we weren’t expecting to place as high as this--top ten was the goal--but an honest pace and not much wasted time has done us well. We even win a bit prize money. There’s a first. And now, all important--as much drink and sleep as we want. And food, what we can cram past chapped lips and ulcered tongues. To think, I won’t have to eat an energy bar ever again--or for another year at least.
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