Cycling from Moulay Idriss Zerhoun to Meknes

Reaching one of the four King's Cities

2019-05-13

I left Moulay Idriss Zerhoun and more or less "fell" out of the town. The roads inside this town are Very Steep as you can see at this pictures. I would be in this type of landscape today. More fluently and with less hills. A last view at Moulay Idriss, bye bye and au revoir. My 💥 with the Securitee in the middle of the night in the orchard had forced me to "cycle" through the night to get in Moulay Idriss. So on that day I actually did quite a lot more distance then I had planned too. Which means that today I will only have to cycle the remaining part to Meknes which is just about 25 kms. So I will have a rather easy time since I will be partly descending and so I also will freewheel a lot. I suppose 👌. Then, for the first time in Morocco, my mobile phone connection started to fail. It sounded as if there were birds on the wire ?! storks were blocking (or overruling ?) the signal. They should do that far more often 😉. I was almost there. Was I ? Is it 12, 13 or 213 kms ? Later I found out that it was 12 kms. The 13 is the roadnumber and the 213 is probably to remember which numbers were used haha. Just a shop along the road. At this one you can buy wickerwork. At the edge of Meknes some people were living in a big berbertype tent. I think they use these dromedaries to make a living by taking tourists on their back at the hotspots in town. Meknes is built at a plateau. Which implies that it is situated more high then the surrounding areas 😎. Viewing down the hill that I had to push all the way up and still had to rest a couple of times. Maybe that had to do with the temperature I was in all day while on the bloody hot tarmac. On a touringbicycle you seldom cycle in the shade. The only (!) shade I had today was for some 10 minutes at a tiny busstop were I was lucky to also be in some cooling wind. However, advantage of this climate sweating is that I don't have to pee all day 👍.

Somewhat furtheron this hill I entered the first suburbs of Meknes. There was a shop along the road were I stopped to maybe find something cold to drink. I was lucky then there were 12 (!) menshigh completely filled up refrigerators welcoming me ! Then I was unlucky since only one of them was cooling. The rest had the lights on but not the coolingsystem.

And in that one were only two drinks available which I both don't want. They make me (and you) fat with 1-minute-only calories and one of them even makes you shine at night ! Which is a huge problem if I decide to make a startrial shooting haha.

Why is an entrepeneur not so "clever" to put a mix of all those products in that one cooler that is working ??? That would raise his change of selling something by some 2000% 🙃. I had my first view at the medina and cycled to the hotel. While doing so I was partly riding into traffic since I turned out to be on a oneway street. Meknes has some 530.000 inhabitants so there is much traffic and always something going on. I found the hotel, choose a room at the far end (noise !) and brought my luggage to it. The OnTheRoad 4.0 could rest downstairs in a small kitchen were it would be guarded 24/7 by the porters.

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I had cycled 250 kms through some Middle of Nowhere in Morocco. And now I was in my first King's City !

But would I be a King tomorrow ?

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