It's the grinning kids with their hands out, high-fiving us as we rumble through, kicking up dust and dirt. We saw them again and again, in remote village after medieval-like town, kilometre after kilometre.
And it's the hairpins. Some so tight it felt like I was turning back on myself, wresting the big BMW F800GS enduro bike up and down and through the corners. The river crossings, the mountain passes with gravel and rocks strewn across every bend, laying in wait like marbles to send me skidding over the edge, down 2,300 metres to my doom. No guardrails anywhere, of course. Terrifying.
When I close my eyes, I can see the snake charmer in the largest traditional market - the souk - in Morocco. Yes, in Marrakech. By Moroccan standards, Marrakech is a booming, bustling city. I say Moroccan standards because Morocco is a developing country. It is, then, a mixture of new and old, of a massive outdoor market and modern luxury hotels, of excellent restaurants and narrow, 16th century alleyways.
Some say Marrakech is the most beautiful town in Morocco. It certainly has one of the busiest squares - the Djemaa el Fna - in Africa and in fact the world. As one of our motorcycle guides put it, the square "boils with smells." We spent hours there on our last night, inhaling the atmosphere, watching the cobras dance, laughing at the comic performers and clowns, listening to the music, the drums, flutes and even guitars.
We ate our last night-time meal at a temporary food stall in the Djemaa el Fna. As a local guide put it, we experienced the "medieval lifestyle." But in the 21st century. Really. To pay for our food, we drew money out of a bank machine just off the Djemaa el Fna. Later, we walked the narrow alleyways with shopkeepers on either side hawking their wares - rugs, shoes, hats, clothes of all sorts, wooden boxes and small daggers.
That was the Friday. On the Monday before, we had other matters to focus the mind. I and a troupe of 12 other Inglourious Basterds were facing a 1,000-kilometre, four-day trek through Morocco. The name seemed apt enough, given that the actor Brad Pitt had been scheduled to ride with us, then cancelled at the last moment.
Our bikes would be a line of BMW GS dual-purpose bikes: four 1200s, the rest 800s, with a pair of 650s thrown in - one for our smallest rider, the other a back-up bike that spent the trip strapped to the bed of a four-by-four pickup driven by Axel. Axel was the doctor imported from Munich to apply the stitches and balm - or perform surgery, if required.
The plan was to circle a remote and mostly high-altitude chunk of the Kingdom of Morocco. About a quarter of the kilometres on unpaved stretches, though the off-roading would consume far more hours and much greater energy. That's the nature of the beast; enduro riding is hard work.
BMW makes its GS bikes just for this stage. The big 1200 is a handful when the going gets really rocky or sandy or steep, so I chose the R800GS instead. Bit smaller, but at 80-plus horsepower it has plenty of jam to get you up and over and through goat paths or worse.
This particular trip had been in the works for seven months. It was the brainstorm of Hendrik von Kunheim, the former president of BMW Canada who now runs BMW AG's Motorrad motorcycle division now. He's a business type, certainly, but an even more passionate motorcycle rider. And competitive.
"I wanted to show these guides, to pass them" he laughed, describing his own trip over the handlebars during a tough, rocky, narrow run up the Tizi-n'Tazazert oass (2,200 m) on day three. Our guides, expert instructors at BMW's Motorrad Enduropark in Hechlingen, Germany, near Munich, were Christian One (with the pony tail), Christian Two (bald) and Manfred (the boss) and they were brilliant. At least compared to me, as inexperienced an enduro rider as a group like this has ever seen.
At the top of the Tizi-n'Tazazert pass we found ourselves staring at a small hotel. A room in this remote place sells for nine euros. We took sweet tea and pressed on.
Irony of the day: After slogging up the mountain in narrow trails with shale and rocks and sand, we felt like heroes. I was elated not to have dropped the bike or to have crashed in any way. Not once, though I was protected in my padded enduro gear and carbon fibre helmet. Then I spotted a local who had done exactly the same ride on a 50-cc Docker city bike, baseball cap on his head, tennis shoes on his feet. Humbling.
Morocco, of course, is a wonder of relative tolerance and stability on an African continent littered with crazy, dangerous, corrupt and incompetent regimes. Unlike, say, Nigeria, which is oil rich, yet the populace is poor and civil wars have killed millions over the past few decades, Morocco does not have abundant natural resource wealth - at least not oil wealth - yet literacy is growing and investors are intrigued.
As we drove into town from the airport, I spotted several billboards for new real estate developments. The face on the billboards doing the pitch: actress Eva Longoria Parker, star of the TV show Desperate Housewives and wife of basketball star Tony Parker. He's French and Morocco once was, too. That explains the billboards.
I saw more of Eva on Day 1 as we headed out of Marrakech for a trip through the High Atlas via Tizi-n-Tichka. As Christian One pointed out, this is a spectacular pass road built by the French and it provided the bulk of the paved riding for the day. The last 45 km were all off-road.
We lunched in a Berber tent, visited a women's co-op where they grind Argan nuts to make oil for sale, and ended the day in Quarzazate, a semi-modern town with two movie studios. The movie business is big in Morocco. Lawrence of Arabia was filmed near Quarzazate, as was Mel Gibson's The Last Temptation of Christ and many other films.
At the end of Day One I typed my notes with sore hands and a bruised ego. Yes, I went straight over the handlebars, into a ditch with the dirt and rocks all around. It was the exclamation point on a long, 11-hour ride, about a quarter of which was pure back country riding. Sand, gravel, stony bits, river crossings - you name it. If you are an enduro pro, an experienced rider, this is the sort of thing you live for.
I am a street rider, unaccustomed to spending hours standing on top of the motorbike's pegs, feathering the clutch, working to be smooth on the throttle, relaxed and consistent. This was all new to me.
Fortunately, Manfred the BMW instructor, gave me a quick trail-side lesson. Just the basics. Naturally, after our last coffee break, I made the classic enduro mistake: I looked down, rather than into the distance to where I wanted to go. Bam! I was on the ground.
If you've done any enduro riding, you know this sort of thing happens all the time. No big deal. It's part of the fun, von Kunheim pointed out, slapping my back. Ha, ha.
Fortunately I had Manfred to help me lift the bike. He then spun and powered my ride out of a hole and back up onto the trail. Without climbing aboard. Jaw-dropping stuff. Then it was back to trails built for donkeys and us.
Day One passed in a blur, but it had its memorable happy moments. As I quickly mentioned, mid-morning we stopped for mint tea - a Moroccan staple - at that women's co-operative that earns its living by grinding down Argan nuts into various oils. By hand. Hour after hour using stone tools. They make use of not just the oil, though. The husks provide fuel for burning and the ground nuts are feed for the livestock. Nothing wasted.
Layla, a lovely 28-year-old who spoke excellent English, told us all the women in the co-op are divorced or widowed. They support themselves with this little business - some 35 or so of them. The mint tea was refreshing. All of us bought something in the co-op store.
Lunch was in a Berber tent and it was delicious - a kind of stewed beef accompanied by potatoes, carrots and cauliflower simmered in Argan oil. We sat under the shade of tents without sides, so the fresh breeze could gently keep us cool. Day One was exhausting and exhilarating and tremendous in very way.
And so it went. Day Two took us through the Draa Valley in a long belt of date palms before we left the pavement and turned north over the Tizi-n'Tazazert. Dirt riding: 70 km out of the 200 km total.
Day Three we headed north into the Gorges du Dades. Slowly as we climbed, the red stones began turning grey and the valley narrowed to a gorge. We pressed on across the Atlas, up to the pass where we drank sweet tea and then down and the return to Quarzazate.
The last day of the ride had no formal off-roading, yet we spent only half the day on good pavement. We rode 280 km up and over and down the Central High Atlas Mountains (2,300 metres). We lunched in the Tassaout Valley at a kind of bed and breakfast. Then it was on to Marrakech and rush-hour traffic. It was the ride of 1,000 switchbacks with 2,000-metre drop-offs looming for fools who make one wrong turn.
The ride over the Central High Atlas range was on a single-lane road - well, kind of a road. Some of it was paved, but many stretches were totally washed out. So it was a long, twisty run of tight switchbacks, up and down, left and right. Every corner - and I mean every corner - had rocks and gravel, paved or not. Yikes! But the scenery was spectacular, and we had it all to ourselves. Jagged rocks, steep peaks, snow patches. A novel taste of Africa.
Not so novel was the poverty. Deep, deep poverty. There is much of it in Africa, of course. Von Kunheim, the Motorrad president, has lived and worked in Africa. Here in some stretches, said von Kunheim, he saw poverty worse than anything he'd seen anywhere else in Africa.
Poor, yes, but the kids in village after village lined the streets, holding out their hands to clap ours as we slowly rode by. They smiled and called to us, excited by their Western visitors and a break from the ordinary. A wonderful kaleidoscope of memories.
And it all wrapped up where it began, in Marrakech. At rush hour on a Friday night. Marrakech traffic flows in its own sort of pattern, with crowded, bustling streets shared by cars - a lot of diesel Peugeots and Mercedes taxis - bicyclists and riders on scooters and small motorcycles. No one, and I mean no one, wears a helmet and none of the cycles, scooters and bikes has a mirror. The local riders? Many wear sandals or flip-flops of various sorts.
As for crashes, I think I managed to drop the bike with varying degrees of seriousness at least seven times. Other than a bit of bruising, no serious injuries. But I did tire of picking up that 200-kg bike, even with help. Once I was alone and had to lift and then drive the bike out of a small river bed to get it back on the trail, upright. Manfred arrived just in time to chuckle and ask me if I needed any help. "Not now," I said, climbing on, before riding away.
A kilometre later we passed through another sea of grinning kids. The sting of that last crash was wiped away by little high-fives. What memories.