21 January 2008

While the rest of us were munching on mince pies over the festive period, Northmavine man Ernie Moritz was racing across north Africa to raise money for a Scottish children’s hospice. In the first of two articles, Ernie tells Gavin Morgan about his out of the ordinary Christmas and New Year.

BIKING adventurer Ernie Moritz is now safely back in mainland Europe following his hair raising 5,200 mile charity trip from Shetland to the Sahara desert.

He arrived on the tip of north Africa on Christmas Eve, his nerves creeping up on him and with no idea where to stay that first night on the continent. The 28 year old drove around the Spanish enclave of Ceuta for hours looking for a hotel, his overloaded KTM 990 bike overheating in traffic jams.

In his desperation he gave two litres of fuel to two “dodgy looking men” pushing a scooter, in the hope they could find him a hotel with safe parking. It soon became apparent that they wanted more than petrol, so he gave them 10 euros as well.

“I felt pretty mad that I had been ripped off after stopping to help someone and give them free fuel. Later I went out to have a beer in the town, but didn’t feel safe,” he said. “I ended up having a beer in my room and lit a candle in remembrance of friends and family who are no longer with us, a tradition of my late father. I still do it every Christmas Eve.”

On Christmas Day he set off with a spare Pirelli tyre over his shoulder, seeking the frontier to “get the hell out of this nasty little enclave”. Ceuta has a 30 million euro, 10 foot high razor wire fence that separates it from Morocco to stop illegal immigrants and smuggling.

Again he had to pay for help to get through border control, which took two and a half hours. After struggling through swathes of asylum seekers swarming around the fence he motored off towards Tangiers.

Surprisingly, as he drove along a half built African mountain highway covered with mud, grit and a huge boulder washed down from the steep slopes, his nerves settled. “If your side of the road looked better than the other half, on coming drivers would head right for you. I wasn’t nervous at all, it seemed somehow normal. I just laughed and pulled in more.”

At a tollbooth he met two Spanish men, David and Alex, on BMW GS bikes. After a brief moment of mutual admiration of each other’s machines they told him to follow them towards the Moroccan capital of Rabat.

From the capital the three drove the 226 mile distance to the ancient city of Marrakech. “Words and pictures could not describe it, it has to be experienced. It was much the same as Arabia, but there was so much more colour,” he said

In Marrakech, the Spaniards’ met up with their girlfriends who rode pillion as the party headed east to the Atlas Mountains the following day.

The welcome the party received was at times as rough as the terrain, but not always. One aggressive local man threw a rock at them, though fortunately no one was hit.

Later, as his Spanish friends sped ahead on their much faster vehicles, Ernie found himself alone in the dark travelling along a “really bad” road lined with bicycles that had no lights. After stopping to take directions from a trucker he offered a robed man a cigarette. The man turned out to be a local Muslim priest or imam. “If looks could kill I’d be dead. I may as well have offered him a whisky to go along with it.”

Luckily, he managed meet up again with his companions for a night of partying with the locals. The next day riding into a valley down a gorge, the travellers came across a hillside mud village that lay across a broken down bridge and was definitely not on any tourist routes.

On arrival they were mobbed by local children who were told to clear off by an old Berber man. “We took some photos, but I felt very tense. There were too many rocks lying about for my liking and over a hundred sets of eyes all staring at us. I was thinking ‘no fast movements and remain calm’.”

It turned out that the old man, Mohammed, was very friendly and invited them to his hut introducing them to his wife, mother, father and their three young children, and offering the a bowl of their traditional vegetable dish Tagine that had a hunk of goat meat in the middle. “The taste was out of this world and it had all come from his garden and goats, apart from the onions, so we were told.

“I’m not sure if his children went hungry that day, but the whole experience was so different. I felt like an alien from another planet. It was somehow emotional for me and I could not believe the hospitality.

“It made a nice change from the sob story beggars of the towns.”

They spent that night in Tinerhir, his seventh on the African leg of his journey and the first warm one, thanks to the heater in his hotel room.

Ernie left his Spanish companions on New Year’s Eve. Feelings of loneliness were already creeping up on him as he set off on the next stage of his long journey south west to Zagora where many more surprising experiences awaited him.

“We said our goodbyes surrounded by kids begging for cigarettes and water.”

Ernie took on this intense challenge for the Rachel House children’s charity in Perthshire. If anyone wishes to donate to or find out more about this worthy cause visit www.justgiving.com/erniemoritz