“What I don’t want is a weekend surrounded by testosterone charged blokes who’ll make me feel inadequate on a bike” that was my plea to the man from Saddle Skedaddle, organisers of mountain bike holidays.

I must admit, it was the name of the company that caught my eye. It sounded fun.  Adventurous but light hearted, not taking itself too seriously. How I like to see myself I suppose!

The sound is deafening. There are ten of us in the tiny bar, and we’re all yelling at the top of our lungs in the name of “Karaoke”, the national pastime the Japanese use to let their hair down. The bar owner has already had to go next door and apologise to his neighbours for the racket. “HERE WE ARE NOW, ENTERTAIN US”, sing Nirvana, accompanied by a group of very tired but happy Skeddaddlers, celebrating their last night of a fantastic trip.
Scroll back 2 and half weeks and I’m excitedly sat on the plane somewhere above Russia with an air of naivety and expectation, on the way to Osaka.

This superb desert biking adventure focuses on the deep south of Morocco, a land of big skies and stark mountain ranges where mud-brick kasbahs appear to rise up out of the desert, sitting in tranquil palm oases and framed by dramatic backdrops of snowcapped mountains. We ride along Morocco’s dirt roads, taking us from Marrakech to the Tichka Pass, the highest in the High Atlas, and then southward, descending along the Draa Valley to the fringes of the Sahara Desert.