So after the longest and greatest bus ride I have ever had we were finally at the starting line in Mezouga, Morocco.  We were set up with some pretty solid tents and a decent buffet which are things we would definitely take for granted later on.

It was a bit of a free for all on picking a tent but in the end they were all the same but personally we wanted to get far away from the Scottish guy who snored like a chainsaw on steroids.

After a decent and very sober nights sleep everyone woke up and we were presented with our bikes.

Now, many people on this trip had never driven a motorcycle and a few have never operated anything with a manual transmission before.  In order to counter this The Adventurists gave everyone a few hours to screw around in the desert with their bikes which is probably enough time to learn the important things right…?

That said, driving these monkey bikes around the desert is perfect training, you can run into a dune a 50 kph and feel nothing after flipping into the sand.  Which I did try multiple times.  It also adequately hyped everyone.  There was racing, impromptu competitions, wipe outs, and posing with camels.

Also it was super easy to pull accidental wheelies here…

That said I had a ton of sand inside my crevices and the showers were cold so it was just going to have to live there.

Since I couldn’t shower a few of us “stole” the bikes for a few more hours of dune riding which is what I will call the driving now because it sounds awesome.

After the “training” there was a party where we all saw our first beer in…well like 12 hours but it felt longer…typing it out it sounds a lot less desperate than it seemed at the time…

Anyway, we partied the night away which I don’t have many pictures of except this weird gathering where we were trying to decide the finish line location.

And this shot of the performers which we soon after took over for and showed them some sweet dance moves.

Now, the next entry will be the first day of the actual run, which was insane and I’m excited about now that we got the preamble stuff out of the way.  Trust me, it gets awesome.