The next day’s riding brought more desolate, Moon-like landscape and I think we may have seen more camels than people. At a service station somewhere North of Dakhla I noticed Laas talking to an official-suited-man while I was checking over my bike.
After a while they came over and the gentleman asked me the usual where-are-you-going, where-are-you-from type questions, unusually in good English. He casually mentioned he had a friend at the border, and he and Laas wrote down each other’s names, and I didn’t think much more about it.
I thought my clutch was a bit heavy when we had stopped, but that evening slowing the bike down the lever became unusably stiff, and by the time we had found somewhere to camp was totally stuck. I realized it was the oil. I had had a long conversation with Peter at Bikershome (quite the conspiracy theorist) about using car engine oil in motorbikes. Motorbike-specific oil isn’t available in Morocco, and Peter had said he’d never paid any attention, and for more than thirty years had been putting whatever car oil in his bikes and never had a problem with a clutch.
I had assumed you just couldn’t get a modern enough car oil with the additives which disable motorbike clutches in Morocco – not that it was an urban myth created and perpetuated by oil companies to sell slightly higher priced oil to Western motorcyclists (as Peter did).
So we were both wrong.
While Laas and I cooked dinner it got dark, and my engine cooled to a touchable heat.
I put on my head-torch and un-changed my oil in the dark.
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