I had ridden my motorbike down from the UK, and If you tried to design a less-suitable motorbike for long distance travel than the TriBSA, you would have failed. The engine was a Triumph 650cc twin bored out the 750cc, mounted in a BSA frame. It didn’t have conventional handlebars, instead the controls were mounted low down on the front forks (clip ons) which you reached by lying down on the tank. The conventional foot controls were instead mounted further back (rear sets). The very low and stretched riding position was finished off with a very hard and thin bench seat. The BSA GoldStar RRT2 close ratio gearbox allowed almost 70 mph in first gear which made starting off on hills a bit of a challenge.

I must have been stopped a dozen times in France, Spain and Morocco by the police, not because I was doing anything wrong but they were intrigued with the bike. Even now I remember my explanation, “Le moteur est triomphe, le châssis est bay-ess-ar.”

I was still making trips to Morocco and in August I decided on a longer road trip on the motorbike. The current King of Morocco, Mohammed VI, is highly-regarded and generally loved by Moroccans, but his father, Hassan II couldn’t have been more different. His reign was called ‘the years of lead’ as nothing positive happened. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when the first assassination attempt took place in 1971.

And then on 16 August 1972, Hassan was returning from Paris when his plane was strafed by four F-5 jets of the Moroccan air force, killing eight on board. Hassan reportedly grabbed the radio and told the pilots the King was dead and they stopped their attack. Of course, he wasn’t dead. General Oufkir, the instigator of the plot subsequently ‘was disappeared’ and his family jailed for decades.

Although in Morocco, I knew nothing of this at the time. I was playing tunes with the TriBSA gearbox on a wonderfully smooth and fast blacktop when I came round a corner and saw a roadblock ahead with gun-toting Gendarmes. The bike shuddered to a half just inches from the spikes laid across the road. The whole country was extremely jittery and I travelled at a much slower speed the rest of the trip.

In the 50 years since, I’ve visited Morocco more than 40 times since by plane, car, 4x4 but mostly off-road motorbike with post-retirement trips of six or seven weeks at a time. I did one 14-day trek with mules in the mountains. I also spent eight weeks in Fez learning Arabic. So it’s in my blood and I’ve spent getting on for four years in total in the country.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)