Paris Dakar rest day #6 – Fez

Our 6th rest day was October 5, 2023. After a hard pair of stages, I decided to have a real rest day in Fez. It’s the second largest city in Morocco, is 1250 years old and has over a million people. There’s a lot to see but I needed to just chill out and relax instead of running around a hot, noisy city. I had breakfast with some of the riders in the hotel, then spent a long time unfruitfully working on a problem we have since entering Morocco: our Garmin bike computers no longer show us elevation/climb data. I think the climb screens are just something that we all took for granted and now that they’re missing, the climbs feel longer and harder. At least for me. Anyway, I tried various ways of regenerating the maps but failed to get it working. No big deal, as long as we have navigation with maps, we are good.

The WiFi is great here and I had excellent long video chats with Beau in Japan and Katie at home. I hung out, had a nap, chatted a little, then went out to dinner in the old town with Wytze, Daniel, Bart, Jan and Willi. We ate in a cool little Moroccan restaurant – I had delicious soup and fish with tomato.

Afterward we walked through the old town (Medina). It’s an endless labyrinth of narrow walkways with thousands of little shops. It’s interesting and dirty and actually a bit repetitive. We tried a couple of desserts and had a glass of fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice. The Argan oil vendors tried very hard to sell to us but weren’t successful.

We took a taxi back which dropped us off at an ice-cream shop and bakery across the big street from our hotel. The bakery part looked like it was in France and the ice-cream was good. Wytze and I talked to Andrew for a while – he looks and sounds great, and is starting the road to recovery, but we all wish it had turned out differently.