The journey from near Midelt to Imilchil turned into our most challenging day ever! There are lots of washed out bits of the road, but where it got really interesting was a few kilometers after Tounfit, not long after the piste from the Cirque de Jaffar joined our "road". I think this is part of MH1. We came into a river valley where a lot of the road had been washed away, but were going well until we ran out of road/track completely and had to go through the river bed. About 1km in an an hour, and 3 very hairy river crossings later things got better, but we did spend some time in there debating whether we'd be able to go on or have to turn back - the challenge is not knowing what it's like further on. River must've been over 40cm deep in places as the water went over the top of Tony's bike boots, with some even deeper potholes to watch out for. The trike was OK, but the trailer has small wheels and nothing like as much ground clearance - we think it may have been floating at one point.

The upside was absolutely stunning scenery and some entertaining encounters with locals on horses and donkeys. At one point we had a couple of lovely Berber ladies on horses laughing away at the sight of us emptying water out of our boots and wringing socks out. We did only meet people on foot or horseback for a fair stretch, which should have given us some clues in hindsight! Wet feet at 2,600m was not ideal...

4WD would have no probs getting through. Decent off-road bikes would be fine but fun. Road bikes or cars would most probably not make it. We always travel a lot slower on the trike than on bikes, but even so it took us about 7 hours from start to finish. That did include stopping in Boumia for fuel, water, and a treat of our first ice creams since leaving the coast for the desert a month ago though!

We later discovered that we had taken the ancient road, which is not maintained. Locals in vehicles use an alternative route which is more navigable, but I'm not sure where that is - apparently we should have taken a different fork in the road at some point.

This is the route we took and where the road first ran out:

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