Cycling Tours in Marrakech: Pikala Bikes
Go on a Pikala bike tour and you’ll see parts of the city that other visitors never reach & support a vital social enterprise. We sat down with founder Cantal Bakker
There’s only one question to ask someone who packed up their life aged 24 to start a cycling revolution in a country they’d visited just once: what made you do it?
Cantal Bakker starts to laugh.
‘You have to be a little bit naive in the start and then you just do not let go,’ she says.
And she certainly hasn’t.
In the eight years since Bakker set up the Pikala Bike project from a rented riad in Marrakech, the social enterprise she founded has grown to employ 45 young people, teach 650 women to cycle, educate 23,000 children on road safety and host cycling events and tours for 400,000 people.
HOW PIKALA BIKE TOURS IN MARRAKECH BEGAN
It all started, as it so often does, with a holiday that became more.
In December 2014, Bakker visited Marrakech for the first time and found the city overwhelming.
‘It was the culture, the movement, the getting around,’ she says. ‘I just couldn’t connect with the city or the people. So on the second day of my trip, I decided to try exploring by bike, escape the city centre to see another side of Marrakech. And that is where it all began.’
Bakker however had to search hard to find a bike to rent because cycling is not yet embedded into Moroccan culture, particularly in urban areas filled with cars and scooters. It means that cycling infrastructure – from lanes on the road network to shops where to buy and rent them – is limited. But Bakker persisted, found a bike to rent and once she did, her whole experience of Marrakech changed.
‘People were waving, chatting to me, and I discovered beautiful places where there were no tourists,’ she says. ‘I felt like I’d got into the rhythm and heartbeat of the city.
‘The bike was like a secret key to let Marrakech reveal itself and I knew I had to share it. Plus I could see the social challenges in Morocco: a young population, low education opportunities, high unemployment. And also of course the environmental implications in a city packed with cars and scooters.
‘That was the wheel that started to turn in my head while I was on holiday.’
Founder Cantal Bakker & the Pikala hub
Having a holiday dream is one thing. How do you then make it a reality?
At the time, Bakker was working in event management in the Netherlands. But she’d already discovered the potential of cycling as a vehicle of social inclusion when she’d volunteered to teach cycling for a refugee organisation. And once she returned home, she couldn’t get Marrakech out of her head.
‘You go back home with this crazy idea and you’re scared because it’s like jumping into a dark hole,’ she says. ‘And the most scary thing is facing the idea and saying it out loud.
‘When I told my mum I was going to Morocco to start a bicycle project and promote social mobility, she told me that I didn’t know the language, the culture or anyone there so I wasn’t going. That’s what almost everyone I knew said.
‘But the city had got under my skin. And while there is so much absence in Morocco, I could also feel a freedom, almost a playground to initiate new things. Plus I wanted to get deep into the local culture, understand the needs of the next generation.’
The one person who supported Bakker’s dream was her partner Erik Van Heijningen.
‘We’d only just got together when I told Erik that I was moving but he was the only person who told me I could do it. Of course I wondered what I was doing leaving this man but luckily we found a flow to keep together.’
In January 2016, Bakker shipped a container of second hand bikes from the Netherlands and got on a flight to Marrakech where she rented a small riad in Bab Doukkala. Word soon spread, as she started doing road safety lessons with local kids.
Within months though, Bakker would get the opportunity to transform her fledgling social enterprise into something far bigger.
GROWING PIKALA FROM IT’S EARLY ROOTS
In November 2016, Marrakech hosted COP 22 and money was pumped into projects as the city filled with thousands of politicians, diplomats and climate activists.
‘It was a game changer for me because I could finally show all the ideas I had,’ says Bakker. ‘I’d been funding everything myself until then but suddenly got sponsorship from companies like DHL and Decathlon so Pikala could start offering free bike repairs for locals and do our first bike tours through the medina. Everything changed because we were suddenly growing.’
Once COP was over, Bakker convinced Marrakech City Council to give Pikala a space to work from. An old garage on Riad Larousse, just five minutes from El Fenn, was transformed into a base for the cycling tours which are guided by young local people, as well as a cafe and bike repair shop where people can either get bikes fixed or be trained in how to do their own repairs.
Further vital funding also came from the Tui Care Foundation and Pikala now also operates in Agadir while expansion to Rabat is planned for October 2024. All this means that Pikala is now completely financially self-sustainable.
Sounds easy right? Of course not.
Bakker says integrating a social project in a different cultural context has been tough at times.
‘I had big problems explaining that we were there to support in the beginning,’ she says. ‘Local people didn’t see any need to promote cycling, the authorities were interested in self-driving vehicles, big data and smart cities, and the tourism industry didn’t think that visitors would want to cycle here.
‘Together it all meant that I had to adapt in many ways, particularly socially and culturally. You come with a mindset and everything is so different to what you know so I had to work out how to blend in and find a balance between business, progress and innovation.’
Throughout it all, Van Heijningen has remained based in the Netherlands working remotely alongside Bakker on planning, communications and logistics. And together they have created something that has reached far beyond Bakker’s initial idea.
‘I could never have imagined the impact we’ve had,’ she says. ‘The diversity of our staff, the interactions between them and the people who cycle with us, the health and happiness of the kids we teach. It’s a beautiful positive kind of tourism that’s created when we bring locals in touch with tourists.
Pikala is a short walk from El Fenn. If you are staying with us, we’d highly recommend a Pikala Bike Tour as a unique and supportive way to get to know Marrakech. If you are looking for other fun things to do in Marrakech, take a look here.
