Draft — Jay Austin
A while back I wrote a kinda-sorta review of the Salsa Marrakesh, a bike I didn't yet own. "Here are the bikes we'll be pedaling around the world" was the gist of it. "Here's why we chose them." It wasn't a very hands-on review.
For one reason or another, the dark magic of the web pushed that post up and up in search results. Google "Salsa Marrakesh," and it'll be like the fifth or sixth hit. It gets some traffic.
After twelve months on the road, we've gotten to know our Salsa Marrakeshes pretty well. It seems like a good time to update that review. Here are my thoughts.
This is my bicycle.
It's a 2016 Salsa Marrakesh. The flat bar version, back when Salsa was making flat bar Marrakeshes, but converted to a drop bar for a few complicated-and-not-entirely-relevant reasons. Stock frame, stock rims (WTB i19) and hubs (Shimano XT) and spokes (Swiss DT), stock brakes (Avid BB7s) and gearset (Shimano Deore). The rest of the parts have been swapped out:
Tires: Salsa lists the Marrakesh as coming with Schwalbe 700c x 40mm Marathons, but both my bike and Lauren's were being sold with Panaracer tires. Either way, we wanted something that could handle gravel roads a little better, so we started our trip with brand new 700c x 50mm Schwalbe Marathon Mondials.
Saddle: As a vegan, I didn't want a leather saddle (nor one that couldn't really get wet). I switched to the Brooks Cambium C17 Carved. It doesn't look comfortable, but it is.
Seatpost: I took the saddle from my other bike, one with a nice chrome seatpost, so I just brought that with it. No reason other than it's shinier.
Rack: I'll talk about this more below, but we were both underwhelmed by the weight rating of the stock rack. We already owned much beefier Tubus Logo racks, so we fit those on instead.
Handlebars: I bought my Marrakesh with a flat bar but knew that I wanted to swap it out for drop bars from the start. I didn't love the look of Salsa's flared Cowchipper bars, and knew that Lauren (who still uses them) had trouble rolling her Marrakesh into her narrow-doored DC apartment without smacking them into the doorframe. I chose a pair of Ritchey handlebars that I'm happy with.
Shifters: Coming from a flat bar, I needed new shifters. The Microshifts that come stock on the drop bar Marrakesh seemed good. I put them on the downtube where they're not in the way.
And a few add-ons:
Basket: Every respectable touring bike needs a basket. We're both riding with a Klickfix Mini.
Bottle cages : I have five: a basic cage on the bottom of the downtube (for a one-liter bottle), a sideload cage on the top of the downtube (for a one-liter bottle; currently rigged up with a hair tie to hold a wide-mouth one-liter Nalgene), an adjustable cage on the seat tube (used to hold my Nalgene; now holds a 750-milliliter thermos), and two oversized cages on the fork (in Africa these each held a two-liter soda bottle; since Europe they've each carried a 6.5-liter plastic jug filled with food or occasionally water).
Odds and ends: Front light, back light, cable lock, kickstand, panniers. I had a bell but it died in a bike crash in Zambia.
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This is Lauren's bicycle.
It's a 2016 Salsa Marrakesh, but the drop bar version. It's fairly similar, though with fewer modifications. Lauren swapped out her rack (for a Tubus Logo), tires (for Schwalbe Marathon Mondials, 700c x 50mm) and saddle (for a Brooks Cambium C17 Women's Carved). She traveling with the same basket and roughly the same set of bottle cages and odds and ends.
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Here's what I like about my bicycle.
It's pretty much up for anything short of full-on mountain biking, and it can carry a whole lot. Specifically:
So many braze-ons.
We knew we'd be traveling long distances through deserts and mountains and great plains. Eyelets for bottle cages was a must.
For reasons I just don't understand, the Surly Long Haul Trucker (the Marrakesh's main competitor, though both brands are actually owned by the same company, and the go-to touring bike for years) really skimps on eyelets. The Marrakesh does not. In addition to the standard two within the frame's triangle, our bikes can fit another bottle cage on the underside of the downtube, plus, very importantly, two bottle cages on the fork. That affords capacity for another three to five liters (once or twice, I've carried an extra fourteen by filling my front jugs with water) over the Long Haul Trucker.
Sure, front braze-ons aren't that important if you're traveling with a front rack. But if your bike can handle oversized bottle cages on the fork, a front rack isn't so necessary.
Good tire clearance.
We're currently riding on 50mm (2") tires, and they fit just fine (without fenders). There's a small bit of additional clearance on each side, but you probably couldn't go much wider. Two-inch tires, for us, has been more than enough to handle the terrain we've covered.
Great disc brakes.
The Salsa Marrakesh is the first bike I've owned with disc brakes, so I wasn't sure what to expect. They've been just wonderful. Better braking performance than rim brakes, better handling in bad weather, and much easier to adjust. Our Avid BB7s have led us safely down dozens of mountain passes, and at the time of writing—one year and over ten thousand kilometers in—I'm still on my first pair of brake pads (we changed Lauren's out after maybe eight thousand kilometers of riding due to a few busted retaining clips).
It's worth noting that the new (2018) Salsa Marrakesh no longer comes with Avid BB7s. I can't comment on the Hayes brakes Salsa's replaced them with.
Lots of gears for the world's many ups and downs.
The stock Shimano Deore nine-speed (11-32) cassette and the stock Shimano Deore 48/38/24t crankset make a great pair for loaded touring. Traveling with about fifteen kilograms of gear each and maybe another five or ten kilograms of food and water and fuel, it's enough to get us up 12% grades; anything higher becomes a real slog. We're not all too interested on going very, very fast, so I don't think I've ever been in my top gear. Whenever our cassettes wear out, we'll probably replace them with 12-36 sprockets for just a little more reach into the lowest gear.
A kickstand plate (and spare spoke mount).
Lots of touring bikes (like the Long Haul Trucker) don't come with kickstand plates. And so lots of people decide that kickstands are stupid and unnecessary. They either lean their bikes against buildings and trees or lay them on the ground or buy a Clickstand, which is a clever but tedious workaround to something that should just come standard on touring bicycles.
Kickstands are very useful. You may survive without one, but you'll never regret having one if your bike will support it. Lauren and I both use basic, single-legged Greenfield kickstands and probably engage them ten to twenty times per day. It took us a few weeks to learn how to make it work without having the bikes fall over, and sure, they definitely get knocked down in a strong gust every now and again, but we still love them. I wouldn't really travel without one. The plate itself is well-built and has survived plenty of bike weight and many bike topples.
(The spare spoke mount is a cute little feature. Unnecessary but fun. The mount can fit three spokes but our bikes each came with just two. Salsa may be getting stingy with spokes nowadays.)
It's steel.
We've taken the bikes on boats and trains and planes and buses and ridden them hard and our frames show almost no sign of wear, spare a little paint damage here and there. No dents, no bends, no cracks. Steel is stronger than carbon fiber, absorbs vibrations much better than aluminum, and in a pinch, can be welded in just about any village the world over.
Here's what I don't like about my bicycle.
I had a few complaints about the Marrakesh before I even bought it. These have mostly held true. They're minor gripes, but worth mentioning.
Ready-to-ride isn't so great.
Salsa sells the Marrakesh as a world touring bike that's ready to ride around the planet right out of the shop. And this is pretty much true. For someone starting from scratch, it's a really great bundle of parts for a really good value. It comes with a rack, it comes with touring tires, it even comes with a name-brand saddle. Everything but the pedals, panniers, and bottle cages.
Ready-to-ride makes a lot of sense for urban commuters and BMXers and beach cruisers, maybe. But touring is a long game. People are different and places are different and requirements are different. Not everyone needs or wants 40mm tires, or the standard Brooks saddle (which, by the way, is a men's saddle made for a male's anatomy, which kinda-sorta leaves female customers stuck deciding between riding a saddle that's probably going to cause some problems or selling it to someone who can use it for a steep discount; also, it's not vegan, which leaves vegans like myself in a similar situation).
Or that rack. I'm still baffled by Salsa's decision to sell a world touring bike with an aluminum, 15-kilogram-weight-limit rack bolted to the back of it. We're traveling fairly light, and even our gear exceeds that on a good day. The Salsa Alternator can probably handle a little more weight, but even so, when an aluminum rack breaks it's kinda-sorta toast. The (chromoly steel) Tubus Logo Evo racks we opted for instead (pricey but so worth it) are rated for 40 kilograms.
Even swapping things out for a few new parts, the Marrakesh is still an excellent value. I was lucky enough to trade everything I didn't want (rack, seatpost, saddle, shifters, tires) back to my local bike shop at fifty-percent-off-retail in store credit. It was still cheaper to do this and buy the new parts than build the bike from the frame up. But for me, and for Lauren, and maybe for you, it means you're buying a bike with several hundreds of dollars of pretty nice stuff that might not be perfect for you. It'd be nice if Salsa, like its competition, outfitted the bike with cheap tires, a cheap saddle, and no rack, and left upgrades to the consumer.
The wheels have had a few uh-ohs.
Our bikes have had almost no troubles. If you're curious, there's a full list of all the troubles they've had a little further down. A number of those issues have been with the stock wheels they came with.
Specifically: three busted spoke nipples (two on my bike, one on Lauren's) and one very cracked rim. The broken nipples were no big deal and we fixed them pretty easily, but my cracked rim was a surprise, because I'm not carrying all that much weight on the back, I ride fairly gently, and the rims (WTB i-19s) are supposed to be pretty hefty.
I called Salsa and they passed the buck to WTB, the rim manufacturer. To WTB's credit, they were really, really helpful in getting a replacement, covered under warranty, shipped from their international plant in Europe to us in Italy. The European factory didn't even make the 36-spoke rim I needed, so they drilled it custom and sent it out express.
Neither Salsa nor WTB would cover the cost of building that wheel—all I got, to be clear, was a new rim. So I read a few articles and learned how to transfer the old spokes and old hub to the new rim (not too difficult) and did it all myself.
So, if you're taking off on a long tour on a Marrakesh, it may be good to know how to pull the rim tape off a wheel and replace spoke nipples. Just in case.
The decals have grown on me, but not that much.
Salsa likes their decals. Big and plentiful. There's a large Salsa splashed on the down tube, a Marrakesh and series of constellations on the top tube, a compass on the fork, and an ADVENTURE BY BIKE on the chain stay.
I think they're a little ugly. If they were on top of the clear coat (like Surly decals), I'd yank them off. But they're not, so I just learn to live with them.
And, if you're really curious, here's a full list of things that have gone wrong.
This list isn't a criticism of the Marrakesh. Take any bike on a long tour and it's going to have some problems. All of these issues we fixed ourselves, with a pretty small toolkit and spare parts (plus the replacement rim). But, if they're things that happened to our bikes, they're things that may happen to your bike. Maybe things to prepare for. So here they are (current as of 11.5 months into our trip).
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For anyone curious: yes, a Tubus rack can fit onto a Salsa Marrakesh.
I've gotten many, many emails this past year from folks who heard a rumor that only a Salsa rack can fit on a Salsa Marrakesh. I get it. I was one of those folks. I heard that rumor.
So, for the record: yes, a Tubus rack can fit onto a Salsa Marrakesh. Here. See for yourself:
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A few caveats. First and foremost, it's going to sit a little higher up. It'll leave a few inches of space underneath the rack. Your panniers will have a slightly (probably imperceptibly) higher center of gravity. It make look strange, if you're really, really paying attention.
Second, you may need to get new rack stays. Mine fit just fine, but Lauren's came up at a steep angle from the rack mounts to the rack (on account of the rack sitting higher). Our local bike shop gave her a few spare stays, cut them to fit, and they've worked just fine ever since.
Third, they bolt into the brake on one side and into just the eyelet on the other side. The bolts you use may need to be different lengths. You may need a few spacers.
Finally, your mileage may vary. Don't buy this bike based on my promise that the rack is going to fit. All that I can promise is that Tubus Logo rear racks have been bolted to our Salsa Marrakeshes for a full year (and reassembled several times after flights), and they're carrying our stuff just fine. If you have any questions about this that these photos can't answer, drop a comment at the bottom of this post and we'll try to help.
After a year on the bike, I'm plenty happy with the Salsa Marrakesh.
It's a good bike. A really good bike. I don't have anything new or novel to say about it since the last review a year ago: the features that made us pick them have been great, and the things we didn't really love to begin with are still minor gripes. One year and ten thousand kilometers in, the bikes are still going strong. We'll check in on them again in another ten thousand.
Until then, here are a few more photos of the Marrakesh out in the world:
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