Of course I wanted an awesome souvenir. Morocco was a brand-spanking-new-for-me country. Since it’s full of awesome stuff like indigenous pottery, spices, metalwork, and leather goods (not to mention the one highly dubious stall in the Medina of Marrakech that was selling baby eagles and owls and (poorly) taxidermied lizards), it’s not surprising I came home with my most unique souvenir yet from a trip abroad.

Unfortunately, just because it’s my most unique souvenir ever doesn’t mean it’s my best souvenir ever. In fact, I’d go so far as to call the set of x-rays taken at a Marrakech clinic — of a collarbone I broke into four pieces within five minutes of starting a mountain bike ride on day four of my eight-day trip —  my worst souvenir ever. But at least it comes with a good tale to tell.

Intrigued Stranger: That’s some scar on your shoulder. What’d you do?

Me: Oh, I was mountain biking. In Morocco.

(Full disclosure: For the few people not impressed enough by this, I might have brought a few camels into the tale. And a snake charmer.)

Having sworn off mountain biking numerous times in the last few years for various reasons, I should have more strongly resisted the suggestion that I engage in this sport while in Morocco researching articles about fit foodie vacations (check back on the Chi blog next week to read all about that). Especially after realizing my “guide” didn’t really speak English and that three days in-country hadn’t been quite long enough for me to pick up either Arabic or French.

But no, I was in the foothills of the High Atlas Mountains and rearing to go. Mr. Guide said “Easy” and pointed at a singletrack sidehilling trail. It looked anything but easy to me but I stubbornly — why did I feel it necessary to prove my athletic abilities to this stranger? — followed. After all, I’m not a total putz on a mountain bike. (Just a moderate one.) And I routinely do century road rides. And I had been stuffing my face with food for three days in a row. Really, how hard could a trail designed for the masses be?

Well, within five seconds, as I was ragdolling down a 45-degree scree slope (perhaps also being chased by a herd of feral camels), I realized it could be quite hard, in the most literal senses of the word.

At first, I didn’t think I had done any major damage. My left leg and arm had some nice scrapes. Throbs indicated future areas of bruising. My left shoulder hurt, so I swung it windmill-style a few times to loosen it up. Unsettling grinding, clunking, and crunching noises indicated it was plenty loose.

I had never broken my collarbone, but the obscene fuss it was now making — along with the giant bump threatening to poke out through my skin — made me pretty sure I just had.

Four-some hours later, a date with the world’s second-oldest x-ray machine at a clinic back in Marrakech (I met the world’s oldest x-ray machine several years ago after a minor car crash in Bulgaria) confirmed my self-diagnosis.

While my collarbone might have been broken, neither my spirit nor my stubbornness was. I wasn’t about to let a shattered collarbone send me all the way back across the Atlantic after a mere four days. And I wasn’t about to let the clinic keep me overnight, which is what they wanted to do.

“No way in hell,” seems able to cross any language barrier. “Painkillers” and “narcotics” seem not to translate however. Three doctors over the next four days gave me nothing more than Tylenol.

Twittering, Facebooking and blogging through the entire experience, even posting my x-rays on my FB page, friends were in agreement that the situation sucked. But that it would make for an even awesomer story if I were to have it operated on in Morocco. Umm, yeah…  for the two weeks I’d be alive to tell the tale before being killed by some bizarre infection.

Propped up in the clinic bed, emailing my orthopedics-inclined husband by hunting and pecking at my laptop keyboard with my right hand, which had been battered by several attempts to get an IV going, we scheduled surgery for one week into the future. When I would be back in the U.S.

I can’t say that, had I known I would have to get through the second half of the trip sans narcotics I would have agreed to stay.

But I survived and was wheeled into an operating room the morning after my return, exactly a week after I had taken my tumble. I was home on my couch by that afternoon, narcotics — sweet, sweet narcotics — in hand, a steel plate with eight screws on my left clavicle, a wound that will heal into a five-inch scar and be a souvenir I carry with me for the rest of my life, one of the more colorful mountain biking wreck tales I’ve heard to tell, and a plan to return to Morocco already forming in my head. The hiking in the High Atlas is amazing. And don’t even get me started on what I’ve heard about the hut-to-hut skiing just outside Marrakech.

DINA MISHEV is a randonee skier, cyclist and hiker who, in February 2009, set the world record for the most vertical feet skied uphill by a woman in 24 hours. She is a category-3 road cyclist who consistently places top 5 in the longest single-day road race in the country… {more »}

Related Chi: Tajine, Please — With a Side of Trekking