Greetings Hubbers,
Let me tell you how it was back in the day, before the inch-thick Touratech catalog, when you sent postcards not texts (and usually beat them home), when you made your gear out of scrap metal you found in skips, and when you navigated with a rosary, not a GPS. This is the story of my first big motorcycling adventure; a plan to ride across the Sahara to the Ivory Coast on an XT 500.



Southern England, 1982. I was dirt bike crazy and spent every spare hour bouncing my bikes off the scenery just for kicks. Here, after a brilliant day on a Perranporth Beach in Cornwall we got caught by the tide, rode up over the dunes but found ourselves trapped inside an army camp.



The only way out was to do a ‘Steve McQueen’ and jump the gate.



But man cannot live by jumps alone - he needs an adventure but in the UK what do we have - Welsh bogs. The nearest bit of wilderness was the Arctic or the Sahara in North Africa. I didn’t know anyone who’d been to the Sahara but figured it must be humanly possible and the Ivory Coast sounded like a nice place to end up. The Sahara Handbook had a lot on Kombis, Range Rovers and Land Cruisers, but just a page and a half on motorcycles: get an XT 500 it said, or get a BMW. They got shaft drive you know.
So I got an XT (that one I jumped wasn’t mine). A mate crashed it into a bus one night so I got some Suzuki RM forks and a 19” wheel as compensation. A bloke took a month to make an alloy tank that didn’t quite fit. I put on an oil cooler from a Citroen or some such. The rack was made of Dexion industrial shelving, the panniers were sacks or varnish tins with the tops sawn off and hinges put on. When the big day came it was snowing but there was no turning back.
Like so many first timers before and since, I was massively overloaded but hugely under-equipped.

'Where you gowin on dat fing?’ a kid at a fuel station asked on the way to Portsmouth.
‘Why Afrika, my lad.'
'No yer not!' he sneered.



Below, camping somewhere in France with my trusty Vango tent which tripled in weight when wet and stayed that way for days.
All the way down people were waving and shouting 'Rallye, rallye, rallye'. What rally? I'd never heard of the Paris-Dakar Rally back then, but in those days the Frenchies were mad for it and actually thought I was a front runner!



The idea of staying in a hotel was patently absurd. Here I’m camping in the hills near Cassis, just out of Marseille. I’d been on the road for all of 3 or 4 days and had already run out of money to pay for the ferry to Algiers. This travelling game; it just wasn’t like being at home.
Nice Alpine Stars. Do they still make them in steel?
Next stop - Algeria...



Don’t ride at night in Africa - they say it in all the books.

First night in Africa: rain… glaring headlights (not the XT's of course)… leftside/rightside? panic... roadside gravel... bike loaded like a refugee's handcart... You can guess the rest.

Luckily I landed on my head despite the fact that to save weight and keep my brain cool in the ‘searing Saharan heat’, I was wearing a £20 climbing helmet.



While crossing the Atlas I’d teamed up with a French bloke called Christian who had a cool, home-made BMW. Apart from the tyres that thing was way ahead of its time. It made my XT look like a mobile scrapyard.
Unfortunately the intolerant Christian was not as cool as his bike, so even though it made good sense to stick together across the Sahara (he was also heading for the Ivory Coast), I slipped away a few days later while he was yet again mending his BM which was having charging issues.



Things soon looked up - relatively - and I came across my first real dunes just north of El Golea (as they called it then). So this is the Sahara! Quite nice really.

But the truth was the northern Sahara in January was cold and the flat landscape elsewhere dreary. Huge plains of rubble and ditches, ugly half-finished towns.



That night I spent my first night alone out in the desert. I rolled into a ditch and set up camp. As the sun set I tried to walk away from the bike into the void as far as I dared, but felt myself pulled back as if by a bungee. It was quite freaky.

I forgot to say, this was the Tademait plateau. As I was to learn on future trips, bad things always happen on the Tademait plateau - a barren, stony 400km wasteland between El Golea and In Salah.




But as with so much about adv travel, it's all about adapting and getting used to your new environment - getting over a form of culture shock.

A couple of nights later I had a great camp in the Arak Gorge, south of In Salah - and as anyone who's been down the Trans-Sahara Highway (TSH) will know, south of In Salah things begin to look up. You pass the huge sand sea of Erg Mehajebat by the road, wind through the Gorge and emerge in a granite wonderland called the Monts de Mouydir.

I was so confident now I managed to leave the bike and walk up one of these bizarre, domed hills.



Down the road the TSH unrolled like a ribbon. You can clearly see the old piste which itself would have followed an ancient camel trading route long before the French arrived. (There's more on Sahara routes here).

But you can also see from the dust kicked up by the truck that the TSH was no smooth, two-lane blacktop. It wasn't 1982 that's for sure, but 80 or 81 was the one magical year when you could drive the 1300 miles from Algiers to Tam on complete and intact tarmac. Then the overloaded trucks, baking summers, flash floods and freezing nights up north took their toll. These days, like the Forth Bridge, the TSH always needs some work somewhere.



I looked down on my bike. Sadly, a passing truck had failed to run it over and it was still there when I walked back.

You’d think I could have ridden to the bottom of the hill, but I was scared of riding the sands. 'Schwei, schwei', as they say out there [take your time]. As it happens the off white granite sand as seen here is actually very nice to ride on - the big, angular grains lock up well - no sinking. All sand seas are made of much finer orange sandstone sand: nice to look at and walk through barefoot, not so nice to ride with a payload.



Just down the road I came across this alluring massif. I wanted to ride there and explore but the idea of leaving the tarmac any sooner than necessary was terrifying - how far was it, 2 miles or 20? What happened if I fell in a hole or got hit on the head by an asteroid? Until you catch up with yourself and your surroundings, adventuring can initially make you paranoid.

Those mysterious peaks became the goal of my next trip, 18 months later, but I never actually got there until just a few years ago. The place is called Sli Edrar and it's actually 10 miles away in the shot below - a lovely cluster of granite peaks. Here’s a video of us bombing around the back of it in 2007 - the Sli bit starts at 2.28 and runs for a minute.

Places like Sli or the ruins of Djado in Niger sum up the other-worldly magic of the Sahara to me.



There were hard rains in the winter of '82 it seems - the Arak Gorge had been trashed by the funnelled run-off and even out on the plains the flash floods had done their damage. I was being forced onto the sands whether I liked it or not.

Here there's a gap in the blacktop with 15-foot drop - ripped out by a phantom river. No red triangle or bloke in a high viz vest as I recall, just a discrete pile of stones. A good place not to be riding at night with a 6-volt Yamaha headlamp that even a moth would have trouble locating!



Well seeing as I had my camera out and all, I may as well take another picture of myself. I can see a hose from an old washing machine jammed in there. That'll come in handy if I come across a nomad with a leaking Zanussi.

This was about a 100 miles north of Tamanrasset and the new road was ripped up all the way down. Top to bottom, left to right, Tam is just about in the middle of the Sahara. The XT handled like a wet mattress of course but I'd need to get used to it - beyond Tam there was no tarmac for the 400-miles over the border to Niger.



Continues...

__________________
Adventure Motorcycling Handbook 8 • Morocco Overland 3 • Overlanders Handbook 2 • Twit