Photos below.

I got the idea from the trip after I heard about the Plymouth – Banjul rally. I knew that we were going to have to dump our Ford Fiesta sometime in the middle of this year because we knew it would not pass the NCT in March so I did not think finding a car would be a problem! Unfortunately the Plymouth – Banjul leaves in January so I would be in college for it and also you need a left hand drive car because they sell the cars in The Gambia and right hand drive cars there are illegal. This meant that we would have to go ourselves and get rid of the car somewhere else.

I then tried to round up a few companions to come with me, after endless explaining of where Dakar and Senegal actually were, that yes, we would actually be crossing the whole Sahara and that Dakar and Darfur were two very different places people expressed interest and then always dropped out shortly afterwards. Finally, I was left with two trusty school mates who were going to accompany me on the trip South, Barry G and Stephen T.H.

I then set about collecting information about the trip and getting the car ready. Thorntree http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com and a relation of a friend who had done the Plymouth Banjul were the two main sources of info. We brought the car down to our usual mechanic to have a few things sorted before we left (including getting a new fan belt and getting different engine oil as suggested by GrahamW!) only to be told that “this car is like an old decrepit man, it won’t even make it to the door, let alone to Rosslare”. His solution was to sell us another car. So, we went to another mechanic, Barry’s fathers’ friend Martin. Martin gave us a very different opinion all together and did what he could for the car and was quietly confident about its’ ability. We were then extremely lucky to have Paul W hear about our planned trip. He works for a car shop suppliers and was extremely generous in giving us lots of useful tools for our trip ranging from a fan belt to spare bulbs for our headlights.

In the mean time Barry got his college exam results and they didn’t quite go as planned so unfortunately he had to stay at home and work for them.

So, the two of us set off for the ferry which passed without incident and we were released into France with the car still running beautifully. Our first stop was Pamplone in Spain where the Bull run was taking place (San Fermin). Picture temple bar X1000 with everyone dressed in white and red and living off the adrenaline of running away from bulls every morning for the last 5 days! We camped and went out with the million other (literally!) revellers, caught a couple of hours of sleep and were back in to run at 7. They cram everyone into a 100 metre long pen at the start of the course to limit the number of people on the route, then 2 minutes before the bulls are released they let everyone move up the course as far as you want. The adrenaline really starts to build in the pen though, with people talking tactics and telling stories of previous runs. A surge of really scared looking people announce the arrival of the bulls and they pass you before you know it until you’re the one chasing the bulls up the street trying to get into the arena before the last one passes and they close the gate. The real fun starts in the arena when they release the smaller extra pissed off bulls that are taunted by the crowd. I saw one guy getting knocked out cold by one of the bulls which didn’t look like a whole lot of fun.

Unfortunately Stephen was pickpocketed and also missed the start of the run, not a good day for him, but we continued to Bilbao in good spirits to see the Guggenheim. The building is incredible in so many ways, architecturally, engineering, artistically, well worth the trip.

The following day we drove to Madrid and spent 3 full days enjoying many things from tapas to the Prado museum and the Bernabaou football stadium. After Madrid we headed south again to our friend Colin H house just outside Puerto Banjos. We spent 8 days socialising in “D4 in the sun” waiting for Stephens’s replacement credit cards to arrive. When they finally arrived after 8 days I was more than ready to move on, the lifestyle of the seasonal locals isn’t how I would choose to spend my summers!

We drove the 100kms to Algeciras and almost straight onto a ferry without any trouble at all. We had done roughly 2000km in Europe and the car was still running beautifully. We landed in Ceuta (which is still part of Spain) filled up on duty free petrol, crossed the border into Morocco without too much hassle and headed toward Tangier. The Moroccan roads were great, fully freshly tarmac and even painted in places! We arrived in Tangier into horrible traffic which was made all the more difficult by the realisation that the maps in the lonely planet were hopeless and impossible to navigate by, we also realised how spoilt we were with GPS in Europe. We eventually found parking and a hostel and got some much-needed sleep. We spent a day driving to, and appreciating, Chefchouen. It is a beautiful small town in the middle Atlas which has a really beautiful medina. We headed to Fes next which was a mixed experience, the Medina was awesome but the rest of the city was not very pleasant at all, noisy busy and quite western.

After Fes, we decided to go on down the East side of the Atlas. From Fes to Tenihir was a great drive, from the middle Atlas, across the corner of the high Atlas and down to our first taste of the Sahara. We found a great place to hole up for the night and watched the sun set over the Atlas from the roof! The next day we headed to the Dades Gorge. This is a gorge filled with the most amazing rock formations I have ever seen stretching for 30kms up into the mountains with little hamlets and castles dotted all through them, really beautiful. We then headed on south and ended up going all the way to Marrakech, back on the other side of the Atlas. The famous square in Marrakech was as atmospheric as advertised, all the stalls selling every kind of Moroccan food, snake charmers, storytellers, and Monkey tamers made for a great experience.

We did not stay in Marrakech as we were put off by the masses of tourists so we headed to the coast and Essaouira. We spent a few days watching the build up to the kite surfing world cup, shopping and eating nice Moroccan food (although we were starting to get sick of the staple Tagine/stew that seemed to be all that was offered to foreigners). From Essaouira we began travelling south again to Agadir where we did a little shopping and stocking up for the desert. I also managed to find a Jerry can and foam that re inflates flat tires using my pigeon French, an achievement which I was particularly proud of.

We headed off early the next morning down into the Sahara proper for the first time. The 11-hour drive down to Layoone was awesome. The sheer size of the Sahara is the most beautiful thing about it, you are driving through this nothingness for hours and hours, it is really beautiful but not in an immediately obvious way, you need to travel through it (and travelling too it helps as well!) to appreciate what an amazing place it is. We over-nighted in Laayoone with what looked like it houses half the worlds UN staff (as we were now in Western Sahara which is a disputed territory) before heading south again all the way to Dahkla, another big drive. We spent a day in Dahkla, me kite surfing and Steve relaxing. We then headed to the border the next day.

The Morocco – Mauritania border turned out to be no hassle at all, even no man’s land in the middle, which was our first and last bit of “off roading” during the trip, did not bother us or the car. We were also introduced to the brilliantly friendly Mauritanian people and officials. We headed into Noudhibou which was a crazy border town bustling with activity. Refreshingly different from the very military influenced towns in Western Sahara. It was the kind of place where you feel like anything could happen, exciting but not scary. We felt like we were starting to leave Arabian Africa and starting to get down into real “black” Africa. We drove out of Nouakchott the next day, drove for a few hours, and camped in the desert. We found a great place to stop between some beautiful sand dunes a few hundred metres off the road. We lit a fire and settled down. The silence in the desert was awesome and it was the best nights sleep I had all trip, out under the stars. The next day we arrived in Nouakchott. The most un-capital city like capital city I have been in! It was so un-westernised it was brilliant. Bustling with activity in a completely different way to any other big city I have ever been in.

We were trying to make a decision at this point, whether to head south and try to get into Senegal at the notoriously (“most difficult border crossing in Africa” – Lonely Planet) crossing at Rosso or to head East and into Mali and then try to get into Senegal from there. Apparently it is much easier to get an older car through from Mali, although if we went that route we would have to drive a few hundred kms off road. We decided to try Rosso and if it did not work, we would come back and go through Mali.

We set off for Rosso early in the morning, not expecting much at all. Noudhibou is only 2 hours from Rosso and the border but it is in these 2 hours and 100 or so km that the whole landscape changes completely, arid desert turns into lush almost tropical fields and bush land. The people also become darker, the dress sense, the local language, the food, the music and even the local cars change!

So we arrived in Rosso to a completely different kind of Africa, and almost immediately, we longed for the Morocco Mauritania border! We were hassled through the border, our passports disappearing and re-appearing in countless strangers’ hands. After we had gotten our exit stamps and documents for the Mauritanians, we then had to fight to get our passports back and negotiate tickets for the ferry. The stress levels were already rising. Thankfully, it was at this stage that Steve decided to do his token useful thing for the day and find a genuinely nice “guide” who we managed to negotiate a price to help us get into Senegal. Encouragingly the first thing our new guide decided to show us was a car that had been abandoned by a French man a few days previously when he had been denied permission to bring it into Senegal! We managed to get everything we needed with no trouble at all until we were issued into the great Douane’s’ (customs) office. After seeing the date on the car ownership cert all he said was “Non” and walked off, not encouraging. However, I persisted and after 5 hours of bribing, begging, sitting in the burning midday, sun and fending off offers for the car out of the blue the Douane finally took our €150, issued us with a receipt for €5 and gave us the Holy Grail, a temporary import certificate for the car! As we had a grand total of €6 left between us in various currencies none of which were Senegalese so we headed off to the nearest town praying to find an ATM (as there are no ATMs in the entire country of Mauritania!).

We spent the night in St. Louis being eaten by mossies in a beautiful campsite, before heading to Dakar the next day. The city turned out to be quite as I expected, noisy, busy and dirty and it took us about 3 hours to get into the centre. We had both visualised ourselves standing victoriously beside a sign “DAKAR” but we didn’t see one on the way in and we couldn’t find one anywhere around town. We were forced to settle for an address on the side of a poster for a shop, not as grand as we would have liked but enough to prove to people back home that we had actually arrived!

We had arrived in Dakar on a Saturday, this was pure coincidence as we had completely lost track of the days of the week. Unfortunately, this meant that we could not book flights home the next day that we would have liked as Steve had completely run out of money and time at this stage. Therefore, we enjoyed Dakar for the day, changed hostel (to a rather busy brothel which also provided accommodation without the “extras”) and enjoyed not driving for a while!

On the Monday, we booked flights home and then started thinking about getting rid of the car.

I had done lots of research before leaving on the trip as to where would be the best place to sell it and had decided on the Mali-Senegal border but about 2 months later I couldn’t remember for the life of me why we couldn’t sell it on the Senegal-Gambia border. Eventually we thought that I must have made an oversight in my research and decided to head for The Gambia. It was only at the last junction on the main road and last big town before the border that I decided to stop and check the information on the net one last time. What a decision that turned out to be! I rediscovered that right hand drive cars are illegal in the Gambia; this would have been a catastrophic mistake as if we had left Senegal it would have cost us another €150 to get back in after we would have not been allowed into the Gambia! So from a tiny internet cafe in a small Senegalese town we instantly changed our route and headed for Mali! It was a great feeling to be able to just change our plans like that, from heading to one country to simply, without any bother at all, just deciding to go to another.

We drove on to Tambacounda (on a terrible, pot hole riddled road) and rested there before heading for the border the next day.

The border town was just what we were looking for, small, very relaxed and confidence inspiring for two young car dealers! We checked out of Senegal without any trouble and heard our first reasonable offer for the car from one of the Senegalese border officials. We drove over to the Malian side of the river and put a sign reading “A Vendre” (“for sale”) on the front of the car where I waited while Steve staked out the rest of the town. I took a step back at that stage and thought about myself standing next to my little Ford Fiesta, in Mali, with a for sale sign on the front of it, watching West African life go by and knowing that I had to get rid of the car today AND somehow get back to Dakar in time to catch our flight home! It was a situation I had never contemplated and I think it will stay with me forever.

A lot of handshaking, smiling, explaining and bargaining later I had found a buyer. I then sat in the back of an old Mercedes outside the local pharmacy (which seemed to act as the local moneylender) and counted out 450,000CFA (~€750) in cash! With the money in my pocket and the keys exchanged (Alasko being the name of the lucky new owner) we scarpered before we were robbed. Back to Tambacounda to pick up our belongings and then a very long and uncomfortable taxi ride back to Dakar. Home free we thought….

Unfortunately, Steve was pick pocketed AGAIN in Dakar but this time they took his passport, the day before he was due to fly out! To cut a long story short he managed to get from Dakar to Madrid to London to Dublin all with just a photocopy of his passport and a hard won letter from the local police chief.

The trip was a resounding success. We never expected to make it anywhere near the distance that we did, 8500km total, especially with no breakdowns. It brings into question the standards required for the NCT! Highlights included the medina in Chefchaouen, the desert (all of it!), the night we spent staying in the desert and negotiation my way into Senegal. There was very little about the trip that I didn’t enjoy. We did both wish that we had had more time to continue into Mali and even have at stab at reaching the legendary Timbuktu but unfortunately, it was not possible.

Thanks to everyone who helped us out especially Martin C, Paul W and Colin H.