In 1998 author of the Adventure Motorbiking Handbook, CHRIS SCOTT, decided to take a leaf out of his own book and headed for Libya on an BMW F650 Funduro. As usual, things turned sour.
Go to most embassies and at least you’ll find a few pamphlets and a poster of a couple frolicking by a fountain. No such noncing about at the Libyan Interests Section in London’s Harley Street in the late 1990s. Down in the grubby basement mean looking guys ground another fag into a Brit passport and ignored you purposefully. Tourist literature was limited to a defiant newsletter commemorating the “drawing of the line of death” against imperial aggressors. Charming. Just the spot to enjoy a spring biking break.
“Visa?” I asked meekly. “Hello, visa?”
It has taken me months to get to this point. In November 1997 with the Handbook completed, I decided it was time to practice what I preached. Libya sounded interesting and BMW’s Funduro trailie would make a nice change from another Yamaha Ténéré.
Buying a ‘94 F650 was easy, getting a visa involved countless dead end faxes to various Libyan tourist agencies for the required invitation. Eventually a mysterious Internet connection provided an invite at a price and my permit was telexed from Tripoli in early April. A week later I was walking down Harley Street with the requisite stamp. There was no going back now.
I may have been nervous about my destination but I was sure of the bike. I’d always fancied the Funduro: a trusty combination of Rotax engine and BMW build quality. No one had anything bad to say about them other than being a bit heavy for off-roading. The revvy engine took a bit of getting used to after torquey XTs, but I was sure the 650 was up for some piste-bashing.
As I was hard up for money modifications were kept to a minimum. A fat Michelin Desert squeezed on the back after a bit of sawing at the outer knobs. The front end took a ‘rear’ 19” Pirelli MT21 tyre with a lot more knob-chopping and a Honda VT500 mudguard. Road riding on these tyres was initially unnerving, especially the ‘marbles-on-glass’ front MT, but I soon got used to it. The bike had come with a new o-ring chain, some brand I’d never heard of, but I figured it would last the trip. A 27-litre Acerbis tank looked barely bigger than the original unit and promised a useful 500km range. To help work out distances in kilometres, BMW UK gave me a metric speedo which saved on possible errors when converting from miles to kms. A chunky alloy Touratech GPS bar mount held my sat-nav gadget firmly in place and a cheapo ball compass screwed on the dashboard. Lastly, I put on an in-line fuel filter, a cig’ lighter power take off for the GPS, fork gaiters and a high screen. It was March now, high time to head South.
To save my knobs I caught the overnight Motorail from Paris to Marseille and then caught a boat to Tunis where ensued five hours of messing around from one counter to another. If this was Tunisian immigration what would Libya be like? And another thing troubled me: had I left it too late? By now temperatures were climbing steeply right across the Sahara and with it expected water consumption and possibly a host of other problems.
A New Year’s meet up with a friend who worked in Libya actually put me off the whole idea. He warned me about the enervating ghibli winds which blew in April and melted strong men’s brains. A story of a guy who’d driven out into the storm sounded pretty grim.
“About a month after the guy had gone missing a nomad came into the camp and asked if we wanted to know where our Toyota was? We said yes and it cost us. Then he asked did we want our body back – it cost us some more. Turns out the guy had just parked up with the engine running and walked out into the sandstorm.”
With a weather eye out for the ghibli by the next afternoon I was close to the Libyan border, a wodge of illicitly-bought Libyan currency stuffed down my crotch. At the border I was resigned to hours shuffling from one hanger to the next filling out forms and getting stamps. But by pure chance one of the Libyan travel agents I’d given up on recognised me and whisked me through the formalities in just twenty minutes (and a hundred quid!) Stunned at my good fortune, I set off towards Tripoli in the fading light and soon pulled over to fill up for just 60p. That’s right sixty pence. Super petrol works out at 2.5p a litre or, if I you’re feeling stingy, regular costs 2p.
With dozens of the roadside wrecks, traffic along Libya’s main coast road was a lethal mixture of grand prix craziness and farmyard bangers so, after a night in the bushes, I was relieved to turn south towards Ghadames, 550km away.
As I rode into the desert on super smooth highways I wondered when the real heat would begin. I didn’t have to wait long. By mid-afternoon the temperature had risen to the high thirties and out of the blue the bike started spluttering. Surely I haven’t got through the tank already. I thought? Undoing the cap revealed plenty of gas. The bike started up but a few miles later cut out again. I got off and had a look at things and guessed at a cause. A combination of half empty tank and minimal throttle at cruising speed added to the afternoon heat saw the trickling petrol evaporate in the fuel filter and cause vapour lock – cutting off the fuel supply. Stopping cooled things down and got the petrol flowing again. Later on, when pouring cooling water over the filter body saw the petrol level rise instantly, I knew I’d guessed right.
Knowing the problem was as good as solving it so I filled up first chance and carried on to Ghadames, arriving zonked out at the empty campsite as the sun set. Slumped out on the sand, I had a good think. If it was reaching nearly 40°C this far north, how hot would it be further south? The vapour lock was easily fixed with a cardboard heat shield, but I was keen to get the BM on the dirt. Was I taking too great a risk riding alone? From here my plan was to ride across the Hammada el Hamra plateau and then cut over the edge of the Ubari Sand Sea down to the Akacus Mountains near the Algeria/Niger border, altogether about a week’s riding.
My French guidebook claimed the route across the plateau was a straightforward 450km gravel track with a well half way. Just about within my range, though in these temperatures water consumption was another matter. I checked over the bike, wrote myself a road book and planned to leave early next morning.
That night at 2.10am a rising gale woke me and I dozed fitfully as the tent wobbled and the palms flapped. Dawn revealed an orange sky and a thick dusty haze. Was this the ghibli I had been warned of? I postponed my departure, hoping it would die down, but in the end set off back to the village of Derj where the plateau track began and where I’d see how I felt.
Filling up at Derj and on the verge of heading back to Tunisia, my dithering was quashed when a German Isuzu pulled in. A brief chat revealed that Rainer and Katja were also heading across the Hamra and would be happy to have another vehicle along for safety.
The Hammada el Hamra is aptly-named the Red Plateau, a barren, undulating prairie of rust-coloured gravel cut by dry water courses. Rising to 800m, my mate hadn’t had much to say about it: a pitiless void that was either freezing or baking and criss-crossed with enough tracks to confuse even the wily nomads.
Enjoying the security of another vehicle, I felt great to be back on the dirt. The BM handled the 40-50kph pace well and it was fun concentrating on the riding instead of sitting on the blacktop. As expected I was a lot quicker than Rainer’s ex-trans African Isuzu, but I didn’t mind stopping, their very presence made this whole excursion much less tense. But there was one thing which bothered me…
“Rainer, shouldn’t we be at Bir Gazell well by now?” According to my speedo the landmark should have been close.
“Bir Gazell? No, that is on the direct route, we are taking the southern route.”
“The southern route?”
“Here, look, it goes down into the Ubari Sand Sea, turns east and follows the dunes’ edge to Idri. My guide book says it’s much more scenic than the direct route.”
“How far is it?”
“About six hundred kilometres.”
“I doubt I’ve got enough fuel to go that far, especially if the piste gets sandy.”
We paused for a moment to consider the implications.
“Well, I have some spare petrol, about six litres.” said Rainer whose Isuzu was diesel,
Topping up the bike’s tank we decided to take a gamble and press on.
But by late afternoon we’d got ourselves lost. The next GPS waypoint was through the hills to the south, but our track was now heading west. This is all part and parcel of Sahara travel so, not unduly worried, we made camp and resolved to head directly for the waypoint next morning.
Cross-country riding may sound fun on a trail bike, but in fact it’s incredibly slow. Once you ride off tracks, however bad, you find yourself walking the bike down rocky slopes, blundering up dead-end valleys or edging towards drops. Even with an early start and the bike reconnoitering a way through the hills, it still took us till noon next day to cover the 14km to the waypoint and the route.
Having lost altitude coming off the plateau, the day began to cook and, as I feared, the plateau’s firm gravel turned into plains of sand. As all you beach racers know, soft sand has to be attacked standing on the pegs with a nailed throttle and eyes firmly fixed on the ground ahead. There is no easy option: back off and you’re off - go too fast and you risk crashing. I finished the day exhausted by more types and shades of soft sand than the Cote d’Azur.
By now I was already cutting into Rainer and Katja’s water reserves, so we needed to find a well. Their German guidebook identified a source 40km away. Having located what seemed the right place, we ploughed into the sands where the Izusu soon mired. While they shovelled I headed over the dunes, riding the sandy banks in all directions just to keep from getting stuck. After a while I found the well – bone dry and full of sand. This little excursion had cost us two hours a heap of energy and still more water. We flopped out under some meagre shade. No one said anything.
We moved on, at one point encountering the vile surface-crusted powder known as feche-feche. Spotting it too late, my BM broke through and sank in, engine screaming in first as a 20-foot roost spurted up vertically from the back wheel. By paddling madly I just about regained firmer ground in time to grab yet another slug of water. By now every minor exertion demanded a drink and the exhausting conditions went on for hours. In this sort of terrain the Funduro was just plain Duro. While the engine was amazingly zippy on the highway, it lacked the plonk needed to chug through soft sand. And as I’ve found before, the super stiff Desert tyre might do the trick on a Dakar racer, but at even just .6 kilos, with the tyre creeping round the rim, it didn’t flatten out enough to give enough traction. Result: lots of wheelspin and wasted fuel for not much forward motion.
At dusk we located a good well, filled up with water while camels mobbing us for a hand out and, fit only to cook up some grub, we crashed out for the third night running. We all knew we’d bitten off a bit more than we could chew, but the end was surely in sight.
By nine next morning the bike was halfway down a dune and out of gas. We’d seen no other vehicles since Derj so there was nothing for it but to lug out twenty litres of water from the car for me and watch the Isuzu chug away over the sands to get help. With a bit of luck they’d be back tomorrow. Knowing that lying still in the shade was the best way to save water, I crawled under a make shift lean-to and waited.
The burning sun inched across the sky and the wind peppered me with sand. Then, just as I began thinking “What if…” a toot-tooting heralded the early return of the Isuzu. They’d chanced across a date plantation where a guy had tapped off a jerrican’s worth from his pickup’s oil drum. We were on the move again but now the riding became really hard as the track squeezed between the dunes and rocky outcrops. Again we found ourselves hunting wind-erased tracks and taking repeated blasts up boulder-strewn slopes that even the nimble bike couldn’t manage. Having covered just 40kms, when the Isuzu got stuck on a dune we’d all had enough and called it a day. Hopefully an early start on firmer night-cooled sand would finally get us to Idri.
With a 6am start and another four hours driving we finally rolled into Idri, caked in dust and absolutely shattered. I felt like I’d done a four day enduro on a heavy loaded bike in 40-degree temperatures – hang on, I had! Two weeks later I was still aching. At Idri I bade farewell to the tough German couple and headed north, butt-, leg-, arm-, hand- and back sore after the 600km pummeling. Heavy winds prolonged my retreat and at one point I had the distinctly novel sensation of leaning out round a bend leaning while against a 50mph crosswind. By the Tunisian border that cheap chain was on the way out – and when o-ring chains go they go fast. Back across Tunisia, back across the Med, another Motorail to save the chain and a quick coffee in Paris.
I made it to the Channel but 20 miles from London the sprocket’ turned into a greasy disc. There was nothing for it but to hire a van and drive home.
Previoulsy published in Trail Bike Magazine, Overland Journal and Wyprawy 4x4 (Polish)
