An enquiry revived memories of a 1980s Sahara ‘quad’ bike expedition across the Grand Erg Oriental in Algeria involving ‘Wheelie King’ Dave Taylor (left) and which I recalled was a bit of a cock up.
Then, a connection, Paul Blezard (right) set me straight on the Honda 250 ATC trikes they used, plus the link to the Channel 4 doc above which features Paul as expedition translator. After watching the doc it turns out it was no more of a cock-up than my first Sahara trip or three which set out with equally over-ambitious goals. The ferryman must be paid a few times before you venture across the sand seas.

The adventure was the idea of the late Roy Pratt MBE. A former display rider in the army, he founded the Imps charity in 1970, a youth motorcycle display team (left), like the adult White Helmets of that time. A social worker, Pratt sought to rehabilitate and inspire disadvantaged east London boys with the two-wheeled initiative. After over 50 years, in 2025 the Imps charity closed down in accordance with Roy Pratt’s last wishes, soon after his death, aged 86. During that time well over 2000 boys from as young as 5 years old had been part of the Imps, learning important life skills like teamwork. bike maintenance and constructing human pyramids.

Trikes – Yikes!
An ATC trike was a motorised recreational or utility tricycle, especially popular in the 1980s North America until inherently unstable characteristics led to them getting axed. Originally pitched as all-season, ‘snow & sand’ scoots which even children could ride, like the Reliant Robin car, trikes proved to be deceptively dangerous and led to countless injuries, deaths and law suits. By 1988 new sales were banned in the US (or production was voluntarily suspended) by which time more stable quads had gained a foothold – but without trapping your actual foot.

Roy Pratt must have encountered the phenomenon at peak trike and like many, mistakenly assumed three wheels were safer than two, an important factor when ridden by teenagers across sand seas with scant support, even if they were stunt riders with many years experience. Trikes would certainly have offered much better traction in sand without a motorbike’s need for momentum in dunes to avoid getting bogged.
It’s unclear if Pratt had any desert experience (perhaps from the army, like Tom Sheppard?) or why he settled on leading a bunch of hand-picked Imps to be the first to cross the width of the Grand Erg Occidental (below) – one of several huge sand seas that fills the Algerian Sahara. There’s talk of a failed ‘Guards Regiment’ attempt on the GEO, as well as a Durham University expedition in 1982 which, among other things, proved the efficacy of trikes in on a shorter, north-south GEO crossing.

I wonder if crossing a sand sea is what a person who doesn’t know the Sahara thinks of as the ultimate desert experience, until reality whacks them in the face like a garden rake. Normally you avoid dunes where at all possible, or at least minimise your time there. The Dakar Rally of that era knew this, as do many visitors to Erg Chebbi in Morocco.

Car, bike or anything in between, dunes are where the accidents happen, largely because of the paradoxical need to maintain speed to avoid sinking and the laborious digging, while moving slowly enough to react to slip faces whose edges can be invisible at certain sun angles. Once flying the lip, very often it’s a tumbling moto that causes the injury, or loose items in a car hurtling forward on impact. Above left: way too fast: vehicle destroyed, driver lucky to be alive. Above right: slow roll over descending a slip face.

The Imps’ original plan was to plough west directly across the erg from El Golea to Beni Abbes, a distance of nearly 500km. Apart from being a very long way, it would also have been ‘across the grain’ of the dunes’ SSW/NNE orientation which, as we found one morning in Egypt’s Great Sand Sea in 2000, makes for extremely slow and risky progress (right). On that occasion we gave up and followed the inter-dune corridors south out of the Sand Sea.
Back in Algeria 1985, the Imps expedition had lost time with the seemingly unregistered trikes stuck in Algiers Customs. Early on in the doc, Dave Taylor, a well known stunt rider turned motorcycle safety campaigner, challenges Pratt’s contingency plans if things go wrong, With too much post-reality-TV cynicism, it’s hard to know if it’s a genuine exchange or set up by the TV people. All the support cars towed unpowered trailers, but even a regular unhitched 4×4 would have struggled to keep up with the trikes, so the TV crew followed the Imps all the way also on ATCs and probably had a story of their own to tell at the end of it.

It seems the four-vehicle convoy merely followed the Timimoun road south of the erg. I’d ridden that road one night three years earlier until I ran out of fuel.
With their radios playing up as radios do, the Imp support cars were a long way from being able to offer help. Instead, there was talk of burning tyres at pre-arranged times and flashing mirrors.
I was thrilled to see three UMM 4x4s (below) making up the support convoy. Never seen those used in the Sahara, or indeed anywhere. A UMM was a slab-sided Portuguese built, Peugeot engined workhorse based on the 1960s French Cournil with nods to Jeeps of that era. I looked into getting a UMM for my own group of two-wheeled ch’imps in 1989, but ended up with a Land Rover 101FC for a bigger payload. The Imps support crew also included a 1973 SWB Landie which at one point seems to have given its frazzled driver a black eye (left), but which is probably still running today.

To catch up on lost time, the original direct route gets ditched and the Imps set off from El Golea along the erg’s southerneastern perimeter to semi-abandoned Fort Mac Mahon.
Next day they follow the Meguidene gravel plain west, then ride alongside the road to Timimoun, after a staggering ’27 punctures’ and 16 hours in the saddle.
Once in Timimoun (where in ’82 I got dropped off after a creepy lift, having left my bike in the desert), the Duneriders move up to El Hadj Guelmane oasis, in the erg north of town. This was the last point where Pratt managed to get a position out of his sat nav as it had turned out the trikes lacked the battery power to fire it up. I didn’t know there was land basedsat nav in 1985, unless it was an earlier version of the pre-GPS Navstar we used in 1990. Early on in the film, the antenna on Pratt’s Honda looks like a Navstar unit (above left).

It seems only from El Hadj Guelmane that the trikes – now without even working odometers so unable to record distance – get stuck into some real dune riding (above) like you’d see in today’s Dakar Rally in Saudi. They give themselves three days to cover the 250km to Beni Abbes, a very long distance to navigate hundreds of dunes without a mishap. The Big Reds’ 12-litre tansk would have given the 250s about a 200km range at best, plus another 300 from a jerry.

This whole area north of Timimoun is dotted with small date-producing oases and ancient fortified ksars. The Duneriders’ camp at Guelmane was just 15km from what’s become called the Ksar Draa of Timimoun (below), which looks like a fantasy film set.

Dead Reckoning into the Erg
Initially we’re told the Imps follow a bearing of 290° then 285° (~WNW), possibly towards Hassi ben Taleb . At the end of the day Pratt plays the ‘guess where you think we are’ navigation game which we also played with the Navstar in 1990 while waiting the half an hour or more for it to get a fix.
Pratt has no working Navstar of course, but estimates “to the right of that highpoint, 424”; pointing to an IGN NH-30 Bechar map (left). Spot height ‘424’ on that map is just to the right of Hassi ben Taleb (on the map above). Although there’s no talk of Hassi ben Taleb being a destination, it’s amazing to think they might have covered the 90km of dead reckoning through the dunes and got close. Of course with no way of knowing this, they might have been anywhere in the GEO, and it was all just a guess.

Unless you know better dead reckoning – estimating a position from just a bearing and distance covered – is an exceedingly sketchy way to navigate while winding through chaotic sand seas. The self-effacing Pratt credits the boys with the route finding and spells out the impossibility of accurately estimating their position after all the the zig-zagging through the dunes.
The key nav aid would have been knowing the N6 highway was a couple of hours to the southwest, albeit it through possibly massive dunes. They can appear daunting, but are actually easier to flow through than the small dunes further north (as we found in 2002 entering the Grand Erg Oriental from El Oued; left).
Towards the end the film seeks to jack up the ante as the anxious support crew search the horizon from the Beni Abbes hotel. But then we cut back to the trikes and the narrator suddenly throws in: ‘… the one safe course to follow is south, down from the dunes towards the plain and hopefully the road. You wonder if the Roy and the Imps could see the writing on the wall: this sort of riding was not sustainable. Although it’s not evident on sat imagery, the IGN map above show a band of higher dunes blocking the way to Beni Abbes.
But it’s a happy ending and the riders appear right on schedule, having bailed from the Erg and headed for the road, maybe because of– or just before an accident. We’re told they hit the N6 about 80km from Beni Abbes, so just northwest of Kerzaz (below).

After recovering my bike and getting going again in Timimoun, I well recall stopping in amazement at Kerzaz in 1982 to crawl up the monumental dune behind the town (above). Whatever lay in the erg behind there, it’s no surprise that triking it ended with a suspected broken arm, one of countless tumbles suffered by the Imp expedition while riding the comically unstable three wheelers.

By mostly tracking the erg’s southern perimeter, the Imp expedition was no more a triumphant crossing of the Grand Erg Oriental than the JSE ‘west-east Sahara’ crossing a decade earlier.
But more importantly, Roy Pratt (right) did succeed in delivering an adventure and hopefully a life-changing outlook for a small group of young ‘ackney teenagers which you imagine they will remember to this day.