In Chapter 10 of Desert Travels the cantankerous 101 leading my first desert bike tour was stranded at the Tin Taradjeli pass (above). As so often happens in the Sahara, the next person to turn up happened to be a diesel mechanic. Steve soon got the 101 running and, long story short, the following year we decided to team up and do a big Sahara trip together: him in his Land Cruiser, me in an old Land Rover 109.
For both of us this was the desert trip we’d each been planning in our heads for years. When travelling together briefly with my bike tour the previous year, we’d quickly established a shared passion for exploring the Sahara and set about doing a big trip together, each with his own 4×4. Though I’d been keen to head for the Ténéré Desert in Niger, we’d settled on keeping off the tarmac where possible and decided to head down to the Guinea’s highland jungles and the Mauritanian Sahara.
Nineteen ninety was not such a good year for me: post bike-tour debt, a bad crash leading to hospitalisation, followed by homelessness, a smaller bike crash which at least put an end to my dozen years of despatching. And finally my Land Rover, all set for a desert adventure with Steve, blew up in darkest Sussex at 2am, while I was doing some late deliveries.
As a way of keeping the tip on the rails Steve invited me to ride his XT600Z instead. I wasn’t that keen on bikes by that time, plus it would leave me dependent on him. But I accepted his offer and we met up in France, the bike towed on its back wheel with a similar arrangement I’d used on the 101.
Unfortunately, as so often happened in those days, all my films were lost on a flight in Mauritania. Since then I’ve learned: do not put things you cannot afford to lose in the hold baggage. What few photos I have were shot by Steve.
On the ‘closed’ piste between Fort Mirabel and Hassi bel Guebbour. Steve’s XT was nicely set up and of course all the essential gear was carried by the car. I’m wearing my airey, paper-thin Swedish Tenson jacket. Beyond wearing a lid, gloves and boots, the idea of wearing any sort of armour never occurred to me.On the gnarly piste up from Hirhafok to Assekrem deep in the Hoggar.I found this picture recently on the internet and am pretty sure it’s the same ancient Beetle we saw at Hassi Tabelbalet, just after the Gara Khanfoussa dune crossing on the Graveyard Piste.
“… A couple of hours later we reached Tabelbalet well on the far side of the erg and were dumbfounded to come across an eccentric German father and son in a ratty VW Beetle. Amazed that a forty-year-old 2WD had made it through the dunes, Steve confessed later that the Germans’ presence had soured his crossing…” One of the easier sections on the sandy trail along the Niger river from Bourem to Timbuktu.Tooling around in the dunes somewhere near Timbuktu where our trip was about to unravel.
‘I think I’ll head off when we get to Ségou [the next major town]. I’m not really enjoying all this riding around after you. I want to go off and do my own thing.’ I was determined to salvage the trip for my own ends. The shared driving had not materialised, the pace was ridiculous (we’d done around 4000 kilometres in less than two weeks) and everything I did was wrong or not enough. I didn’t see such a separation as a failure, it was merely the right thing to do if I was not to end up feeling resentful. Somewhere near Timbuktu. Too much vegetation for my likingGetting water in a village in the Malian Sahel.Fuelling up in Nara, just before the Mauritanian border.Digging out on the way to Adel Bagrou, the Mauritanian border post where we managed to talk our way in without a Carnet de Passages.Trackside break on the way to Nema.In Nema we picked up the Ghandi-like guide called Nani for the 800-km crossing to Tichit. Just as well; there is no way we could have found the way without him as most of the time there was no track (or he rarely followed it).Steve and Nani have a brew near Oualata.I remember this bit well – a steep sandy pass called ‘Enji’ about 300km from Nema by which time I was riding the unladen XT like a Dakar vet. When you’re good it feels like ski-ing.Enji is the plateau at the bottom right. This 1960s map shows a track, but in 1990 most of the time there was nothing but sand and annoying tussocks.Sunk down to the axle in the soft sands west of Tichit.
As agreed near Timbuktu, in Tidjika Steve went his way towing the XT, and I went mine. I met some American Peace Corps Volunteers and my travels in Mauritania took on a whole new direction.
Once in Tidjikja, I flogged my crash helmet to a delighted policeman. This time Steve didn’t even try to persuade me and drove off towards Nouakchott.
Anyone who’s taken the RN3 down to Djanet in southeastern Algeria will remember the Tin Taradjeli Pass. By the mid-1980s the tarmac may have reached Illizi, but from here a bone-shaking 200-km crossing of the Fadnoun plateau was so rough, steep and bendy, bigger trucks had to take a long detour and there were warning signs at each end of the plateau: Attention; Dangerous Track.
Illizi (from Africar book)
Part of the Tassili N’Ajjer escarpment which stretches over into the Libyan Akakus, the Fadnoun was a notorious, vehicle-wrecking barrier. Suspension problems were common and on various trips I came across a 2CV and a Hilux which were gradually breaking in half and needed the chassis braced.
As I write in Desert Travels, crossing the Fadnoun with a Landrover 101 and a group of bikes in 1989, they’d ride for an hour and then wait hours for me to catch up.
On the left, the 1983 edition of the Paris-Dakar crossed the Fadnoun on its way to Djanet and the Tenere beyond.
A map and few shots of Tin Taradjeli over the years.
Tin Taradjeli: where the green line meets the pink in the middle of the map.
Book Chapters: 16 Arak 17 Bad Day at Laouni 18 The Far Side 19 A Blue Man 20 The Hills are Alive
After my batty Benele excursion of 1984 I brushed my hair, straightened my tie and bought a sensible XT600Z, just like I always knew I would. This was the slightly better 55W version of the original kick-only Tenere, distinguishable by sloping speedblocks on the tank (more here). All I did was add thicker seat foam and fit some Metzeler ‘Sahara’ tyres – a rubbish choice for the actual Sahara, as I was to learn. Using no rack was another mistake which nearly cost me the bike. My learning curve was still as steep and loose as a dune slip face. In fact, there was so little to do to the Yahama that I moved the oil cooler from down by the carbs up into the breeze over the bars. And I painted it black because I still hadn’t shaken off my juvenile Mad Max phase.
With my £5 ex-army panniers slung over the back, in December 1985 I set off for Marseille, bound for Dakar via Algeria, Niger and Mali. As I mention in the book, I was going to try a new ‘go with the flow’ strategy’. Instead of being ground down and resentful by the setbacks of my previous adventures, I’d just take the reversals on the chin, bounce back, and move on. On this trip that stoic philosophy was to get a thorough road test!
Zoomable Map LinkA chilly desert morning somewhere south of Ghardaia. Further south there isn’t enough humidity to produce overnight frost.Back at those first proper desert dunes north of El Golea (today: El Menia). What a crappy, lashed-up baggage system!I return to Arak where I’d got detained on the enervating Benele trip the previous year for being an idiot.Here I meet German Helmut on an old, ex-police R90 BMW. We are both planning to cross the Sahara so agree to meet up in Tam a couple of days down the road and do it together.A pose south of Arak. full black leathers, HiTec Magnum desert boots, and my dainty British Airways nylon scarf.View of Sli Edrar: my aborted destination on the Benele trip. Even now I was too nervous to ride the 10km across the desert to the hills. What would happen if i hit quicksand?! It takes years to get used to being out there. Or it did me.Sli in 1982 on the XT500 trip.I finally got to Sli Edrar 17 years later from the other side.while laying out fuel caches for Desert Riders.And in 2008 we had a great afternoon riding Sli’s granite domes on one of my epic Algerian bike tours.The worse thing about those rubbish 2-ply Metzeler Saharas, was that I bought a spare. Back then there were no hard-wearing Heidenau K60s or Mitas E09s.In Tamanrasset I meet up with Helmut and we take an overnight excursion up to Assekrem in the Hoggar mountains.Helmut on the R90. The overnighter was a good chance to test our bikes.Sunset from the Hermitage at Assekrem. ‘There was no one there..’.A chilly camp, high up in the bleak Hoggar.On the less used western descent down from Assekrem, near the village of Terhenanet Helmut deftly flips his BMW. The rounded gravel in this particular oued is unlike anything I’ve found in the Sahara. I barely made it across myself.A day or two later, Helmut lightens his load after the lessons of the Assekrem excursion and we set off into the night to cross the Sahara to Niger. We camped a short distance out of Tam in the hope of getting a good run for the 350km to the border in a day.Next morning we come across some Swiss riders. One of them flipped and cartwheeled his 80G/S and and now it won’t start.Helmut knows his BM from his elbow and sorts it out: a barrel flooded with oil. Look at the huge load on that other Tenere compared to mine. This was one of the reasons why I felt it was my duty to write Desert Biking a few years later. That book evolved into the Adventure Motorcycling Handbook.As that day wore on, Helmut got progressively more and more tired from frequently falling off his bike. One final crash around dusk finished him and the BMW off.With his shoulder damaged and so unable to ride, I persuaded him to give his BMW a Viking burial with the loads of spare petrol he had left over.The remains of Helmut’s trans-Sahara ride next morning. We abandoned most of his gear and he squeezed on the back of my XT. It was galling for him; he came off quite a lot worse than I did on my first attempt at crossing the Sahara in 1982 on an XT500.After leaving Helmut at In Guezzam, the Algerian border post, I set off across No Man’s Land for Assamaka: the Niger border. It was New Year’s Day, 1986 and the Dakar Rally was leaving Paris.As I say in Desert Travels, the Sahara Handbook of the time warned of the very sandy conditions in No Man’s Land, but in fact the terrain wasn’t so bad. When things are tough or in times of stress I tend to press on; when they ease up I feel it’s safe to stop for a breather. So even though it wasted precious film, I had the notion to take some aerial selfies by setting the camera on self timer and throwing it up in the air.Most shots were of gravel or sky, but here’s a superb pre-drone-era snap of the Tenere from 20 feet up.After checking into Niger at Assamaka – a portacabin and mud hut in the middle of nowhere, next day I got lost on the last 200-km stretch to Arlit where the road resumed. And not only that but just before I got there, my canvas baggage caught fire (pressing on the pipe; the usual story). One pannier burns merrily in the stiff Saharan breeze.I wasn’t carrying that much stuff; now I had a bit less. Notice the H4 light bulb.My first Saharan crossing had been quite eventful. See the Google Map.A few days later I arrived at the banks of the Niger river. West Africa was a whole different vibe from the Sahara and North Africa.After struggling along the very sandy riverside track from Niamey (Niger) into Mali, I camped on some dunes above the river. As the sun set, over the river I could hear drums beating in the villages.Next morning I reached Gao, located the ferry over the Niger (there’s a bridge now), and headed straight to Bamako as my Mali visa only lasted a week. But I got a puncture and encountered the Blue Man as described in the book. From here on I’d have many punctures from thorns I picked up while battling along the sandy bush track to Gao.The famous monoliths near Hombori, Mali.Another monolith in the morning haze.The fabulous Grand Mosque of Djenne (not my picture, can you tell?).I’m now sick with the shits but need to rush on to Senegal before the visa expires. In Bamako I gave up trying to get my bike on the train to Dakar, as most people did back then because the roads were so bad. So I take the direct route to Kayes and the border. After all, I’ve crossed the Sahara and am on a trail bike, how hard can it be?The track follows the Dakar railway which helped with orientation. Just as well as I got lost again and again. Unlike the desert, there are loads of bush tracks linking village to village.Waiting for the non-existent ferry at Bafoulabe. After a while I realised there was a bridge just upriver. How else would the train get across. You can see my perspex numberplate has succumbed to the piste; a common problem. Small metal plates are better.Rough tracks in west Mali heading towards Kayes. Few people took this route and I don’t recall passing any other vehicles. From Kayes it was another 100km to the border which I had to reach that night.But there is time for a quick look at the Chutes de Gouma, west Mali (see map).Passing through Kayes that evening, I learned that Dakar Rally founder Thierry Sabine, had been killed with several others in a helicopter crash. January 14, 1986.Somewhere after Ambidedi, I crash out myself under some baobab trees. I was still sick and too tired to carry on, visa or no visa.Next morning I reach the border, now with two flat tyres, but accidentally manage to slip out of Mali unnoticed. With no more patches, I get a train to Tambacounda where I meet Al Jesse, of Jesse Luggae fame. He gives me a spare tyre (my own got ruined from being running flat with the rim lock done up.I think my cameras had packed up (another common problem) but I still had film so Al took some pictures of the Dakar finale for me, including Gaston Rahier #101, signing Al’s BMW 80ST which he’d ridden down from the Arctic Circle in Norway, two-up.Gaston Rahier in action.The Marlboro-Elf team. Imagine racing those tanks off road for up to 1000km a day.That year RothmansPorsche 959s got 1 and 2, and Neveu and Lalay did the same on Rothmans Honda NXR 780s (which became the original XRV 650 Africa Twin two years later). What a great result for Rothmans – if that won’t get you smoking, nothing will! Serge Bacou – cool centre stand (not my pic).Al inspects a Honda 125 #1. I have failed to find out who this was, or if it was an actual finisher.
The route was similar to mine, but twice as fast, half as long and many, many times as hard.From Dakar I ship the XT to Spain and fly on after it. What an adventure that was!Weeks later I got a postcard from Helmut.London to Dakar on an XT660Z Tenere. Next?!
Recap: I’m taking a two-week touring holiday in Algeria, late summer 1984 and it has become very hot indeed. I’m riding a 200cc mash up of AJS, Honda CD200, VW and Yamaha with enough ground clearance to become an Olympic event but barely enough power to stir a tea bag.
Yesterday I rode through a tornado and right now I’m just south of the Tademait plateau: Day 3 in Algeria.
This is part two of a bonus chapter which does not appear in the book.
I got up before sunrise but it was still warm a hot summer’s day in the UK. I packed up and rode towards In Salah, a hour or so down the road. Soon I came across a French guy on a Z750LTD – that’s a Kawasaki early 80s mock-chop in case you’ve forgotten. Clearly 1984 was the year to ride the Sahara on dumb bikes. He was sat by the side of the road looking a bit how I felt: shell shocked. Yesterday on the Tademait, the satanic sand storms had also freaked him out and he was beginning to realise his bike, a spine-wrecking ‘factory custom’ (as was the fashion at the time) was not such a cool highway cruiser after all. He’d had enough and was heading back north.
I carried on south, passing the denuded outliers of the Tademait plateau. The old fuel station in In Salah was always fighting to keep its chin above the sands, and I pulled in to fill up for the next stage: 270km along the Trans Sahara Highway to Arak Gorge with not so much as a well on the way.
A short distance out of town I passed another fallen truck, as I’d done near here in 1982 in the XT, only that time it was flat on its back with its wheels were up in the air. As before, the road perfectly flat and straight. You presume the driver had dozed off in the heat of his cab and jack-knifed. It’s not the greatest picture I’ve ever taken but you’ll notice there’s someone camped by the truck – maybe the driver. He’s watching the wreck so it doesn’t get stripped bare before someone comes along with whatever it takes to get it back on its wheels.
Time for a quick pose why not. Young kids these days think they invented self obsession and selfies! We were doing that years ago! And probably our parents before us, if they had a camera.
I liked my trusty Bell Moto 3 but I’m sure glad I never had a crash in it. The padding inside was about as inviting as the inside of a cylinder head. I also see I’m wearing a natty nylon British Airways cabin steward’s scarf picked up in Laurence Corner’s army surplus ‘boutique’ in Camden, just up the road from our Blooomsbury squat.
They say the Beatles bought their Sgt. Pepper outfits there, and the likes of, Adam Ant, Kate Moss (possibly still in nappies at the time) and Jean-Paul Gaultier (older, but probably also in leopardskin nappies) have all rummaged around in the junk at LC, looking for something to cut a dash. As trendy despatchers looking for the ultimate outfit, we did too, and I think the scarf was an impulsive £1 purchase.
Back to the desert where the only fashion was to get from water to water before what you had ran out. The low elevation hereabouts meant it was becoming exceedingly hot. I’m guessing about 45°C or over 110 F. That’s nothing unusual at these latitudes I’m sure, but I’d never experienced temperatures hotter than I was. I was being baked alive by the air I was riding through and so I wrapped up tight to keep the blast from turning me into a shrivelled Peruvian mummy.
I’m hot
In this pre-Camelbak era, every half hour or so I just had to stop for a drink. I was getting through water at a rate of 2–3 gallons (10+ litres) a day which was all I could carry. As I rode along, by the time I could stand it no more I’d feel the desiccation creeping down my throat, and realised how fatal dehydration actually gets you from the insides out as you helplessly breath in air at well over body temperature (36°C). It was clear that the survival manuals were right all along: without water or shelter, consciousness could be measured in a matter of hours in this sort of heat.
At one point I thought I simply must cool myself down and poured a helmet’s worth of water into my Bell and put it on. The delicious effect soaked down through my clothes with a steamy hiss, but half an hour later I was again throat-parched and dry as a roadside baguette.
I’m thirsty
The Trans-Sahara Highway that had finally linked Algiers with Tamanrasset just a couple of years earlier was already breaking up, and in this heat, you could see why. Black tar which sizzled as you spat on it wouldn’t stand a chance as another over-loaded lorry hammered the scorching highway to a pulp. Diversions shoved traffic onto the sands so repairs could be undertaken, and I had my first chance to be forced to ride the Benele off road. All things considered it managed well enough, even with horsepower barely into double figures. The trials tyres and light baggage all helped.
Then, as I neared Arak something changed in the ride, the suspension seemed to tighten up. I hopped off, dreading some problem with the Honda motor which could surely not handle such heat for much longer. It was a simpering commuter hack brutally abused by being thrown into the deep end of a Saharan summer. A quick look revelled the chain was as tight as a bow string. On this trip I was experimenting running a non-o-ring chain dry to avoid oily sand wrecking the seals. I can tell you now that was a bad idea. years later rode a BM in Morocco with an o-ring that got plastered in sand and even with daily oiling it needed adjustment once in 4000 miles.
Modern chains are incredible, but back then I was worried my hyper-taught chain and bouncing suspension – three times longer than any CD200 had imagined in its worse malarial dream – might rip out the engine sprocket and ping it across the desert floor. I soothed the creaking chain with engine oil and watched it sag before my eyes. Now it was way too slack but the AJS frame had some nutty eccentric swingarm pivot like 1970s Ducatis which was a faff to adjust in the state I was in. I was out of water and the mercury was again pushing at the end of the dial. Just as I’d panicked when my XT500 had leaked away half its fuel on the way to Niger in ’82, I felt the compulsion to flee towards shelter so rode on to Arak just a few miles down the road, with a slap-slapping chain.
Relieved that I’d just caught the bike in time, I decided to remount the barred blacktop under repair to save any extra strain on the transmission. The gorge walls of Arak rose up ahead but then the tar suddenly took on a darker shine and I sunk into a sludge of thick, freshly laid bitumen as the gutless Benele lurched to a crawl. I yanked on the single carb to spur the slug onward, the tyres pushed a trench through the oily slush and bitumen sprayed across the mudguards with a clatter of sticky gravel. What a mess. I steered off the unset mush and continued to the roadhouse, hoping my tar trench would melt back smooth, like divided custard.
Now safely at the roadhouse I crouched in the shade clutching a drink and looked forward to a rest before the final stage on to the Cone Mountains, 100km down the road and just where the desert landscape begins to bet interesting. As I pondered my near miss with wrecking the bike, an army jeep pulled up, two guys jumped out and marched up to me.
‘Is this your moto?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why did you drive on the closed road!’ I may have pathetically tried to play dumb until they pointed our the sticky black splat coating the undersides of my bike. ‘I am sorry. I was panicking. You see my chain was…’ ‘Did you not see the signs ‘Road Closed? and the stones blocking the road’ ‘Yes. Sorry. Look I will go back and repair it myself’, I reasoned, thinking I could smooth it all back with a plank of wood. ‘Shut up! You will pay for this. Give me your passport!’
One of them snatched it out of my had and they stormed off back to the fort in a flurry of wheel-spin. The other people in the roadhouse looked down at me with the pity of one who was rightly in the dog house, gagged up and tied down. Another heat-frazzled wannabe adventurer disrespecting locals regs. There began my three day ‘hut arrest’ in Arak.
My detention hut in Arak
Everything I had was hot all the time. Nothing had cooled down for days. As I unpacked my stuff I found candles had drooped into Dali-esque blobs and weirder still, opening a tin of luncheon meat or ‘Spam’, the contents poured out like water, flecked with pink particles of fat-saturated gristle. I’ve not eaten that stuff since! I spent the days reading J. P. Donleavy or chatting with other similarly heat-struck bikers passing through, while dust storms periodically ripped through the gorge. By night it was just too hot inside the hut, so I slept outside in what little breeze there was. Even then, I’d wake up once in a while with my lips and throat parched fit to crack, and struggle to remoisten my mouth from the water bottle.
As the days passed I knew I was running out of time to visit my goal: the mini massif I now know as Sli Edrar (left). Then one morning the jeep returned and my passport was returned with nothing more than an admonition no to do it again. Ashamed of my stupidity, I’d got off lightly and vowed to oil the chain as often as it damn well liked. I packed my ragged bags and set off on the 1000-mile ride back to Algiers port where a boat left in four days time
A day or so later I wasn’t feeling well. I got past In Salah and was lightheaded, stumbling and weak. Just up ahead was the climb back onto the dreaded Tademait plateau, not a place I wanted to tackle in the shape I was in. So halfway up the switchback climb I pulled off the road and crawled into the shade of a metre-high culvert. What was wrong with me? I was surely drinking enough: 10 litres a day and a couple more by night. Then it struck me. Water was not enough. I needed to ingest salt and other essential minerals flushed out in my sweat which evaporated unseen. That must be it. I made myself a salty-sugary drink and lay back while it took effect, wary that this was just the sort of place snakes and scorpions might also like to pass a siesta. Despite, or perhaps because of my dozy state, I clearly thought a picture of my other camera on a tripod would be a fitting souvenir of my in-culvert recuperation.
The drink did the trick and revived and I set off across the Tademait, tensed up in readiness for something bad to happen – a piece of the sky falling on my head, perhaps? Nagging me were the 1100km that still lay between me and the Algiers boat that left in two day’s time. It was time to put some miles in. For once the 400-km crossing of the the Tademait passed without event and which in itself felt creepy. I filled up in El Golea and another 250 clicks got me past Ghardaia, the gateway to the Sahara. Only now it was late afternoon, time for the headwinds to kick up. At times the feeble motor strained to reach 25mph while I crouched over the bars, crippled with stiffness, watching the odometer numbers click by in slow motion.
By now the UV had seen paper-thin Times delivery bag had fallen apart. I lashed it to the bike with a piece of plank and some nice 7mm climbing rope. Around Berriane the wind sucked in a dust storm and visibility dropped to a few feet. I edged to the side of the road, wondering what would be thrown at me next and if I should get off the road altogether, not least because cars still rushed past me, confident that whatever risk they took, it was OK because All Was Written. By Laghouat I’d caught up with myself and had taken a good 1000-km chunk out of the map. I unclawed my hands from the ‘bars and tracked down the only hotel in town. But the uppity ponce behind reception had no room for the likes of me, so I rode out to some edge-of-town wasteland more suited to my kind. As I slumped against a litter-strewn, shit-riddled ruin, an old guy living in a cardboard hovel I’d not even noticed hailed me over.
I’d never actually met a regular Algerian civilian before. He invited me in and we chatted as well we could while his unseen wife prepared a meal. He proudly told me how he’d fought in the recent Western Sahara war against Morocco (Algeria lost that one), and when the time came I was invited to sleep on his living room carpet. Sadly, it turned out to be agonisingly flee-ridden and try as I might, I could not drop off as another bug took a jab. I moved out into the donkey yard but it was too late, the fleas had latched on and in turn went on to infest my lovely old mattress back in my London squat for many months. I did everything I could to delouse it, repeated dousing of flea powder and even gently torching it with hairspray and a lighter. But as the flames licked over it, those Algerian bloodsuckers just yawned and sharpened their mandibles. Eventually I had to chuck it.
Thanks to the killer, 12-hour, day from Arak, only 400kms remained. I was well on target for the boat the day after tomorrow,. After a week of relentless day and night heat, the temperatures finally began to drop as I rose back into the Atlas mountains north of Ain Oussera. Unready to face the congested capital, I bought myself a roadside melon and bounced over some roadside scrub down into a ditch, stalled the bike, and passed the night there.
Another big mistake. I’d carelessly left the ignition on (something I’ve caught myself doing since, when dirt camping). Next morning the battery was as dead as roadkill and, try as I might, no amount of jump starting could get the Benele going.
It was just 100km to the port and hours before the ferry left. I pushed the bike into a layby, made a sign ‘Alger port SVP’ and eventually two kind blokes responded to my plea and loaded the Benele into their pickup. ’What’s with all this tar all over the bike?’ Don’t ask, mon brave… Following a battery acid transfusion and a cafe noire injection in Medea, I was good to go. I spun down the Atlas bends into Algiers and blundered my way to the port gates. I was late but so was the ferry.
Even today I can tell you: nothing beats the feeling of a ferry steaming away from a North African port. Did I say that already about the 1982 trip? Well it was even more true in 1984 and on most years since. Let Somali pirates steal us to their thorny lairs; let sudden storms hail down brimstone and flip the ferry. I was out of Algeria. Yippey–I-yay!
A day later the boat docked in Marseille. It was probably Friday, I had to be back at work on Monday. So I’m still not sure what possessed me to make a casual visit to the Bol d’Or 24-hour endurance race set for that weekend nearby, at Le Castellet raceway, except that Bike magazine had enshrined it as a biker’s rite of passage – France’s one-day equivalent of the Isle of Man or Daytona, as much a moto-carnival as a race spectacle. I rode in and watched the 3-man teams flip their slick tyred UJM’s from bend to bend and also enjoyed some baffled looks at my odd bike, battle scarred from its recent desert detour. The trail-bike loving Frenchies who went on to buy more Ténérés than anyone at least would get some like Le Bénélé.
Setting of down the Mistral straight
I even had the presence of mind to check out #53 on an RD500LC popping in for a fill up. I bet the team spent more time filling that tank than he did on the track.
But my abiding memory from the ’84 Bol was a vision of my desert biking future. In fact it was a future that was already two years old, and its name was Yamaha. XT600Z. Ténéré. On the Sonauto Yamaha stand was TT-Z Dakar factory racer looking slick in the sexy, pale blue Gauloise livery which we never got in the UK. It has it all: 55-litre tank, discs all round, 12-volt lights and a side stand as long as a pool cue. Even if the road-going XT-Z was less extreme, what was not to like? My Bénélé joke-bike had been a cocky imbecile’s two-fingers flicked at the Yam. Why? Search me but 30 years later I found myself engaged in a similarly pointless project.
OK, I concede. The Tenere ticked all the boxes, but it had been fun doing it my way. I’m sure there’s some pithy Armenian proverb that spells it all out, something like: ‘The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow‘. Actually that’s William Blake as quoted in Dead Man movie.
Anyway, a Tenere could (and did) come later, right now It was time for the final haul, another 1100 clickety-clicks to Calais and a boat back to the UK. I spent that night in some slug-riddled fores and Sunday morning saddled up bright and early to get a good run up for the ferry ramp. Tonight I’d be back home, but as I’ve learned so well over the years: it’s never over till it’s over. I don’t know where I was – the middle of France somewhere – but within an hour or two of setting off a slate-grey death cloud crawled up onto the horizon, unzipped itself with a shrug and proceeded to empty its bladder straight in my face. My desert desiccated leathers soaked up what they could, before dutifully passing it onto my next layer of clothing, until within just a few minutes I was a sodden spongebag of saturated rags.
Splashing through a village, I overcame my reserve, swung into a farmyard and rode the bike into a barn. Inside was an old steam powered lettuce thrasher. There I slumped, dripping on a workbench, exhaustion welling up from the previous fortnight’s moto mania. I was dropping off and ready to tip over in a heap when the farmer wandered in and said coolly: ‘Fatiguée, eh?’ Damn right mon ami. I perked up with glazed eyes and luckily looked the part of a road-weary, waterproof-scorning wayfarer, rather than some deviant trespasser. He let me be.
By late afternoon the P&O disgorged me at the end of the A2 which reeled me back into London. Spinning along at 45-50, clogging up the inside lane, I snapped this defiant shadow shot as I went by.
Back home, what the Germans call the durchfall began to form, as my shrunken stomach reacted violently with longed-for snacks. My drenched leather coat fell to the floor with a thud and I was surprised to see there were still dry patches on some parts of my clothes. I had just enough energy left in me to glare at the camera and snarl like an alcoholic on New year’s Day: No more sodding motorbikes! Ever again! Well, not until 8am tomorrow, that is.
This is part one of a bonus chapter which does not appear in the book.
You’d think I’d have learned something after my 1982 Saharan fiasco on the XT500. Well I did. Despite it all, I was still fascinated by the Sahara and wanted to go back and do it properly this time. When it was good it was epic and other-worldly, and if you came from one of the less edgy suburbs of South London, the Sahara made quite an impression: nature stripped back to its raw bones of sand and rock. Across it lay the frail ribbon of road they called the Trans Sahara Highway which I’d ridden off the very end of a couple of years earlier on the XT.
By 1984 I’d settled for an easy way of despatching for a living: working long but steady hours for a London typesetting outfit, delivering advertising copy on the one mile between Holborn and the West End. (You can read all about that and a whole lot more in The Street Riding Years.) There was no longer a need to ride an IT250 or a 900SS should you get sent to the other side of the country on a wet Friday evening. For this job a dreary commuter bike was sufficient. And none came drearier than Honda’s CD200 Benly twin (below left), a single-carbed commuter ridden by stoical Benlymen. Riding up to 12 hours a day on a hyper-dull CD can drive you a bit crazy at 24 years of age.
Honda CD200 Benly
AJS Stormer 370
Knowing I was into dirt bikes, a mate put me on to a mate flogging an AJS 370 Stormer (right) for fifty quid. The Stormer was a vile, shin-kicking British two-stroke motocrosser that was the polar extreme of the Benly. In a flash of brilliance which years ago had given birth to the Triton cafe racer cult, I figured I could marry the two and make something more desert rideable and less boring: a Benly-engined, MX-framed desert racer!
Over the summer of 1984 the machine took shape in my artfully appointed bike design studio in London’s literary Bloomsbury district. It took two goes to get a bike shop to correct the engine alignment mistakes of the former. But here it was, suspended by some Honda XL250S shocks as long as truncheons, and silenced by VW Beetle tailpipes, a cunning, lightweight trick you may recall from the BMW I rode with in Algeria in 1982.
Later on, the job was finished off with gearing more suited to horizontal applications, and an RD250 tank with a sexy ‘Moto Verte’ sticker so there’d be no mistaking what an international, Franchophilious guy I was. I took it out to the woods near Addington to see what it could do. The answer was similar to dragging a dead dog around on a lead. The VW pipes reduced the power at the rear wheel to quite possibly single figures. The foot of clearance needed a running jump to get on the bike. And the AJS conical hub brakes where a requirement by the then powerful Ambulance Drivers’ Union to ensure their members were never without work scraping Stormer riders off the sides of buildings.
Testing the Benele
I dubbed the bike a ‘Bénélé‘ in envious recognition of Yamaha’s near-perfect XT600Z Ténéré which I’d spotted in a Sydney bike shop a year earlier, and which was itself based on Yamaha’s Dakar Rally desert racers. More about them, later.
So what do you do with a dumb-arsed desert racer? You ride it to the Sahara of course, in a little less time than was available. You pack a 3500-mile trip to North Africa into two-weeks and you schedule it for September when you imagine peak summer temperatures are on the wane. This time there’d be no fear of enduring the mid-winter transit of Europe and the northern Sahara, as in 1982.
Sli Edrar – my destination in 1984 at 53mph
My goal that year was a mysterious massif of conical peaks which I’d passed by, south of Arak on my way to Tamanrasset in 1982 and which I’ve since learned is called Sli Edrar. The Bénélé’s top speed was no more than 53mph, and even at that speed it felt unsafe, should a squirrel run out in front of me. So to get a good run-up I rode straight from work on Friday night down to a mate’s in Canterbury, close to the port of Dover, ready to catch an early Dover ferry next morning.
Total
Gumby
By maintaining momentum, Monday night found me camped back among the magical limestone outcrops of Cassis, near Marseille, ready to hop on the ferry to Algiers the following morning.
Cassis
Windsurfeurs, Marseille
You can see I had an all-new soft luggage set up. No more sawn-off chemical tins poorly lashed to Dexion racking. This time I had a small canvas pannier hanging on one side where a 10-litre jerrican slipped in; a thin cotton Times newspaper delivery bag dangling off the other with 10 litres of water, and an over-huge tank bag which sat on the flat-topped RD tank. A sleeping bag in front of the headlight – Easy Rider style – kept the bugs off the Benly headlight. Cunningly, I lashed a tool bag with other heavy items under the lofty engine. If my mass had been any more centralised I’d have become a Black Hole right there and then.
My first memory of Algeria that year was being a little unnerved that as far north as El Golea it was already 35°C by 9am. If you live in Yuma that’s probably no big deal in September, but for a South London boy it was a bit of a shock. I filled up in in town and set off across the Tademait plateau which had spooked me on my first transit in ’82. The town (or anything) was 400km away. I buzzed along at 9.8hp/hour and by early afternoon dust devils or mini tornadoes were whipping across the baking gibber to either side. I recalled how a mate said he’d been knocked off his XS650 by one in Turkey earlier that year.
I was already tired, thirsty, sore and hot when up ahead what looked like a huge wall of sand hundreds of feet high hurtled right across the blacktop. Only as I neared it did I realise it was the mother of all whirlwinds, a huge cauldron of rotating sand. I turned the wick up and and the motor droned as I punched the Benele into the sand wall. Inside, all visibility was lost as grains pelted me from all directions and I struggled to keep upright or even know which way it was. And then, as I slipped into the windless eye of the maelstrom, the sand grains briefly turned into pelting raindrops. WT jolly old F was going on!? Search me but before I knew it, I’d blasted out of the tornado’s far wall, this time shoved left onto the roadside gravel. Now I knew how those roadsigns got flattened into the dirt…
Just as in 1982, the Tademait had terrorised me and I vowed I’d ride into the dark to be off the plateau before stopping. I rode into the dusk, pulling up briefly with the engine running to remove the sleeping bag off the headlight, before pushing on into the big switchback descent from the Tademait to the desert floor.
That night I stripped off and lay in the dirt by the bike, listening to what sounded like the oil boiling in the crankcases, hours after switching off.
I wasn’t hungry but I drank and drank and soon fell asleep where I lay. Tomorrow I was heading past In Salah, the hottest town in Algeria, before heading deeper into the Sahara.
Sahara Overland 