Category Archives: Maps & Nav

1985 Grand Erg Imps Trike Expedition Film

An enquiry revived memories of a 1980s Sahara ‘quad’ bike expedition across the Grand Erg Occidental in Algeria involving ‘Wheelie King’ Dave Taylor (left) and which I recalled was a bit of a cock up.
Then, a connection, Paul Blezard (below 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, I thought it was no more of a cock-up than my first Sahara trip or three which routinely set out with equally over-ambitious goals and inappropriate equipment. The ferryman must be paid a few times before you venture across the sand seas.
But after posting this page I read Paul’s forthright accounts published in the biking press (below; Bike 1985; more to come). Yes indeed it was a rolling calamity from start to finish, led by poor planning, preparation and logistics, followed by opportunistic thefts and irksome breakdowns leading to subterranean morale among the harried support crew. It might not have been helped by, as Blez calls him, ‘Mr Pratt’s’ leadership style. As Paul wrote for Trials & Motocross News (TMX) around Christmas 1985, just after the film aired:

To sum up, the first successful east-west crossing of the Grand Erg Occidental, as the TV film proclaimed, was only really successful in that no-one died and the trikes came out of it still running well.

Never mind the C4 doc. Blezard tells it like it was in *Bike* mag.

The adventure was the idea of the late Roy Pratt MBE, a former military policeman and army display rider. Now a social worker, he founded the Imps charity in 1970, a youth motorcycle display team (left), like the adult White Helmets of that time. Pratt sought to rehabilitate and inspire disadvantaged east London boys with his two-wheeled initiative.
After over 50 years, in 2025 the Imps charity closed down in accordance with Roy Pratt’s last wishes and soon after his death, aged 86. During that time well over 2000 boys from as young as six 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 issues with inherent unstability saw them 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 when too deviating sharply from a straight line, leading to countless injuries, deaths and law suits. By 1988 new sales were banned in the US (or production was voluntarily suspended) by which time better turning quads had gained a foothold – but without trapping your actual foot.

Despite being geared to only reach 45mph, the tubeless-tyred 250s used by the Imps would certainly have offered great traction in sand without a motorbike’s need for momentum to avoid getting bogged. Roy Pratt must have encountered the phenomenon at its peak and like many, assumed three wheels were safer and easier to ride than two. He was not alone: as Paul Blezard wrote, that year three riders entered Honda ATCs in the Dakar Rally (#156, #157 and #158). All were ATC dirt racing pros who’d mastered the all-or-nothing skid-steering technique mentioned in the F9 vid above to get the trikes to corner on all three wheels. One racer, Paul Bonnet, even squeezed what may have been an XR600 motor into his trike (below). None of the Dakar trikers got any further than the Algeria-Niger border which was already 2000km over just four days of flat-out riding across the desert. But then again, of the 135 bikes which entered the Dakar in ’85, only 25 made it to the Senegalese capital.

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 former Imps to be the first to cross the width of the Grand Erg Occidental – 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 challenge, until reality whacks them in the face like a garden rake. Like an avalanche slope, 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. The paradoxical need to maintain speed in a 4×4 to avoid getting bogged (and the laborious digging which follows), must be balanced with going slowly enough to spot and navigate over slip faces which can be invisible at certain sun angles. Once inadvertently airborne on a moto, very often it’s a tumbling machine that causes the injury. In a car it’s the impact of a nose-dive or fully somersaulting while battered by loose items. Above left: way too fast: vehicle destroyed, driver lucky to be alive. Above right: relatively harmless fall roll over descending a slip face a little too briskly and at an angle. No harm done.

Probable route as interpreted from watching the film. Inset bottom left: fantasy route from the doc.

The Imps’ original plan had been to plough west directly across the erg from El Golea to Beni Abbes like a fat-tyred Columbus. A distance of nearly 500km, as Paul wrote this would have required days of towing power-sapping trailers. Wisely, that plan was ditched before leaving the UK.
Apart from being a very long way, it would also have been ‘across the grain’ of the dunes’ SSW/NNE linear orientation, something that’s visible when zoomed in on sat imagery. We found that out for ourselves one morning in Egypt’s Great Sand Sea in 2000. Driving over successive dune cordons makes for extremely slow and at times risky progress (right). On that occasion we gave up and followed the inter-dune corridors south and out of the Sand Sea. It seems the Imps ended up doing the same during much of this trip.
After suffering a series of ongoing thefts, the unregistered trikes were now stuck in Algiers Customs. Early on in the doc and with group tensions and low morale already flagged up, Dave Taylor, a well known stunt rider turned motorcycle safety campaigner, presses Roy Pratt on contingency plans if things went wrong. With too much post-reality-TV cynicism, you wonder if it’s a genuine exchange or a staged conflict set up by the TV people. Reading Paul’s accounts, it was almost certainly the former – and was just the tip of the tottering iceberg.
All the support cars towed trailers for the trikes, but even an unhitched 4×4 would have struggled to reach, let alone keep up with the trikes in the dunes. So two C4 TV cameramen followed the Imps on their own ATCs, one towing a small trailer. You imagine they had a story of their own to tell at the end of it all.

The four-vehicle convoy merely followed the Timimoun road south of the erg. I’d ridden that road three years earlier until I ran out of fuel. The dunes were unseen, far to the north.
On top of everything else, we’re told radios were playing up as radios do, putting the Imp support cars even further from being able to offer assistance. Instead, there was talk of burning tyres at pre-arranged times, as well as flashing mirrors. Both were possibly set-ups for the TV because at any point all the trikes had to do was head south to the nearby road.
I was thrilled to see three new 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. With the Peugeot 504’s solid reputation in the desert, I’d 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. From what Paul wrote later, it sounds like I made the right choice. 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.

The team had flown directly to Ghardaia and after a mooch around the market (‘ain’t no gews nowhere…’) and with the bikes released from Customs, they based themselves outside of El Golea before setting off along the erg’s southeastern perimeter towards semi-abandoned Fort Mac Mahon.
From here they continued west along the Meguidene gravel plain (see yellow map below), ending up riding alongside the road to Timimoun because the trikes were struggling but not road legal. On the way they suffered a staggering ’27 punctures’ resulting in a 16 hour day, but as Paul wrote, they’d forgotten the vital plugs which makes tubeless tyre repairs so effortless, providing you have a compressor. Desert sand soon ruins foot pumps, as I’d also found myself in ’82.

Once in Timimoun (where in ’82 I got dropped off after a creepy lift late night lift, having left my bike in the desert), the Duneriders move up to El Hadj Guelmane oasis, in the erg north of town. After two long days having punctures repaired, this was the last point where Pratt managed to get a fix out of his sat nav, as it’s claimed the trikes lacked the battery power to fire it up. I didn’t know there was land-based sat 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 (left) resembles a Navstar unit.

Judging by the film, it seems only from El Hadj Guelmane that the trikes – we’re told without even working odometers so unable to record distance – get stuck into 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. In dunes like this the Big Reds’ 12-litre tanks would have given the 250s about a 300km range, plus another 300 from a jerry.

This whole area north of Timimoun is fascinating, 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 (above), which looks like something from a fantasy film set.

IGN maps NH30 ‘Bechar’ and NH31 ‘Ouargla’. Probable actual route shown

Dead Reckoning into the Erg
Initially we’re told the Imps follow a bearing of 290° then 285° (~WNW), possibly aiming for Hassi ben Taleb. At the end of that 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 sat-nav 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 this marked well being a destination, it’s amazing to think they might have covered the 90km of dead reckoning through the dunes and got so close. Of course they might have been anywhere in the GEO, and Taleb as a destination is just my guess.

Unless you know better dead reckoning – estimating a position from just a bearing held 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 then spells out the impossibility of accurately estimating their position after all the zig-zagging to find rideable passages.
Their key nav aid would have been knowing the N6 highway was just a couple of hours to the southwest, albeit through possibly massive dunes. These can appear daunting, but are actually easier to manage 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 terrace. 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. After two days they’d supposedly run out of food, despite Pratt’s baffling instruction telling the support crew to wait eight days before coming to help. You wonder if Roy & the Imps could see the writing on the slip faces: this sort of riding was not sustainable. Although it’s not evident on sat imagery, the IGN map above (and which Pratt had) shows a band of even higher dunes blocking their way to Beni Abbes.
But it’s a happy ending as the riders appear right on schedule, having bailed from the Erg and headed for the road, maybe because of– or just before another accident. We’re told they hit the N6 about 80km from Beni Abbes, so just northwest of Kerzaz (below).

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

The film can’t disguise that in the end, by mostly tracking the erg’s southern perimeter, the Imp’s 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’ll remember to this day.

Night out on Mt Tiska

Mauritania: The Railway Piste (400km)

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Nearly 20 years after I last drove it, Mauritania’s 400-km Railway Piste is becoming an Overlander’s Thing. If nothing else, it remains a short-cut from the coast to the interesting Adrar highlands east of Atar and is of course a desert adventure in itself. The alternative is twice the road distance via Nouakchott by which time people lose interest in Mauritania and carry on down to Dakar. There is now an asphalt short-cut via Benichab saving 200km (see map below). If the Railway Piste is your first spell on Saharan sands, it can be a drop in the deep end, especially for heavily laden motos.

While navigation in either direction is straightforward with the rail track either in sight or never far to the north, it can still be hard work as you cross the successive cordons of the Anezal dunes in the east before you reach the road at Choum, 400km east of Bou Lanouar, and 115km north of Atar. Note the easiest way to access the piste from the west end is off the N2 about 10km southeast of Bou Lanouar.

Some say the terrain gets easier further south from the tracks, but there’s no way of dodging the long bands of dunes in the east. They are mostly low, rolling mounds, not full-on crested dunes, but the soft sand, occasional drop-offs, ruts and heat will work you and your engine hard. In whatever direction, you just have to plough on, seeking out the easiest tracks or terrain. Riding a bike between the rails on sleepers (above; video) doesn’t always work as they’re buried in sand or thick rubble (below).

Alone on a moto this is quite a step if you’ve just cruised down the balmy Atlantic Highway through Morocco. It’s a lot hotter down here and riders have crashed or burned out and needed rescuing or escorting out. Even with the easy nav, think twice about tackling it alone on a heavy bike. You can buy drum fuel and water from the shantytowns alongside the track marked on the map above.
North of Ben Amira village (KM360), the granite monoliths of Ben Amira are well worth an excursion, though don’t stray too far north to the PFZ border. And don’t expect Choum to be any kind of Shangri-La, though there is fuel and an auberge here.

Cooling off in late October on the way to Choum

They say the ore train linking Nouadhibou port with the iron mines inland at Zouerat no longer off-loads vehicles at Choum, where it can stop for just a few minutes westbound when full. Motorbikes have been quickly manhandled on and off. Otherwise you might load or off-load a car at Zouerat (12–16hrs), even though asphalt now extends there from Choum. SNIM has no formal reservation system, booking website or even a station. There will be a yard at each end with a ramp.

Coming up from Atar and riding the loaded ore train as a passenger between Choum and Nouadhibou has also becoming popular with youtubers (below). You’ll find loads of self-agrandizing vids on social media. There’s even a backpackers’ guide to Mauritania now, as well as organised tours using rudimentary sleeper wagons, while the hardcore huddle on the mineral wagons for free, choking on iron ore dust. Bring a Covid mask.

Michelin 742 Morocco (2024) map review

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See also:
Morocco Maps
Reise Know-How 2023

In a line
Well after 14 editions the paper feels thicker but in the south much detail remains missing or well over a decade out of date.

Cheap
Big (1 x 1.5m)
Detailed key in many languages
Intuitive 1:1m scale
Doesn’t need batteries

So out of date in the south it’s not funny anymore

Big and 1.3 m wide, but years out of-date

Review
Michelin the best map for Morocco, right? Not for many years, I’m afraid, unless you’re following the main highways. The late 2024 edition’s paper feels thicker – an age-old complaint. You also get five sub-regions at 600k scale.
Plus points are the intuitive 1:1m scale, clear Michelin design and the fact that it goes right down to Laayoune which means you can view all of Morocco 4’s routes on one sheet – except that I’d guess less than half on them exist on this map. And at from £6.50 in the UK, it’s cheap. 
But many easily navigable market roads and tracks mentioned in my M4 book or on the digital maps below are missing, and some roads and tracks either don’t exist or get misleading prominence. In places this data is nearly 20 years out of date so once you get far of road, it’s unusable.

Jebel Saghro: nothing to see here – at least on the Mich 742

Look at a region like Jebel Saghro (above) about which complete piste guides have been published (and which in Morocco 4 get 32 pages and 11 routes). On the Mich map even the main roads is incomplete.

You’d think one day they’ll go all out and improve the 742, like RK-H did in 2019. That has not happened for years at Michelin. Perhaps the best thing to do with the latest Mich 742 is mark the many, many missing roads and pistes from other sources all on one big and inexpensive map to become a handy reference to what is possible and where. That’s what I’ll probable do with mine.

The Seven Passes of the Issil Plain

Moroccan Sahara – Are we there yet?

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To paraphrase the cop addressing Jack Nicholson’s character at the end of Chinatown:
‘Forget it Jake, it’s the internet.’

Exactly where does the iconic and eminently Instagramable majesty of Sahara start in Morocco? Like Keyser Söze, is it even there at all?
Years ago I came across an internet forum argument on the now defunct LP Thorn Tree (I gave my 2ç then left them to it). There, a couple of know-alls lambasted the callow innocents daring to enquire where they could ‘see the Sahara in Morocco’ – in most cases referring to the famous Erg Chebbi dunes. ‘I told you: there is no Sahara in Morocco!’. All concerned have now migrated to TripAdvisor from where the quotes below were copied. It staggers me that some of these individuals can assert their unsubstantiated beliefs with such conviction, but such are the times. According to one of TA’s wise owls, ‘Erg Chebbi is not in Sahara, desert it is but not Sahara‘. So the Sahara is ringed by an unnamed desert that is not the Sahara?

… neither … Erg Chebbi/Erg Chigaga are the Sahara. For that you need to head to Western Sahara.
Ok, we know that but we want just see Sahara and ride camel
The limit of the Sahara is classified by the limit of the Date Palms
the Sahara,… lies 100 km or more to the south in Algeria.
Although not part of the Sahara , the dunes are pretty amazing.
It also corresponds to the 100mm isohyet in the north and the 150mm isohyet in the south. Long term average rainfall. A further definition is where the evaporation potential exceeds the presipitation [sic].
I don’t care what “Sahara” means. I am talking about the actual geographical boundaries of the area. And your definition of those boundaries is as incorrect and misleading as that of the ridiculous tour companies’ one.
Erg Chebbi is not in Sahara, desert it is but not Sahara. If you by reading see on website about Sahara tour, then it is only marketing to attract customers. But Sahara begin first in Algeria or you have to go to the South of Guelmim, to Western Sahara.
Here we go again with the “Erg (Chebbi/Chiggaga) is not the Sahara” brigade. What’s wrong with you? What’s a few hundred miles between friends? Jesus H. Christ.
May I just make one thing clear? You will not be travelling through the Sahara desert until you have gone south of La’ayoune. References to the Sahara in other places such as Erg Chebbi and so on are simply concoctions dreamt up by tour companies to fool their victims into thinking that they have been to the Sahara – they haven’t. To the east, the Sahara starts way over the other side of the border, deep into Algeria.
the Sahara if [sic] 100’s of kilometers away from the big dune areas over the border in Algeria and not in Morocco [continues] ... [Chebbi] is more spectacular than any of the places in the Moroccan Sahara that I have visited.

This knotty problem of the Sahara’s precise extent may be unique to Morocco. You start with the very concept’s compelling mystique. It’s hard to think of other wilderness regions that conjure up such strong imagery and notions, maybe because it’s so close to Europe compared to other iconic wastelands.
Then you mix in the unceasing clash between gullible bucket listers wanting to definitively tick off the Sahara – and devious local tour ops who promise the earth and deliver a turd. One wily tour agency has even managed to insert themself as a ‘reference’ on Wiki’s ‘Sahara desert (ecoregion)’ page.
This seems to be the angled grinder which the naysayers above fixate on: if some Moroccan cat in an oversized cheche strolls up and says ‘Hello my friend. Come, we will drink tea with nomads and I will show you Sahara’, you can expect to be a little disappointed.

As with all geographical features (seas, mountains, etc), it’s tempting but futile to apply fixed boundaries to their precise extent, as if they were a country. Where exactly does the Southern Ocean become the Atlantic? Where does the Karakoram become the Himalaya, or the High Atlas become the Anti Atlas for that matter (along the N10 highway, of course!).

It’s the same with hot deserts, commonly defined as arid regions with less than 100mm of average annual precipitation. Unlike a sea shore, there can be no finite edges identifying this change in rainfall; to imply otherwise would be absurd. In this way the NOAA map (above) is rather more nuanced, showing blurred transitions, not fixed isohyets (rainfall contours) between regions. Both the hard-edged yellow and red maps below could benefit from the same idea.

According to this ridiculous website, (sadly, the first that popped up on my Google) it appears to rain every other day in Merzouga/Erg Chebbi. (The ‘sea temperature’ there gets pretty balmy too – or maybe they mean ‘sand sea’).
This source for Merzouga looks rather more plausible: 65mm. Another estimates 53mm. yet another 172mm. This French Wiki gives 59mm. Let’s assume it’s not Kew Gardens down there and it comes in under a 100 mil most years.

Another map with a red zone straying over the Moroccan border. Can’t be right! Source

Archway into the desert, south of Guelmim (iirc)

Not all accept the level of aridity as a definition (‘I don’t care what “Sahara” means…‘), but they don’t cite any sources to explain their assertions about the Sahara’s boundaries. Instead, some of the TA dolts avow the Sahara lies ‘100km south of Erg Chebbi’ (ie: in Algeria). Others insist ‘200 miles’ from Chebbi. Final answer: ‘100’s of kilometers away’. Some even proclaim they magically entered the Sahara at Guelmim in western Morocco because ‘it is officially known as ‘The Gateway to the Sahara’’, surely a bald, tourist-oriented claim in a town famously thick with faux Tuaregs.

Others insist that, to be in the Sahara in Morocco, you must go ‘beyond Layounne’ (left), a fairly boring road trip, even for a dedicated bucketeer. What will they see on the way there? It may look like a desert, walk like a desert and quack like a desert, but it sure won’t be the Sahara!
No matter – give it a few decades because it’s said the climate in Morocco will see the Sahara creep over the berm and into Morocco.

You can see why some of your forum know-alls get cynical, myself included, even if I believe they’re dying on the wrong hill on this one. Lately, some canny marketing has designated an area of eroded wasteland ever so conveniently close to Marrakech’s gated resorts as ‘the Agafay Desert’ or ‘le petit Sahara’ which ‘extends over several hundred acres’.
There you can do all your favourite deserty things: sip tea in a tent, wear a cheche or ride camels, quads and 4x4s across a landscape where the barren rounded hillocks of dried mud resemble dunes. Insta heaven!

Some academics have sought to reclassify the liminal sweep in question as the ‘North Saharan steppe and woodlands‘. Aka: the edge of the Sahara where things gradually become less arid, like the Sahel in the south. But looking at the zone on the map below, ‘woodland’ is not a word which springs to mind. The band encompasses the vast Grand Erg Oriental spreading across Algeria (left) and southern Tunisia – about as Saharan an expanse anyone could wish for which would swallow up hundreds of Chebbis. The only woodland here is of the petrified fossil variety, west of Hassi bel Guebbour.

Me? Having travelled much of the Sahara over the last five decades, if you pushed me blindfolded out the back of a Hilux behind Erg Chebbi and removed the hood, I’d get up, smell the air, squint at the sun and guess I was in the Sahara. It may transpire to be the edge of the Sahara in boring old Marrokie, because vegetation and rainfall change in a very short distance (by Saharan standards) in the mountains to north.
But from Chebbi south and west along the Algerian border all the way to Tan Tan, it all resembles the Sahara I’ve seen – often dreary, sometimes epic, often barren, vegetated in patches, hyper arid elsewhere – all the way from Mauritania’s Adrar plateau to the Selima Sand Sheet (left) close to the Nile.

Camels? Dunes? Palms? What else could be be?

If anything, Erg Chebbi is just too darn Saharan for school and so has become one trampled terminus of Morocco’s Axis of Tourism, a quad-busting desert resort. I avoid the place. Over the years the pretty cluster of dunes at the end of the road has become choked with desert camps, kasbah-hotels, a few opportunist sharks and us tourists doing the dunes by various means.
In that sense it is very much not what I know of the real Sahara, but caught right, Chebbi can still be an amazing sight for a desert first timer. You’re on the very edge of the Sahara. Which side you’re on is up to you.

Dacia Duster rental in Morocco 2

In November the Mrs flew in between my moto tours and we hired another Morocco-built Duster from Medloc Marrakech to scout routes for the M4 book, covering the western corner of Morocco to the Atlantic and within an hour of Smara. Only this time they had a 2023 model with just 14,000km on the clock, but still just €65 a day – about half the price of a Toyota TXL.
For more on the rental experience and my unchanged pros and cons, read Duster 1 from earlier this year when we drove a 100,000-km far, but got little done due to preceding rains having damaged many roads and tracks. By the time we got this newer model all the tracks we tried to do and more were in great shape, and so were able to push the car less hard.

A Duster can restore you cynicism in the SUV craze by having genuinely utility on regular tracks (but see below), plus enough power to sit at 130kph on the desert highway – as fast as you’d want to go with camels roaming about. At the same time it’ll reliably do up to 45mpg or 15kpl giving a massive 800km range. And these modern diesels are quite amazing: torquey, quiet and nippy. With an auto box it would have been even better.

On our one the air-con actually cooled properly which was a relief, the switches and dash have been re-organised, but the fitted satnav was bogus. Yes there was a map displaying our position on an unnamed road or track most of the time, but there was no other info at all and no routing function. This confused us until we read you have to visit the Renault (Dacia’s owners) website to download a map/app? onto a USB stick or some such. You couldn’t even pair a smartphone screen (or we failed). Be warned: unless we got something wrong you will need your own nav device. We had my Garmin Montana, as well as a more readable Samsung tablet running Gaia maps (above). I did happen to have my music on a USB stick and that system worked intuitively, through the speakers are not the best.There was music pairing off one iPhone too.

Toyota’s Prado TXL is the other main 4×4 rental in Morocco but tough though it may be by reputation, the autos can be comparatively portly slugs and unless lifted (left), are also bottom scrapers.
As it is, I’d not be surprised if the 1.5 litre, 110-hp 6-speed TD Duster has a superior power to weight ratio than a TXL. It certainly takes off and overtakes effortlessly out on the road and handles bends well thanks to anti-roll bars. Only for deep sand or exceedingly rocky climbs – rare or avoidable in Morocco – might a Prado’s Low Range be needed.

Within hours we got a flat on the ropey Tizi n Test road, luckily just as we stopped in Ijoukak for supplies and close to a tyre repair shop. This was a bit worrying on the road; were the Continental tyres cheapies? I had the means to plug flats with a spike/worm, but better to get a shop to remove a tyre and vulcanise a patch from the inside.

We had another flat in Tan Tan Plage which needed the spare fitting to drive to the tyre shop. This spare is speed limited to 120kph which seems fast enough, and looked the same size tyre, but on a steel rim.
Note that the scissor jack has only just enough reach to lift the rear, and be careful about positioning it correctly until the metal sill, not the plastic trim.

Off road obviously you take it easy in a rental when alone in the desert. So many SUVs, even AWDs have disastrous frontal overhangs but I never scraped the front or rear bumpers driving in and out of ditches or oueds. Same with the ramp clearance.
But as before, the ‘axle’ clearance is oddly not as good as it looks and you find yourself having to straddle ruts to one side (above) to maintain clearance. A full tank may not help, but we just had two bags in the back. As you can see below it’s quite tidy and nothing sticks out – it must be down to the plush suspension so you just need to slow down to limit compression and contact. We left the tyres are 2 bar road pressures.

The scraping was frequent until I got a feel for the clearance but the noise is probably amplified by the protection hardware, and we’re talking piled rocks, not solid impacts.
Dust crept into the covered boot space so the rear hatch door seal may not be so good. Had I remembered, I’d have done that trick of parking on a bank with one wheel in the air, then closed/opened a door to evaluate body twist as we did with th TXl a few months later. Door closing cleanly = good stiffness.

In 3000km I probably turned on ‘4WD Lock‘ for about 500 metres, mostly to spread traction while crawling out of stony oueds and on one sandy climb in the wastes of Western Sahara.

All up, I’d happily rent a Duster again from Medloc. If you have experience driving 4x4s effectively you soon recognise the limits of a Duster (largely no Low Range). If you’re new to off-road but want to go in hard, you might feel better in an automatic Toyota. Having done a few thousand kilometres in both over the last year, for normal road and track exploring, a Duster is more than adequate and better value for money.

Map review: Reise Know-How Morocco 1:1m (2023)

In a line
If you have the previous edition, save your money – this time round they’ve made more changes to the cover than the actual map itself.

Note: in December 2022 a traveller had his RKH map confiscated at the Ceuta border because it showed ‘Western Sahara‘ – (like all other paper maps, afaik). Actually the back cover (see below right) always gave the impression it is all Moroccan territory, but inside they mark the ‘Moroccan Wall’ and the Polisario ‘Free Zone’, which is correct and more detail than most maps, but might also get up the Moroccans’ noses.

For the very latest mapping digital, OSM updated by users (used by Garmin and many others) is useful. But not everyone gets on with digital maps which are far from perfect of accurate, At the planning stage you can’t beat a paper map spread out before you. Out of habit I routinely carry a 2019 RKH out there, though almost never refer to it now as i know all the southern roads. I have much more success finding unknown pistes as well as verifying newly sealed roads from aerial imagery.
As you can read here, the German Morocco Reise Know-How (RK-H) is one of the least bad paper maps for Morocco. It’s double-sided, the plastic paper is tear-proof and compact at 70 x 100cm, and it has an intuitive 1:1m scale (1mm = 1km). They also show both old/new road numbers which changed in 2018, but unlike Europe, this information is of little use in Morocco (* see bottom of page).
In 2023 RK-H published the 13th edition of this map. The big question is, given the amount of road-building going on in Morocco, is it a properly updated edition like the previous one, or just a new cover with a few updates, as Michelin like to do? The answer is that in the south there appear to be virtually no changes to the actual mapping in the 2023 edition.

What they say
Reise Know-How maps are characterized by particularly stable plastic paper that can be written on like paper, even with a pencil. The cardboard cover is detachable so that the card can easily be slipped into any pocket. A protective cover is not required. The cartographic presentation focuses on the most important information for travelers and is particularly easy to read. Colored elevation layers are used instead of hillshading.

Contour lines with elevation information
Colored elevation layers
Classified road network with distance information
Sightseeing features
Detailed local index
GPS accurate
degrees of longitude and latitude
Legend in five languages (German, English, French, Spanish, Russian)
Einklinker Western Sahara
Larger places also in Arabic script

With the 2023 edition laid out alongside my crumpled 2019, what’s new? The cover; that’s about it, but it does include a redesign of the back cover too! Even the decorative pictures on the northern side of the map are unchanged. I may have missed some of course, but a few minutes scanning familiar roads and pistes in the south brought up precisely two changes, maybe three. Everything else appears identical.

2019 – 2023; spot the difference. The notepad is tellingly blank.

1. What was a yellow ‘Secondary Road’ for Route ME4 (Korima Pass in Morocco Overland 3) has now changed to ‘Track’ although it was actually a ‘Gravel Road’ imo. It suggests a user’s correction was actioned, but ironically it’s now sealed up to KM41 or beyond. I bet there are many more sealed roads let alone tracks on the nearby Rekkam plateau.
2. Another former road they’ve admitted was a piste all along is the R704 (Route MH1) High Atlas crossing from Dades Gorge to Agoudal. Again, the irony is that piste is about to be sealed too!
Thirdly, down in WS in the bottom left corner they switched ‘Laayoune’ with ‘El Aioun’ on the main panel in line with the inset; it was probably a typo.

Elsewhere, right across the area I know well (not the north), pistes and even roads are still missing (Route MW6 to Labouriat) while many more pistes have become roads, in some cases over a decade ago, eg: Routes MW1/2/7 to Mseid; Route MH6 from Aguim as well as Routes MH7/8 south and west of Asakoun and Route MH4 Jebel Saro, etc, etc.
Old edition and new, Route MS6 (left) is shown as a secondary road all the way to the Sidi Ali Tafraoute (bafflingly shown as a well: ‘Hassi Fougani’ on the map). Imagine arriving at the notorious Rheris crossing in your campervan! But west of Sidi Ali they miss out the well-used track carrying on directly to Zagora just south of Oum Jrane. And I’ve just noticed in the WS panel on both editions they’ve shown the 1000-km Tindouf Route as sealed all the way (via the PFZ no less) to Zouerat, complete with bypass! No wonder Moroccan hats are confiscating this map at the border. You can understand them not keeping up with all the asphalting, but the practise of calling a piste a road is hard to fathom. Where do they get this information – QAnon?
These are just a few of the glaring errors that jumped out at me. There are loads more in the Anti Atlas, plus areas depicted as forest which are barren mountain hillsides and contour shading that jumps in 300- and then 600-metre stages. That means within one shade the elevation could change by nearly 2000 feet. Not a great map for push biking then.

To be fair the previous edition did appear to be a genuine update with tangible changes but this edition is near identical to its predecessor. And I know the Michelin equivalent follows the same practise of ‘cover updates’ and can be just as flawed, last time I looked. All the others maps for Morocco are even worse. Sadly, this appears to be the state of paper mapping in the early 21st century – the money no longer exists to update maps properly, nor even action users suggestions. Good thing then there is Morocco Overland with Updates & Corrections as well as the Horizons forum taking up the slack for the adventurous traveller. I gave the 2023 map away.

Got a 2019 edition? Save your money then.

* Are Moroccan road number even useful?
Unlike in the UK and Europe, in southern Morocco road numbers rarely appear on road signs, be they at junctions or showing distances. First photo is a positive example, below. So knowing – or wondering if – you’re on the R504 now called the RN4 will be near impossible to ascertain on the ground and therefor of little value. Of course a road sign saying ‘Foum Zguid 87 [km]’ will be what you want to know.
Infrequent and often weathered mileposts dating from the colonial era may show a road number. Example: the R203 Marrakech – Taroudant road via Tizi n Test, now called the RN7.
In most cases in the 2018 shake up, only the prefix changed so the ‘N10’ became the ‘RN10’ and so on, but elsewhere if there was a new number like the old N12 now called the RN17, I am fairly certain no one has since gone around Morocco updating mileposts and road signs.

Draw a GPS tracklog online for free

Fyi, I do this all on a desktop computer or a laptop at a pinch. It may well be possible on a mouseless smartphone or tablet but would drive me nuts.
Also, note this is a reliable but labour intensive procedure which may not align with modern ‘I-want-it-all-I-want-it-now’ sensibilities.

Particularly in the desert, these days aerial or satellite imagery from Google Maps and ESRI (Bing, etc) is so good you can spot passing vehicles and whether a road is sealed, a car track or even a little used donkey trail. This is the sort of age-sensitive information you won’t always get from maps, digital or printed.
When planning new off-road routes, I find tracing the probable orientation in advance helpful for all the obvious reasons. It also provides a good preview of the area and what features I might come across (mineral mines; climbs, gorges, junctions).

Using Google satellite mapping services, tracklogs can be drawn, saved and exported in two ways:
Using Google Earth Pro – no Google account needed but your annotated maps won’t be automatically saved online/in the cloud. I’ve drawn tracklogs using this method in Moroccan hotel rooms prior to setting off along remote tracks (above left), benefitting from the reassurance of knowing a track exists and where the key junctions are.
See the images and captions below for more.
Note: this is a reliable but labour intensive way of doing it but does not align with modern ‘I-want-it-all-and-I-want-it-now’ sensibilities. You can trace a route much more quickly off something like Garmin Basecamp using the ‘Create a Route’ tool. It takes seconds. But afaik Basecamp doesn’t have an all important satellite layer to verify against an actual track on the ground. Somethng like the subscription Gaia app can do this, but you have to pay.

**First: download Google Earth Pro (it’s free).**

Either **search** for your place or **zoom in** on your start point.
Now choose the **Ruler** in the **top tool bar** and then select **Path** (blanked out above when selected).
With your mouse **trace a path** click by click, point by point along the track you want along the ground.
The extent of precision is up to you. When you’ve finished, **Save**.

The tracklog your drew is saved. Now **right-click** and choose **Save Place As…**

It **saves as a .kml** or .kmz file (same difference, more or less).
You may now need to convert the Google .kml file format to **.gpx** to import into Garmin satnavs and smartphone/phablet nav apps.
**Garmin BaseCamp** (free) can do it, or use also free online converter like GPS Visualizer.
Import the .gpx into your device and you can now set off to navigate your MYO tracklog.

With a Google account (…@gmail, etc) you can save your routes on a Google ‘My Map‘ as has been done for the Trans Morocco Trail. It can have as much detail (tracklogs and waypoints) as you like, but Google ‘My Maps‘ are limited to about 10 layers. Layers are a bit like folders (with infinite capacity) and sometimes you have to shift tracklogs or waypoints into a pre-existing layer to free up a new layer so you can import more.
This map can be shared or exported but will be saved online and be viewable/editable wherever you have internet.

Open Google Maps and once signed in, **click the Menu** top left.

I already have **Saved** maps so look for **My Places** or **My Maps** and click.

In the sidebar click **Maps** and **Create New Map**.

You can give your map a **name and save**. Google **autosaves** every few seconds so long as there is internet.

You may also like to **Name** your first layer in your map and **Save**.

To trace a tracklog you need to **change the map’s base layer** to **Satellite**.

It looks like this – people often call this ‘Google Earth’ though that’s actually the app above.

If you don’t know where your start point is and it’s waypoint, use **Search**.
I chose Chenachen base, as close as I’m ever likely to get to this place.

It’s not strictly necessary, but click **Add to Map** to save your searched place as a waypoint.
You can also **add and name a waypoint** anywhere using the toolbar above (top arrow).
Useful for important junctions, I find.

Right-click and you can **edit a waypoint’s** Icon and Colour for better visibility and classification.

Now, to **draw a tracklog** along a desert track, click the **Draw** icon in the toolbar and choose ‘**Draw a line or shape**‘.

**Trace** the track with successive mouse clicks. As before, levels of precision are up to you.
Unless you are going cross-country there will be a clear track on the ground.

**Or, if the track is shaded** by Google, it means it is ‘**routable**‘.
You can **automatically trace it**, up to a point.
This method is much **less tedious but hard to control**.

**Click on a start point** on the shaded track. It will be saved as ‘Point A’.
A new ‘Driving’ layer (not ‘Import’) will be created.
Now **follow the track with the cursor**; it automatically highlights it in blue and keeps going as
long as it lasts. The problem is, the track may not go the way you are.

At the end click again on the track and ‘**Point B**‘ is created and the track’s directions are
saved as whatever Google calls it: ‘route sans nom’ in this case.

Click on the 3 dots and the **distance and other data** are shown.

You can **export this Driving Route** (not a hand-drawn track) by clicking the 3 dots
alongside the map’s name at the top. Choose the layer you want: ‘Directions from Route sans…
and it will save as a Google format **kml file** which you can then convert to .gpx to be read by
a GPS or non Google mapping.

Back to hand-drawn. Click the track’s end point to **Save** and give your track a **name**.

Again, you can edit your track’s **width and colour** to make it more visible on screen.

The contents (waypoints; tracks) of an individual layer can be saved and exported by clicking on the layer’s **3 dots sub menu**, choose **Export Data** and save as **KML/KMZ**.

**Download** your kml or kmz to the desktop.

The layer’s data is **downloaded** as a kml/kmz.

You can also **Share** your data online in various ways.

If you have saved several layers and tracks, you can save and **export the entire built up map** as a kml.
Then convert to .gpx as explained above and import into your nav device.

Above, the top red line is the tracklog I traced the night before.
The second red line with an arrow is the ‘live’ or ‘true’ tracklog I am recording.
And the grey line below is the same unverified track as depicted on my digital map and which sort of eliminates the need for your own tracklog, assuming you trust the map. In some cases, not a good idea.

Time for my Tablet: Samsung Tab + Gaia GPS vs Garmin Montana

4 Replies

With added info from Duncan B and Grant @HU
See also:
Morocco Maps
Time for my Tablet: Samsung Tab + Gaia GPS vs Garmin Montana
How to trace a tracklog
Michelin 742 Morocco (2024) map review
Map review: Reise Know-How Morocco 1:1m (2023)

Updated September 2025

Short version: Gaia detailed mapping on big tablet screen better for following, but Garmin 680 better for easy and reliable recording with minimal tapping faff.

In the early Noughties I recall meeting a lone G-Wagen near the Monts Gautier in far southeastern Algeria (Route A14). They’d hooked up their GPS to a laptop for big screen nav. It was the only sensible way to do it in a car if you wanted that sort of thing, but would have been hard on the spinning HDD drives of that era.

I’m not sure I even owned a laptop at that time. Instead we managed to research and log the scores of routes in Sahara Overland with a hardback jotter and a Garmin 12 or a ‘big screen’ 76 mounted in a sawn-off juice bottle and an elastic band. When needed, I transposed the lat/long reading to the then still excellent IGN 1 million maps using a ruler or a more accurate roamer grid (below).

You could then pinpoint your position with adequate accuracy for the expansive Sahara because, unless you were looking for a cache (which we’d buried the previous day for Desert Riders), that was good enough to locate yourself. Otherwise, as the Austrian guys had done, you had to scan and carefully calibrate your paper maps (taking into account the map’s projection format) so that the moving cursor dot would mark your precise location.

Fast forward 2.2 decades…
… and I was driving Duncan Barbour on a recce job in Morocco (more of which later) while he logged our convoy’s route on an iPad. I had my hands full and so assumed his setup was off his phone but in these phablet days, his SIM- enabled iPad was all he needed, along with an app like Gaia GPS. In the meantime a couple of others confirmed it was no longer possible to mirror a Garmin GPS onto a larger screen, be it laptop or tablet. Perhaps because Garmin want you to buy their 5 or 10-inch Tread series from £500 to well over a grand + subscriptions.
I already owned some 400 quid’s worth of 680T Montana, the Garmin handhelds which in 2010 changed the game by being able to load several increasingly better base maps and not just record tracklogs and waypoints on what in the Sahara had hitherto been an essentially blank screen.

Tefedest (Algeria). Scraps of tracks on the ‘Overland’ map layer. Not helpful (like old TPC aero maps).
(Don’t start me on this ‘scraps’ thing on the OSM database…)

Since then digital mapping has improved to the point where there are topo maps based on OSM of the middle of the Sahara nearly matching the classic IGNs. Problem is, unlike the paper maps, these OSM-supported maps have been ~~in part~~ ~~automatically rendered – the discontinuous scraps of tracks are a dead give away, as above (southern Tefedest, Algeria).~~
A year later and I see I was quite wrong about this. These disconnected tracks and paths – some less than a hundred metres long, have actually been added – presumably remotely from aerial imagery – by over-zealous OSM contributors whose understanding of ‘ground truth’ is… different. I have since found them all over southern Morocco on the OSM database, often with no path visible on any of the aerial layers and very often the work of one contributor who just does not get it. It can sure make it hard to see the main track among all the clutter.
Anyway, even with the on and off lifting restrictions on overlanding in this part of Algeria, such maps will still take forever to be completed with genuine tracklogs while the IGNs show it how is was (and still is). But with Gaia GPS Premium it’s also possible to download high-res WYSIWYG satellite imagery to use offline (see bottom of page). Plus there’s nothing to stop you travelling with paper IGNs or similar, or scan of them on your device.

Tablet + Gaia GPS app vs Garmin Montana GPS

Tablet + Gaia good
Cheap to buy/lose/break
Can do internet/phone/camera etc
Big bright 8″ screen
Loads of Gaia maps (once subscribed)
The desktop app is much easier to navigate (keyboard/mouse)
ESRI (or non-Google) sat imagery downloadable too
Masses of memory (1TB)
One tap track recording
Loads of (messy) public tracklogs on the Gaia map (can be ‘muted’)
Works on my iPhone 7 (but not Android phone)
Gaia GPS free Topo map is nicely rendered for an OSM

Samsung tablet/Gaia less good
Gaia GPS requires subscription for good stuff
Freezes or take ages to fire up (could be my tablet CPU?)
Gaia takes ages to get a fix
Tablets (and phones) can overheat
Baffling organisation of saved Gaia files in folders
Hard to tap and manage on the move
Hard to save precise waypoint easily
Screen decentres after inputs
Battery life: must be plugged in unless dimmed
Proper car mounts are expensive but needed
Gaia GPS app froze on my Android phone
Samsung A7 fried 2 motherboards in 2 years. Replaced with cheaper A9.

Garmin Montana + OSM Topo good
Rugged build (good for motos)
If needed, li-ion battery lasts all day (or takes AAs)
Once customised and familiar, interface easy to manage
Fits in a pocket
Will do routing like a car satnav (Gaia may too)
Won’t overheat

Garmin less good
Expensive to buy
Small and dim screen
Limited miniSD capacity (32GB)
Freezes/crashes occasionally
Needs BaseCamp and other (free) Garmin apps on a computer
Easy to forget tracking, zero the trip meter, etc
‘Keyboard‘ is comparatively excruciating
It’s only a GPS + a rubbish camera

Samsung A7 Lite
I decided to try Gaia GPS on my own car recce and settled on a Samsung A7 8.7 incher; £120 from Argos. It has a metal case, takes up to 1TB microSD and weighs 330g when fully charged. CPU speed is 2.3GHz, 1.8GHz Octa-Core; I don’t know if that’s a lot, but 18 months in it fried its motherboard, got repaired on warranty, then did the same at 25 months, just out of warranty. Is that normal for a lightly used Samsung tablet? Don’t know but I replaced it with a near identical A9 for just £85. If that packs up too I guess I’ll just get an iPad. My laptop and desktop have always been Macs, but an equivalent new iPad Mini starts at a staggering £750.
I owned a crappy old Samsung mobile once; the A7 has the same interface so the A7’s Android learning curve was pleasingly pruned. Best of all, I was able to flog my Kindle Fire for 40 quid and remain ‘gadget neutral’ in line with current government advisories.

From fourbie driver CW in Arizona: a **twin-tablet set up** to save flipping from maps to satellite or playing with opacity due to bright sun visibility issues.

The A7 got fitted with a screen protector out of the box but the all-metal body is very slippery so needs something better to handle it. I have a RAM windscreen sucker and flange mount but was shocked at A7 RAM ‘Tough Dock’ prices which easily exceeded the cost of the tablet.
In a car it’s not going to get run over and smashed, like on a bike, and I’m not rallying, so I bought child’s foam case off ebay for £12, complete with vomit-proof standle. I ended up zip tying it to a handle or rear view mirror

Adult mounts and other options
One the left, the DR400 of Grant from Horizons, based in BC: another A7 on a RAM Tough Dock mount. Grant says the unit tends to droop on rough terrain, which is why people end up with Rally towers. Waterproof cases like Otters can be hit and miss he says (this is a benefit of Garmin’s Mil-810-spec Montana), though there are ruggedised tablets, like the Carpe Iter. “It runs DMD2 software launcher, which is also available for any Android device. Their unit is also excellent in sunlight, whereas the standard tablets are crap. I’m running the software now on mine, and it’s good. It launches GaiaGPS which is what I use the most.” says Grant. I do notice it has 128GB but will only take another 128. Still on bikes, Thork Racing (see YT vids) do bike-ready mounts and even roadbook-like thumb controllers to avoid trying to jab the screen with the chequered flag in sight.

Luscious sat imagery offline – who’d have thought

Using Gaia
Note: it is possible I’ve yet to fully get to grips with Samsung and Gaia. I worked all this out by diving in and flailing around like a beached haddock; a good way to test how intuitive it all is. Pay your Gaia GPS subscription, log in and browse maps by one of four activities from the ‘Layers’ tab top right: Hiking, Overlanding, Pushbiking, Weather & Misc; there are at least a dozen maps for each. The selection is inevitably US-centric: see which best suits you. All you really need for Sahara is one good topo map and a satellite layer.
I chose the promisingly named. OSM-like Gaia Overland (metres) and World Imagery (© ESRI) satellite (find it under the ‘Hiking’ tab. I know ESRI often trounces Google in the desert). The other three sat imagery options looked less good. Sat is the layer you might want to zoom in on because, as mentioned above, the topo maps won’t be WYSIWYG, just an array of tracks added by OSM contribs with an inevitably sketchy hierarchy. The track you want may be in there among the clutter.

Then choose what maps you want to download so you can use your device offline in the hills. That is they key. Tap the ⊕ icon top right, choose ‘Download Map’, select a rectangular area and import, ideally into a folder if you plan to have loads of maps. As you can see in the examples above, the whole of Morocco in ‘Gaia Overland’ is just over 2GB, while a smaller area of ESRI covering about 15% of the topo map is 3GB. Full res ESRI covering the good bit of Morocco would have been getting on for 1TB. It really couldn’t be easier.

Satellites thicker than bugs on a bumper

Recording and saving a tracklog
I laboriously emailed myself ~50 pre-traced tracklogs to and picked them up off the tablet to import into Gaia. This and especially sorting them out took quite some time.
I was warned getting to grips with Gaia’s folders is the thing; it’s so much easier on a desktop computer. Loading the Garmin with the same was easier, providing all the .gpxs have been index-accessibly named. I know we’re all supposed to be smartphone savvy now, but around this time you realise what a great invention the keyboard and mouse were.
For most travellers that will do: pick up the tracklog you want and follow it; the Gaia Overland map is pretty good in Morocco. I’m a bit different in that I’m over-recording a new, live track plus adding waypoints with distances and take notes.
Recording a track is dead easy on Gaia: hit the prominent ‘Record’ tab. The Garmin’s track recording is another page so is more easily overlooked when you’re trying to get your shit together at the start of a new route. But in the Gaia app saving a waypoint for your exact current location requires pressing and holding the position arrow on the map; hard to do accurately with fat fingers and the car shaking about. On Montana you back up to Home Page, hit Mark Waypoint for where you are that second, then Save (and jot down the number). Map > Home > Mark > Save and back to map in just 4 taps.

Gaia waypoints are annoyingly recorded as long (but I suppose unique) date and precise time, though I suppose they’ll all display chronologically somewhere. Also, I found a Montana suckered to the windscreen was easier to grab and tap than the propped up Samsung. I know with Duncan at times I had to stop driving so he could save and jot down. This can break the flow but is the age-old problem in doing this in a jolting fourbie. (Yes, I have thought of voice recordings).
Another drag on the Gaia is having to re-centre your location and the full screen map every time you do an input. And I wish the map scale bottom left could be made less opaque, or not opaque at all; same with the zoom buttons, though of course you can spread two fingers to do the same. Occasionally Gaia freezes and needs a restart, but my Montana freezes often and need the battery removing.
Later in 2023 I did two more scouting trips in 4x4s and found the Gaia detailed map on big tablet screen better for following, but Garmin 650 better for easy and reliable recording with minimal tapping faff. I recorded data with my trusty Montana, as I did on several moto trips, when also scouting tracks.
It took me a while to fully get the key differences between these two devices (see red/green comparisons above). One just does nav (plus a crumby camera), the other is an internetable phablet that does everything a smartphone can do, but nearly as easily as a laptop. Feet up, when the navigating is over, a phablet can come into its own. And once you’re back on wifi or 4G your recorded and saved nav data shoots off to you Gaia cloud automatically. Then catch up on the news, other emails, twitter off your photos or watch a movie.
Duncan said initially he took both Montana and Gaia iPad on his nav jobs, now he relies on the iPad. I suppose alone and travelling at my own pace, I could rely just on the tablet too, though on a bike it would need a secure or shake-proof mount somewhere.

Update Algeria 2025 with Tablet and Gaia
On this trip I was passengering in a car, following roads mostly, but doing some off road and off piste nav to new places.
As always, loading and labelling your data beforehand (below) saves teeth gnashing in the field. I renewed my sub and downloaded huge slabs of Topo (1.25GB) and low-res Sat (250mb) mapping for offline use (below).
I also borrowed an InReach2 to display our position for those back home

Gaia/tablet conclusions
• Can take 20 mins to work properly some mornings (not just getting a fix). A combo of tablet CPU and huge offline maps – or is it just Gaia? I suspect the latter
• Stops track recording out of the blue – could be me but annoying
• Great to use offline sat mapping – and the Topo map layer is pretty good for Algeria
• Imported track gets broken up into several segments. Annoying
• Next time will use a proper windscreen mount
• Would a Garmin 710i be the answer? Sat tracking/messaging included (so InReach not needed), plus a bit bigger and much brighter screen than 650 but still with good battery life? Only £700

For the moment the Montana is a reliable recorder, the Gaia tablet is much nicer to nav off.

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