Particularly in the desert, these days aerial or satellite imagery from Google Maps and ESRI (Bing, etc – often better than Google) is so good you can spot passing vehicles and whether a road is sealed, a track or even a little used track. This is the sort of age-sensitive information you won’t always get from maps, be they digital or printed. When planning new off-road routes, I find tracing the probable route in advance helpful for all the obvious reasons. It also gives 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 maps won’t be automatically saved online. I’ve drawn tracklogs using this method in Moroccan hotel rooms prior to setting off along remote tracks (left), benefitting from the reassurance of knowing a track exists and where the junctions are. Fwiw, I do this all on a desktop computer or laptop. It may well be possible on a mouseless smartphone or tablet but would drive me nuts.
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 over the track you want visible on 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 maybe smartphone/phablet nav apps. Garmin BaseCamp can do it too, or use a free online converter like GPS Visualizer. You can now set off to navigate your MYO tracklog.
With a Google account you can save your routes on a Google ‘My Map‘. 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 one. This map can be shared or exported but will be saved online and be viewable/editable wherever you have internet (unlikely in the desert).
Open Google Maps and once signed in, click the Menu top left.I already have Saved maps. Look for My Places or My Maps and click.In the sidebar click Maps and Create New.You can give your map a name and save. Google autosaves every few seconds so long as there is internet.You may also like toName your first layer and Save.To trace a tracklog you need to change the map’s base layer to Satellite.It looks like this – people often call it ‘Google Earth’ though that’s actually the app above.If you don’t know where your start point is and it is a place or you have a waypoint, use Search. I chose Chenachen base, as close as I’m ever likely to get there.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 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.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.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.
Just over 20 years ago 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 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 and now 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 and GPS 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 base maps and not just record tracklogs and waypoints on what in the Sahara had hitherto been an essentially blank screen.
Scraps of tracks on the ‘Overland’ map layer. Not helpful (like old TPC aero maps).
Since then digital mapping has come on to the point where there are topo maps of the middle of the Sahara matching the classic IGNs. Problem is that 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). Given the restrictions on overlanding in this part of Algeria, such maps will take forever to be completed while the IGNs show it how is was (and still is). But with Gaia GPS it’s also possible to download high-res WYSIWYG satellite imagery to use offline. Plus there’s nothing to stop you travelling with paper IGNs or similar, or scans 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 8″ screen
Loads of Gaia maps (once subscribed)
The desktop app is much easier to navigate (keyboard/mouse)
ESRI sat imagery downloadable too
Masses of memory (1TB)
One tap track recording
Loads of (unverified/messy) public tracklogs on the Gaia map
Works on my iPhone 6 (but not Android)
Tablet/Gaia less good
Gaia GPS requires subscription
Freezes occasionally
Baffling organisation of saved 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
Gaia GPS app froze on my Android phone
Garmin Montana 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)
Garmin less good
Expensive to buy
Small screen
Limited miniSD capacity (32GB)
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 an A7 8.7 incher; £120 from Argos. It has a metal case, takes up to 1TB microSD and weighs 330g when fully charged. My laptop and desktop have always been Macs but equivalent new iPad Mini starts at a staggering £750. I own a crappy old Samsung mobile; 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.
Handy standleHandy handle
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 a screen protector out of the box but the all-metal body is slippery so needs something better to handle it. I have a RAM windscreen sucker and flange mount but was a 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. It will do for the moment; I might attach a` RAM or a Nuvi flange ans sucker to the back.
Touratech RAM mount
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.
2GB for all of Morocco ‘3GB for the book’s area in medium red ESRI
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 ~50 pre-traced tracklogs to my gmail 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 folders is the thing; 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 to the end; 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 top left green ‘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 times, 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 so he could save and jot down. This can break the flow but is the age-old problem in doing this in a jolting car. (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 the Garmin crashes occasionally too. In the end I found the Gaia’s large screen and detailed map better for following, but the Garmin made recording data with minimal (or well practised) faff easier, as long as your remembered to start the tracklog. It took me a while to 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 you can shoot off your recorded and saved nav data to your Gaia cloud, your email or wherever. 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.
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.
Part Seven of Peter Reif’s report and maps recalling ÖSEWO: an Atlantic-to-Red Sea crossing of the Sahara in 1983-4. After having to divert around Libya via the Mediterranean, the flat-four foursome are back in the desert to tackle on of the hardest stages so far. But not before they conduct a desert survival experiment to see how far one of the team can walk with what they can carry (above left). For other parts, click the Index Page.
Part Six of Peter Reif’s report and maps recalling ÖSEWO: an Atlantic-to-Nile crossing of the Sahara in 1983-4. Despite their best efforts to acquire Libyan visas in Djanet, Algiers and Tunis, an escalation in the Libyan war with Chad means they can’t cross overland to Egypt and so have to ferry around across the Mediterranean. For other parts, click the Index Page.
Part Five of Peter Reif’s report and maps recalling ÖSEWO: an Atlantic-to-Red Sea crossing of the Sahara in 1983-4. The team have arrived in Tamanrasset where they meet many other desert overlanders, as well as the Dakar Rally and three VW friends from Austria who’ve brought spare passports for Libya. The four vans tick off the Hoggar Loop, then headed east for Djanet, close to the Libyan border. For other parts, click the Index Page.
Part Four of Peter Reif’s report and maps recalling ÖSEWO: an Atlantic-to-Red Sea crossing of the Sahara in 1983-4. Following the tough, three-week crossing of the Majabat al Koubra to Timbuktu, the two VWs head northeast back into the desert for the Algerian border they crossed two months earlier on the way down. For other parts, click the Index Page.
Part Three of Peter Reif’s report and maps recalling ÖSEWO: an Atlantic-to-Red Sea crossing of the Sahara in 1983-4. The VWs load up and tackle the big 1500-km dune crossing of the Majabat al Koubra or Empty Quarter from Atar to Timbuktu. For other parts, click the Index Page.
Part Two of Peter Reif’s report and maps recalling ÖSEWO: an Atlantic-to-red Sea crossing of the Sahara in 1983-4. The team get in position for the first big desert crossing. For other parts, click the Index Page.
Austrian, Peter Reif spent his Lockdown formatting a series of detailed reports and maps recalling ÖSEWO: an Atlantic-to-Red sea crossing of the Sahara in 1983-4. Volkswagen’s T2 Kombi was an unorthodox choice, especially as much of the route was off-piste, but as you’ll read over the next few posts, the vehicles managed better than you’d expect.
Sahara Overland 