4th June - Somewhere in the Desert

Last night’s campsite was certainly convenient and cost-effective, but it wasn’t very quiet. I think this proved more of a problem to Nicki than me. I slept OK, until about 4am, when Nicki woke me up to tell me it was time to get up. I replied “No, it’s dark!” and she went back to sleep. She often talks in her sleep…

As we left Laâyoune we saw a lot of people around and part of the main street had been cordoned off. It appeared to be a big fun-run or something, as some side roads were also blocked off, but luckily not the ones we wanted to drive down. From Laâyoune we took the road south-east towards Es-Semara, or Smara – the town seems to have a different spelling on each successive road sign.

Part way we passed the huge conveyor belt which runs hundreds of kilometres across the desert and ends near the road just south of Laâyoune, where there is a big bulk ship handling facility. It conveys phosphates from the mines inland to the coast. You’ve never seen such a long conveyor belt. It just stretches off into the distance, over dunes and around oueds (dry river beds). We also saw some camels by the road and as we didn’t have many camel photos in our collection, we stopped to take some photos.

Arriving in Smara just after noon, we went through a couple of friendly police checkpoints, then stopped at a garage to fill up everything we have with petrol and to fill our two empty jerry cans with water. From there we went into the town, another pleasant place, which had a good internet café. We had a drink at a café and bought some bits and pieces from a general store, including a big bag of nuts which cost a fortune.

We then set off on our desert trip. It’s a 350km route which is detailed in our Sahara Overland book (route M13 if anybody has it). I’d already input the GPS coordinates in the book into our laptop, so it was easy to see where to go. We picked up the first piste on the road just north of Smara, on the Tantan corner of a big empty campsite there. This bit of the route is sort of tarmaced, in that it has some Spanish tarmac dating from antiquity, which was built to last but in some places peters out altogether and in some places is a bit iffy. So for a few miles we drove across dunes & reg (basically sand with gravel on top – it’s quite a firm surface in most places). Some of the dunes required 6wd. I find we run out of traction fairly quickly in 4wd, but as soon as you click into 6wd the truck goes through most things (so far). Elsewhere, where the Spanish tarmac was giving up the ghost, the tyre marks follow alongside it for a while.

After a while the route in the book struck out noticeably north of the trodden path. We decided to follow it, for the hell of it, and shortly came across a sand ridge which we needed to drive over. It took me five attempts – not because of the truck, only because of the driver! I kept getting to the top, and easing off the gas, only for the heavy back end of the truck to tip me back and roll me back to the bottom again. Nicki videoed it, and the middle of the ridge brushes the bottom of the truck between the front and middle wheels, whilst the rear wheels are several feet up in the air for quite a while.

According to our guidebook, we were looking for a piste, but at this point we couldn’t find one at all, so we made our own. We were driving mostly through reg and scrubby sand, which was fine, but the occasional oued (dried up river bed) presented more of a challenge as the bottoms are soft sand and need low-ratio 6wd. The ground clearance of the truck was remarkable through ruts and over hummocks. In places, slate ridges protruded through the sand, and I was a little worried about the tyres, but ironically (see later) this wasn’t a problem. Some of the slate-clad hummocks were too slippery to drive up, although a bit of attention would have sorted this out, but we chose to drive round most of them. Nicki wasn’t keen on some of the descents as she doesn’t like heights.

I decided to call our piste the Egg Piste, or Piste d’Oeuf in French. At length we made our next waypoint, but still couldn’t see a proper piste as per the guidebook. Nicki was navigating from the laptop, and kept telling me to go towards the left, but for some reason, left to our own devices, the truck and I tend to roll around to the right. So it was only after some kilometres that we headed north far enough to stumble across the piste, which was an old Paris-Dakar route. It was clearly marked by large cairns which had been bulldozed either side of it. I’m not sure how old it was, but apparently it was there in 2003 when the route was mapped out for the guide book.

Some of the piste was pretty fast, but you had to be careful, because there were ditches and washouts in places which could catch you unawares. Most of it was pebbles and sand though. The scenery was pretty amazing: just desert, sand and low hills in every direction. On a particularly fast, flat, non-problematic section, we were listening to Abba when all of a sudden – “BOOM!” A sound we’d heard before. The rear tyre had blown out again. Oddly enough, the same one as last time and just like last time, the tyre is shredded and unrepairable. I had a look around to see if it could be rubbing on the leaf spring or something, but there is no obvious reason for this to happen. This means that despite having over a hundred quid’s worth of tyre repair gear here, we now don’t have a spare tyre, so we were a little Piste d’Oeuf about it. Nicki got to drive the truck a little way so I could run alongside to see if I could spot anything out of the ordinary, but all I achieved was a face full of dust and a near cardiac arrest! We are now driving very gingerly.

The piste dropped us back to the remains of the Spanish road, which took us past some wild camels, and then to what appeared to be the ruins of some buildings, but which were actually inhabited. We could then see an old Spanish hamlet on a hill on the horizon, which is now marked by a big radio repeater mast. We by-passed the hamlet and its military checkpoint, although we saw some of the citizens sitting at the bottom of the hill, who waved cheerfully. The northern edge of the settlement is marked by many very neatly built dry stone pillars. It’s odd that somebody would go to so much effort just to mark a boundary, but I couldn’t see any other reason for them.

Pushing westward we passed some tanks parked up in a little military point, although we didn’t see any soldiers there with them. We’re now not far from the Berm, the wall built of sand by the Moroccans which marks the boundary between the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara and the bit which is under the jurisdiction of the Polisario, the separatist organisation which represents the people native to the country before Spain gave it over to Morocco and Mauritania back in the 1970s. I don’t think the Polisario cause any hassles, as there appears to have been a cease-fire in place for some time now, but there’s still some gesticulating going on by the Moroccans. I have no idea what it’s like the other side of the Berm, because you can’t generally cross it, although a Paris-Dakar Rally did a few years ago, unannounced, which really annoyed the Polisario, and Michael Palin accessed it through Algeria for his Sahara series on TV.

As the sun started to set, we were driving alongside a plain, to the southern edge of which was quite a green area, with stunted trees and everything – an oasis, if you will. We turned north and dropped down from the hills onto a huge flat plain, where we departed the road and followed the GPS north. The plain is an enormous dried lake bed, covered in fragmented dried mud like a huge jigsaw puzzle. It’s about 20km or so across, and mostly perfectly flat, notwithstanding some tyre marks and a few small water channels. This meant we could chunter along it at some considerable speed, in truck terms. As the sun went down, we picked our campsite by putting the truck in neutral and letting it drift to a halt. All we can see in any direction is the dried lake bed, until it runs into the hills towards the horizon. I don’t think we’ll have too much noise and distraction, as there’s probably not a soul between us and the horizon.

It’s amazing how appetizing a plate of Smash and Baked Beans can be when you’re out in the middle of the desert on your own. I even have a cake to look forward to and Nicki the rest of her Milka chocolate from yesterday.