5th June - Western Sahara / Morocco border

Nicki: My version is at the end!

David: Today didn’t go quite as planned. We had a few issues, shall we say, but nothing totally disastrous.

Firstly, our Bluetooth GPS decided not to work. It’s done this once before, in the comfort of Heywood Drive, Bagshot. You can sometimes reset it by dismantling it and jumping a paper clip across two capacitors on the circuit board, but it didn’t work this time. I’ll leave it turned on with the battery disconnected overnight, and hopefully it’ll reset itself. It picked a great moment to pack in.

Then I connected our other GPS up to the laptop. And although the GPS was working, and the laptop was working, the two wouldn’t talk to each other. I think it’s partly an issue with some software, which I had to painstakingly uninstall, and partly down to the USB interface which I bought before we left. After an hour and a half, I got the two talking for a couple of minutes, but after that the connection drops out. Plan B was to get the route data transferred to the GPS, so we could navigate using the GPS on its own, and forget about the laptop. This I managed to do in the end. Good, at least we’d know where to go.

So we departed at half past ten. We continued to drive across the lake bed, but I was dismayed to see a sizeable lake between us and the hills. We debated whether to drive east or west of it, but both of us didn’t quite think it rang true. As we drove towards the lake, it turned out to be a mirage! It’s odd: the slate around the “lake” had looked like green shrubbery, so the combined effect was fairly convincing. I think the mind fills in the gaps so you see what you expect to see.

We began to climb some foothills, following a clear piste, but the going was fairly hard as the piste was quite sandy, with some sizeable rocks thrown in. One section involved going up a steep right hand bend with a left-hand camber and a gulley to the outside. We cleared this with some scrabbling of tyres and continued upwards. Towards the top, we did start to lose traction in the loose sand, so I stopped to engage six wheel drive. Oddly, this didn’t seem to have the desired effect: we weren’t able to climb any further, and in fact we were slipping backwards.

I stopped to check if 6wd was properly engaged, because normally the truck is fine as soon as you engage all the wheels. It wasn’t, and wouldn’t. Hmmm. I asked Nicki to take the controls whilst I checked underneath to find out exactly what wasn’t working. This in itself was quite hard, because the steepness of the slope meant gravity was working quite hard to dislodge the truck from the top of it. I could see that the prop shaft leading to the rear gearbox, which drives the rear wheels, was turning, but the prop shaft going to the back axle wasn’t. Oh dear.

Time to take the gearbox apart. There are two inspection covers on top, which fortunately for me are accessible from inside the camper body, by lifting up a panel in the floor. The front one checked out fine, but by the time I’d cleaned the inspection plate off and re-sealed it with silicone, it still took a while to do. I then checked the second one, with Nicki running the engine so I could see what was turning, and to my surprise, all the little gears were engaging properly and turning cheerfully. So it had to be something between here and the output shaft. Time to read the manuals.

Our rear gearbox is a cut-down version of the front one. This means it contains a differential, which would normally be used to split drive between two output shafts. Because our rear gearbox only drives one output shaft, the diff has been welded up. It therefore seemed likely that the diff was the problem. I rang Kevin Winn, who built the truck, on the satellite phone, and he concurred: the diff in the gearbox had probably come apart under the pressure of all the rough terrain we’ve been pounding through. If I had a welder with me, it would be remotely feasible to dismantle the diff and re-weld it, but it would still be a fairly big job. It’s not the sort of thing you’d relish doing on a steep sandy slope in the middle of a desert with a 5 tonne truck about to slide down on top of you.

After I’d put the gearbox back together, we discussed our plan of action. We could either try to get to the top of the hill, or reverse back down again and turn around. With the use of low tyre pressures (which I’ve been trying to avoid, as we don’t have a spare now) and our sand ladders, plus a lot of digging, we might have made it up without 6wd. But what would we do then? To proceed into unknown territory with only 4wd and no spare tyres, where we might encounter the same conditions again and again, seemed foolhardy. Even crossing moderate sand would be difficult without 6wd. The clincher was our guide book, the well-respected Sahara Overland, which says: “If in doubt – turn back!” Wise words. It’s worth considering that we were at least 140km from the nearest town, in the Sahara Desert, in the summer, on a piste which might not see other traffic for weeks or months. We have enough water and food to survive some time in an emergency, but it’s not a situation you really want to be in. Of course there was some disappointment at not completing the route, but it wasn’t top of our list of priorities.

This left the second option: reversing down the hill. Not as easy as it sounds! Nicki spotted me backwards, and did a very good job of it. However, even in low ratio reverse gear, I couldn’t let the truck roll down without using the brakes, as it would have been too fast and uncontrolled. So I had to use the brakes, with the result that the steering became very ineffective in the steep sand. When I got to the cambered bend, half way round it became clear we were pointing in the wrong direction and wouldn’t make it round without falling into the gulley. I tried going forwards but we couldn’t go up either.

After discussion, we decided to drive backwards out of the bend and actually across the gulley, which meant filling the gulley with rocks as best we could to make the manoeuvre easier. I checked out the side slopes this would entail, but I didn’t think it would be bad enough to tip the truck over. We made it across the gulley first try, which is where our huge tyres and immense ground clearance came in handy.

The next step of the manoeuvre was to reverse the rest of the way down the hill, ignoring the piste altogether. At the bottom there was a narrow gulley before the next uphill, so it was important to swing the truck around 90 degrees as I got to the bottom, so I could drive down the gulley and away. The truck doesn’t have a great turning circle, so the back of the truck hit the opposite bank of the gulley just as the front dropped off the other bank! It looked like we might be wedged, which would have put us in a very fiddly situation indeed, but fortunately, I had enough traction to edge forward up the lip of the gulley and inch backwards again. After a couple of shuffles, I was able to drive down the rocky gulley and back out onto the flat. Relief! Again, the ground clearance and traction of the truck rather saved the day, even though it was the loss of 6wd that got us into the predicament in the first place.

All in all, we did a pretty good job of extricating ourselves painstakingly from a difficult situation. Kudos particularly to Nicki, who was doing all this for the first time. It helps that after all this driving I know the truck’s handling pretty well, and could feel exactly what was going on from the limited perspective of the cab. Taking our time over it, thinking through the steps and listening carefully to each other were also factors in our success. It would have been scarily easy to have screwed up here, in which case we could have been facing a real disaster, with a rolled truck at the bottom of a gulley. From starting driving up the hill to getting back to the bottom took about two and a half hours.

Retracing our steps was somewhat more straightforward after all this. We crossed the huge lake bed again, while the truck filled up with dust, and picked up the piste we came in on. We decided to give the Piste d’Oeuf a miss this time round, and stuck with the old Spanish road right until we got near the main road several hours later, when we annoyingly lost the piste and had to ad-lib a little to get onto the tarmac. As we came out only 10km north of Smara, we decided to go back and fill up with fuel again at Western Saharan prices before taking the new tarmac road towards Tantan.

After completing this and the various police checkpoint formalities, with the ever-cheerful but bored policemen, we left the town. We drove for an hour or two before the sun started to set, so we pulled off the road and out over the desert for a mile or so to be out of harm’s way. After parking, we spotted a goat herder about a mile to the west, so maybe we’re not as remote as we thought! It’s been a hot day, so we took it in turns to use our little shower, which was unbelievably arctic in the evening breeze without the benefit of the sun having warmed the water up first. Still, it’s nice to be clean, and it’s quite nice to be cool, too. We’re camped just a few miles south of the border between Western Sahara and Morocco, so we’ll cross the notional border first thing tomorrow.

After some thought, I think I’ll wait until we get back to the UK to get the rear gearbox sorted out. I know I can get a good job done there and if it takes a few goes to get right it doesn’t matter. It’s annoying not having 6wd but as all our planned routes from now onwards are on tarmac, it shouldn’t actually matter, and we still have various strategies for recovery on the off-chance we do get stuck. So, Paul from Challenger 4x4, if you’re reading this, keep me a slot free in July mate, and while you’re at it, can you do the exhaust!

Nicki: Well David recorded a very tame version of events, let me tell you what REALLY happened…

Yes we did sit for an hour and a half this morning while David fiddled with the GPS. Eventually we set off, although I was little use as I was now unable to navigate as the laptop had been banished to the back of the truck! So I read out what the landscape should be doing from the book and admired the scenery. All was well for the first ten minutes, until we hit a hill. Now I don’t like heights so shrieked a bit on the ascent, but we made it up to my relief. Until we rounded the next bend, when THE hill came into view. We followed a sandy path to its base, which is dodgy anyway in the truck, but luckily there was no sinking. Then we started to ascend, while wobbling as we hurdled boulders in the path. Then we lurched some more as we overcame huge crevices in the track. Then we hit the part of the track which had a sandy base and loose rocks on the top. To the right of the truck (my side) was a big drop, which was all I could see while we swayed from side to side, as David struggled to get the tyres to grip on the surface. We spun to a halt, so reversed for a second go. Same again. So we tried again, with David giving it as much welly as possible which only seemed to produce horrendous noises from the underside of the cab! I was seriously concerned at this point, I saw no way forward and only a long rocky drop down. I think I was beyond shrieking on this hill.

I waited for another 2 hours while David tried his best to find the problem with the 6 wheel drive. We were stuck up a vertical track, being plagued by irritating flies, slam in the middle of the midday Saharan sun. We had no rear gear box, no spare tyres and a temperamental GPS system. On top of this I was reluctant to move for fear of dislodging the truck (slightly over the top but you had to be there!!) I was also in charge of doing things with the pedals and turning on the ignition periodically, terrifying. After the phone call which highlighted the fact we weren’t really going to mend the gear box while stuck in this precarious position in the middle of the desert, we changed our plans to reversing back down the vertical ascent, avoiding said huge crevices and rocky boulders and sand and cliff face at base of hill.

We spent a good ten minutes filling the first huge crevice with rocks (with no regard to the scorpions we later thought may have been nestling there!) I then had to try and direct David down in the truck, which began with the most terrifying part of the day… as the truck part descended into the gulley all three wheels on David’s side LEFT THE GROUND leaving the truck in a moment of one-sided suspension! I swore loudly, as I had visions of pulling David out of an overturned truck, before continuing with the ‘hard left, straighten up’ instructions. The crunch point (literally) came when David and I had high hopes of the truck managing to reverse around a corner, which it just didn’t, leaving a huge rock face at the rear of the truck and the bottom of the steep hill in front. Swearing again as I saw the front tyre digging a hole in the sand with every moment, I saw with relief that David was managing to shuffle the truck out of the possible stuck position. Images of camping out with rationed water and little food for days left me!

I have never been so relieved as to see the truck driving off in front of me on a horizontal surface! This was short-lived however, for as I happily and joyfully jogged to catch up with David I stood on something that stung my foot. Well thanks very much! We are now happily bush camped, just off a real TARMAC road, and David has just succeeded in making custard out of Gambian custard powder which we enjoyed with peaches! I am relieved to think we will be sticking to tarmac roads from now on…

David’s last comment: huge drops are just a matter of perspective. It’s not so bad if you’re not afraid of heights :)