It is not possible to thank enough the members of Blue Cycle and Solus who made this journey possible. The Jeep despite the abuse it received made it all the way with out mechanical hitch all the way to Banjul. With our added detours we did over 6000km. If Blue Cycle had not stepped forward we would have ended up doing in in a 2CV, which no doubt would have led to a very different experience.
Our fundraising total to date is in the region of £3000 pounds.
The Jeep sold for £1040.52. It will no doubt continue to serve as a workhorse for many years to come in the Gambia. I hope whoever bought it enjoys driving it as much as we did. I find it hard now not to run up to passing Cherokee jeeps and try and hug them as they go by! Hopefully this fad will pass soon. Driving my regular banger the other day I involuntary swerved towards a pile of builder’s sand and only just managed to snap the desire to try and conquer it before it was too late.
With more names and thanks to come in no particular order: crossley, Adam, Crowski, AlexHead, pmalone, Aisha, Emily, Anisa, John da Mina, Tamsin Walker, John & Pam, James, Mister Richard Lee, Rhiannon, Pierce Lord, Sam, Malcolm, Yumiko, Ban Blythe and Jenny, Gillian Walker.
Also thanks to all the varied and interesting people we met on route, who made the trip what it was. Long live the sandmen, long live the Jeeps.
Well the adventure has come to end and now the dust has settled, the sand has finally stopped coming out of my ears and shoes and life starts to take on the normal pace it is time to wrap this blog up.
Working backwards in time like any good archaeologist: the trip was an overall success. We arrived in Banjul on schedule only to find the organisers schedule was not as clear cut as our own. The auction was delayed till the following Sunday so we missed our beloved Jeep being sold off. It sold for £1040.52, less than the white jeep, dare I say it! The overall total made in the auction from group one cars was £20,973.65. However we have been promised photos, which will get uploaded along with a comprehensive set of other pics from the adventure. However like before the trip began trying to coordinate 3 sandmen is like herding cats, it only became possible when we were all contained in the space of our leather seated Cherokee with one common aim, so don’t hold your breath. The three jeep teams will all be having a reunion soon, to re-live some of the finer moments and swap pics.
Crossing into Gambia from Senegal at first seemed straight forward, but that was before we arrived at the ferry port. The system appeared to be squash as many vehicles and people around the gates, barely let the arrivals get off and then a free for all squash into the queuing lanes. Red Jeep pulled an impressive move somehow weaving through lanes much to the amazement of locals, as the freedom of the gates loomed in site a merc blocked his way, undeterred red jeep pushed on, resulting in the merc having its front lamp smashed in. A crowd gathered and no translation was needed to see that the merc driver was pretty narked. No problem says Kev, i'll be back in a min. Strolling back a little later with a mew lamp in his hand seemed to diffuse the situation. Later it was revealed that he had unscrewed it off the German teams Merc Hearse that they had been towing for the last few hundred km and had left a little way back. Hustlers worked their way through our convoy.. with sand broken phones; unwanted tyres and other random equipment were traded for cold beer. Time slipped by (seven hours) ferries came and went and the light faded. Finally we were off. Towing a heavy Saab we made our way onto the ferry. Which can be imagined as a very rusty Isle of White ferry crossed with a crusher’s yard and then had the equivalent numbers of people present at Glastonbury festival dropped onto it.
Driving through Senegal was pleasantly uneventful, and a blast of colour and freshness from the desert wastes and desperateness of the Sahara. A day trip to the colonial crumbling town of St Louis provided some needed relief from driving.
Saying 'desert wastes' is rather unfair. The landscape was incredible and very varied from Lawrence of Arabia drive as fast as you can flip your jeep or get stuck dunes to smash your suspension tussocks "was that a spring that just fell off white jeep, James?... nah its not important...." to choke and go blind, fix your fuel filter and eat cold tinned ravioli in the middle of a sandstorm expanses, to amazing sand polished rounded granite outcrops. The final stretch into Atar was spectacular climbing out of the desert and over a range of mountains, dropping down into another valley with interesting settlements of bee-hive shaped dwellings. A kamikaze camel bounced off the side of the jeep about 5km from Atar. Atar itself looked like a set out of Black Hawk down, with dodgy dealers trying to sell us fuel out of barrels. After 3 days unplanned in the desert we were down to what was left in our tanks! By the time we rolled into the capital we really looked like we had been lost in the desert. What I thought was a tan soon washed off and blocked up the plug hole. The next day saw an early start despite everyone being knacked. We were headed for the Senegal border and making a bid to catch the rest of the convoy before they began to think that perhaps we were under equipped and foolhardy for our route 2 expedition.. as if...!
The border bargained, bantered and negotiated by Kev went pretty smoothly. The road (un-surfaced track) to the border consisted of a dyke and bank used for irrigation and flood protection. After the desert this was nothing and we cruised down it. Trying to drink cold custard from a sharp tin can wile doing 80km an hour in retro respect proved not to be the best idea I had that day, although for the first time since the trip began I could stick my hair back out of the way.... Reaching the campsite in Senegal we found it already full with fellow teams. Beers were sunk and stories swapped,, From here on in, it would be on-mass convoy driving all the way to Banjul. The obvious happened and cars started to clap out every few km, even ours had an episode of overheating, although that turned out to be the result of human error (not screwing the radiator cap back on!) Mentioning no names James.. Then again if he was writing I am sure he would not mention the fact that I locked the keys in the Jeep the evening before in my rush to get to the bar. We remedied this with a tent peg and thin piece of mental provided by team Bodge...
The head gasket went on an old Renault 5 and despite pleas of common sense to just ditch it, it some how got dragged all the way.. We were considering offering up the new found skills of Hue and his now highly developed snatch tow manoeuvre,,.. Had we been allowed they may have just had to drag the front axel only! So stop start stop start we slowly closed on the border and ferry port.......... and thats where I came in...
So down to the important stuff.... see next blog posting
In our road book there are only a couple of passable routes over the Western Sahara, and the first one is now a made road, so we plumped on route 2, the 4x4 route, unfortunatly we underestimated the desert and took a 2 wheel drive Jeep as well!
The learning curve begins!
Hue was convinced that his GPS and our natural talents would get us through unscathed, so no need for a guide..........
Tavis desperate to conquer a dune floored the jeep at the biggest dune we could find, of course this is not reccomended in the desert driving manual, and now we know why. We zipped up the dune at 80k expecting it to level out, why we thought it would level out I can't imagine, of course
it didn't there was a 75 degree drop on the other side, on flying over the lip the natural reaction was to slam on the brakes burying the jeep nose deep in the sand with a perilous decent to negociate! After we dug it out Tav bravely coasted down the dune, enough excitement for one day, time to set up camp!
We soon discovered that the 4x4 Cherokee is great off road, and even when stuck was easy to free, not so with the 2 wheel drive version which would make a great excavator. The only way to prevent it getting stuck was to floor it everywhere! on our second day we got it serious;y stuck at 2pm, it took until 6.30 to free it using every bit of kit we had, baloon jack, high lift jack, sand ladders, carpets even skis! possibly the most dispirating day, especially as we had another 40k to get out of the dunes and another 200k to get out of the desert.
Luckily Kev had brought some big wheels and fat tyres, time to upgrade the 2 wheel drive jeep, unfortunatly they didn't fit under the wheel arches, no problem, we cand soon modify the bodywork which we duly did. With the fatter tyres the performance was certainly improved.
We were definatly falling behind sceduale, too much time digging and not enough time driving, after some thought Hue developed a new recovery technique christned the high velocity snatch tow, whereby the towing vehicle starts behind the stuck vehicle with a very long rope and accelerates hard snatching the bogged down vehicle out of the soft sand. This techique had a 60 percent success rate, although there was a risk of ripping out the front of the towed vehicle!
We had lost so much time and had already spent two unplanned nights in the desert, with fuel and water running low it was time to get out of there. We were fairly close to a railway and decided to drive along it to bypass the soft dunes which did save us a day of digging, however there was a cost, after ripping the bottom off our silencer and suffering a blowout it was time to get of the rails, we had already chanced our luck avoiding the train! Another problem, the red jeep got the diff caught on the rail rack, a very bad situation. After some head scratching we realised we could all lift on the bumper to raise the diff and push it of, phew another near disaster averted.
Time to sort out our room, look out for the second part of our desert trials tomorrow!
Finally at the Mauritanian border, after much tooing and froing we got our vehicle and individual exit stamps and faced the 2k drive through no mans land to Mauritanian immigration (a dirt track through yet another minefield with wrecked cars on either side!). Customs followed the usual procedure,waiting around for 3 or 4 hours then being rushed from office to office to get papers stamped and signed. The national Mauritanian tourist board was there to greet us in a batterd old shipping container, not a good start.
Well we are finally back in contact after reaching civilisation! On our last post we were heading for the Mauritanian border, suffice to say it wasn't a picnic!
We arrived at a service station 50k from the border which happened to have a hotel, as usual there was no room at the inn, no problem we can camp. Following Team bodge we found a bijou campsite just of the road, excellent, untill a police car pulled up, bugger were going to get moved on! But oh no, it was far worse than that, 'dont go any further your on the edge of a minefield'. Everybody froze, luckily it became clear that the minefield was a few hundred yards further and we were OK where we were. After a fitful nights sleep it was off to the border for our daily dose of corruption.
Tomorrow we cross, or at least try to cross the border into Mauritania, another 6am start to cope with the legndary beaurocracy and then we are really up to our necks, no roads, people or petrol stations as we cross the desert proper, hmmm, well its too late to turn back now. It may be a few days before we can add anything else, if you dont here anything by the 5th send out a search party! Our desert crossing party is made up of 5 other teams; the two other cheokee jeeps, team Lover Rovers, Team Bodge and two Germam teams in two wheel drives! but up for the longer off=piste desert route. We have been given GPS waypoints from a jeep that has come the other way so we have passed on the offer of a guide; we will just make sure we are not first into the mine field!
Finally in Dakhla! time for some rest and reorganisation. Our first mission was to empty our mobile skip which had slowly filled with rubbish, then find another spare wheel for the desert. After much hunting we found a street full of workshops where a friendly mechanic tried to find us a wheel, after a couple of failed attempts it was decided to customise a mercedes wheel by drilling out the centre to make it fit. We jumped into his clapped out Renault 4 for a whistlestop tour of the back streets, rather worringly every wokshop approached to modify our wheel thought the idea insane and refused, luckily one workshop with less regard for health and safety agreed to do it and we are now the proud possesors of a custom built wheel, all for 30 euros! All we need now is a tyre, preferably bald and ready to blow out, shouldnt be too tricky!
Another day another near disaster! James made another faux pas accidently blasting through a police checkpoint, not his fault the policeman was checking another teams papers and was only spotted in the rear view mirror, stamping and waving like a lunatic as he choked in our dust, only one thing for it; foot down qnd pray he didnt radio ahead! Luckily he didnt, at the next checkpoint everyone was smiling; especially us! Now we are in the western Sahara proper there are military and police checkpoints everywhere, on the plus side its 26 degrees and were getting a tan! Finding a convenient garage we decided to get a couple of punctures fixed, all for a bargain price of 40 Dihram; about £2.50, the mechanic slyly asked if we had any whisky for the customery bribe, instead James gave him a rather ripe Stilton that has sat in the sun for too long! after some suspicious sniffing he was assurd by phrases such as cest tres bon; et un specialitie anglais! As we drove off we saw him and a friend sniffing the jar trying to work out what it was, I think it can safely be said that we managed to berber a berber! I just hope we dont read about dysentry sweeping the Sahara as a result! To reasure out sponsers the Jeep is runing bautifully, its a pity it has a limiter at 180km/hour, not that we would drive that fast.
A 6am start for the 27th to drop Guy off at the airport, at least there were luxery toilets to look forward too althugh as usual paper was lacking! Our target today was Layoune, a long drive with slow lorries two a penny. Naturally we wanted to unleash our 4 litre monster with exciting overtaking manouvers, all went well until James pulled out to overtake a slow lorry only to find hi,self face to face with an oncoming taxi doing 100k! Unfortunatly we were hemmed in by a lorry and a ditch, nothing for it but to stamp on the brakes and vere in behind the lorry, a quick check of pulses while Tavis extracted himslf from th glove box and everything was OK.
Continuing at a more sedate pace progress was good, or was untill we reached a steep hill where the lorries were doing about 10 miles an hour, another, in this case safe overtaking manouvere was called for. However on reaching the top of the hill a policeman popped out from behind a lorry and flagged us down, bugger. After fabricating an offence of overtaking in a dangerous place we were 400 Dihram down, in our defence we are driving far more safely than the locals who seem to think the highway code is something to stuff under a table leg to stop it wobbling!
With the sun setting we thought it wise to stop in Tan Tan for the night, on the plus side we caught up with Team Lover Rover who are also in a Jeep Cherokee , albeit a hairdresser version.
To date we have raised approximatly 2500 pounds, thank you very much for your generosity and supporting a worthy cause [Wateraid]. Hopefully by next week we will break 3000 pounds.
Thanks to the hard work of our sponsors the Jeep has run perfectly for over 4700km
touchwood
Woken up by the early morning call to prayer, we went for our daily worship of the squat toilets, followed by stale croissents and coffee. After a wonder around the Souk avoiding carpet sellers and real sandmen it was time to plan our onward travel to Dakhla and the desert proper.
 Christmas day started in the town of Zagora with a flat tyre. Team Bodge stepped up and did a Formula 1 style Wheel Change. With the target being Marakesh, over 500km away on the other side of the Atlas mountains we made speedy progress, stopping off at Ait Benhaddou to take in the amazing views of the crumbling citadel. The danger of the Atlas mountains was soon to be shown with a smashed bridge and an overturned truck lying at the bottom of a ravine, busily being stripped for parts by the local Berbers. Reaching the top of the pass at 2260m we waited for team bodge to catch up whilst fending off high altidude rock selling Berbers. Although the hairpinning road with its precipitous drops had some crash barriers there were nearly always ragged gaps where others had clearly tested their effectivness. This became more relevant as the sun started to set; realising that the desent towards Marakesh would be completed in the dark. Team bodge had the added handicap of headlamps illumiating the air above the jeep rather than the road ahead. Passing through recently cleared snow and rockfalls while overtaking tankers on hairpins hightened the concentration and the potential need for a change of pants. By the time a local lorry decided he wanted to re enact scences from the movie Duel with us it was time to take a cofee break, where by we were chased round the forecourt of the garage by a deranged dog. Christmas and our circular 1000km excursion of South Western Morocco was ended in Marakesh with a good dinner in the Djemaa El fna swapping tales with other teams.
An early Christmas present greeted guy early in the day in the form of a dose of the runs, This was best remedied by a marathon drive across some spectacularly picturesque and pot-holed roads down to Zagora in an attempt to keep a rendez-vous with our copper/arms smuggler friend, Masjid, in the dunes of Tinfou, this lead to an aborted short cut attempt to go off-piste at the village of Al Nif only to find ourselves embroiled in a childrens mince pie riot 200 m from the road, to which we beat a hasty retreat. Trying to make time and still practising our Moroccan driving styles guy attempted a rather dangerous maneouvre which ended in a game of chicken at over100 km an hour with overloaded moroccan merc. Fortunately in a country where might is right the merc binned itself and the occupants were left waving their fists in a cloud of dust.
Breakfasted on jump leads and battery acid outside Ibis Hotel, as the engineers were busy beating Bodges engine with sticks tav quietly suggested using the jump leads which seemed to do the trick! We crossed the Moyen Atlas encountering the interesting Berber sales tactic of running out into the path of your vehicle with handfulls of rocks and fossils. Several hours of avoiding a hit and run incident later we pulled into the beautiful Berber metropolis of Midelt<>, and feasted on cold bean stew with diced chicken bones, stale bread and mysterious liquids at a nameless restaurant .
Having landed in Tangier, and made our way through several brides and chess board purchases, we headed south in convoy with Team Bodge and the Silver Fox. Two miles in and our first of a number of entanglements with the local authorities occured as guy was pulled over for speeding, but after smiling sweetly, a thousand apologies and a few forced tears money was handed back and we re on our way again and made Fes by nightfall where we accepted the trditional arabic hospitality of the Ibis Hotel.
 Some one stole our J;
6 days in and this is our first post. Sorry. From the Dreaming Spires of Oxford; to the White cliffs of Dover; to the sombre mists of the Somme; to the solid citadels of Carcassone; to high peaks of the Pyrenees; to 1000 plus km accros Spain looking for a non existant parking space; to the Moorish cathedral of Cordoba; to the port of Tarifa; to FINALLY Fes in Morroco; where three Sandmen are sat puzzling over a arabic key board; so scuse the short blog and free style grammer§
Thanks to Bath local paper for running a story on our fundraising mission.
As of 5pm tonight we are the proud owners of a fantastic Jeep Cherokee! James went to collect it from Solus, a major vehicle accident repair company who have moved heaven and earth to prep the car for us! Look below for the before pictures and look at it now! We owe a great debt of thanks to Bluecycle and Solus for providing our vehicle, and not just providing it but prepping it to the highest standard!
James held a fundraising christmas meal last night and raised £300 from some very generous friends!
Tomorrow is the big day when we pick up the jeep, so watch this space for more info!
Well, we have had our final (and first) group planning meeting at the excelsior in Oxford (the best greasy spoon this side of Birmingham). Everything seems to be on track, we have visas, international driving permits, sun cream and shades.
The good news is that we have just recieved a very generous donation of £500 from Pierce Lord, what a legend! ('i'm speechless, what a generous guy' quote from Tavis).
OK, so now we just need to get our passports and visas back from the Mauritanian embassy and its all plain sailing.......... apart from everything else we have to do like getting maps, sand ladders, spares for the Jeep etc.
However we do now have a ferry booked and will be leaving from the official start line which is at the Triangle car park at the Serpentine, Hyde Park at 10am on the 19th December, so come and see us off!
Latest donation £50 bringing the grand total to £300
With just over a week to go until the off something potentially serious had to happen! To cross the African borders we have to have the vehicle registered in our name, no problem............... until the DVLA told us it would take 4-6 weeks to re-register the vehicle, not good! After much pleading and negotiation I found out that we could get a temporary registration certificate that is valid abroad, excellent!
But.......... its not valid for permanant export, so we will have to get the new V5 posted out to the Gambia (well at least thats the plan).
If it was simple it wouldn't be a challenge!
On being accepted for the challenge our first hurdle was sourcing a vehicle, hmmm easy you might say, but there is a catch, the vehicle has to be left hand drive. Luckily bluecycle.com, an online motor salvage auction came to the rescue and agreed to sponser us (We can't thank Robin Scarborough enough), what luck! After much searching they came up with a Jeep Cherokee, perfect. As I write the Jeep is being serviced and repaired at one of their yards. We plan to pick it up in London next week.
Here are a few pics of the vehicle at their yard before being fixed up:
Sponsership total so far £250
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