For my driving team of three, our lesson in desert driving began on a lonely stretch of Mauritanian road. Our guide, Mohammed, spent two minutes giving us our instructions: “Engage first gears, point wheels straight ahead, accelerate to the floor and don’t ride the clutch.”
My driving partners and I were in Mauritania as part of the Plymouth-Banjul rally. The idea behind it is to buy a car for less than a hundred pounds, then drive it across the Sahara. Our crew had been taking turns to drive our ancient Renault 18 (the ‘dix-huit’) for ten days now, but for us, and seven other decrepit rally cars, our Sahara challenge was just about to begin.
The entry to the desert is a difficult bed of soft sand. Mohammed stood by the tracks to guide us, his blue robe flapping in the wind. Somehow, I get the dix-huit through first time, despite Mohammed’s sceptical expression at the woman at the wheel.
The terrain alternated between firm, easy driving and beds of soft sand. Inexperienced, we drove too close to the other cars, unable to find the acceleration required to glide over the sand. We then spent the afternoon digging, pushing and towing. When all that failed, Mohammed took the wheel and expertly drove us out.
Our camp for the night turned out to be occupied by thirty other rally cars, driven by party-goers, so we had to sleep to the sound of AC DC blasting from their car stereos.
We discovered the next morning that Saharan rain feels like being spat at with wet sand. The dix-huit glided away in the first group of four. The piste here is a firm carpet of shells. Apart from a tyre change, we sped on, stopping only to take a sand-spattered lunch. All the cars in our group formed a square for shelter, which was really no shelter at all. Mohammed sat alone beneath a thorn tree, his face concealed by a wrap. I went over to sit with him, to find that the thorn tree provided perfect shelter from the wind. He made tea smelling of fresh grass, which he served in glasses, pouring it three or four times to make it froth.
The sun filtered through in the afternoon, casting a silvery light over the dunes. It was soon time to drive on and make camp. The group slept alone this time, in the shelter of a dune. The wind dropped and everything was still; Mohammed told us that we had had an easy day. Tomorrow, he prophesised, will be hard. I slept badly that night due to the owner of a Golf, snoring like an elephant in the next tent. The desert was turning out to be very noisy at night.
Morning arrived, chilly and damp until the sun rose and took hold. Mohammed squatted in the sand to give brief us. We had to cross a series of four long, low dunes which stretch for several kilometres. Our instructions were clear: drive as if your life depended on it and keep to Mohammed’s tracks.
The dunes looked insignificant as we pulled up – gentle slopes of sand held together by bits of scrub. Mohammed took the wheel of the Golf from the snorer, lit a Marlboro Red and motioned for us to follow.
The stretches of soft sand are long. Mohammed zoomed ahead. The dix-huit was heavy, but its grip on the sand was weak, as the backside of the car slid from side to side. In the deeper sand, we took turns to rev the car forwards only to find ourselves slipping sideways at forty degrees, as thorn bushes scratched at the wings. Once, we lost control completely and drove straight over a small tree; the branches made an agonising scraping sound on the oil tank beneath the car. We looked behind; fortunately there are no tell-tale fluid trails in the sand. The tracks were soft, deep furrows, to stop now would mean sinking into the ground. We were fast learning that speed was everything here.
We soon lost sight of everyone else, as we tried to guess, at the last minute, which tracks were fresh and where Mohammed might be. The car the spun around the corners in the sand, as Muhammad suddenly Mohammed appeared ahead on the brow of a hill. Before us was a deep valley of sand, Mohammed clenched his fist and whirled his arm like a windmill, screaming “Drive, drive drive!”