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If Dastardly and Mutley were to take a holiday this would be it: attempting to cross the Sahara in a car that is so appalling you wouldn’t even drive it to the scrap heap. What’s the challenge? Buy an old banger for £100, fix it up for just £15 and then drive it – with your fingers crossed – nearly four thousand miles from Plymouth down the west coast of Africa to Dakar in three weeks.
The rally, in aid of charity, begins on Boxing Day. The dubious vehicles disembarking from the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to Le Havre, France include an Ice-Cream van complete with working freezer, a replica A-Team van that’s already sprung an oil leak, the universally despised Austin Princess, a tiny £20 Fiat Panda and perhaps the worse British car ever made, an Austin Allegro.
Alongside this roll-call of rust buckets is ‘The Lady,’ a 1994 red Lada Riva saloon driven by Rachel Palmer, 29, and myself, Liz Scarff, 28, aka the Lada Ladies. With steering as heavy as a tank and gears like treacle, driving her is a truly awful experience. Unlike the Paris to Dakar this wacky race is completely unsupported. If we break down in the Sahara Desert we’ll, well, cross that bridge when we come to it.
Anyway who needs support vehicles laden with spares and luxuries like GPS when you’ve got a roof rack, fashioned from a length of old skirting board found in a local skip, ten metres of quality carpet, to be used as sand ladders, some gaffer tape, small tool kit and the spare wheel that came with the car.
This attitude of ‘winging it,’ can be applied to all the motley crew taking part. The cars quite frankly are rubbish.
The rally is (un)-organized by Julian Nowill a stock broker from Exeter with a penchant for Lada’s. Having driven a £25 Lada to St Petersburg in 2001 Julian dreamt up the rally to satisfy a mid-life crisis. Now in it’s third year the entrants have jumped from an initial fifty to over two hundred. He says, ‘If you have lots of money and a sense of adventure then the Paris/Dakar could be your cup of tea. If you have a sense of adventure but relatively little cash then the Plymouth to Dakar challenge might be up your street.’
Rally drivers are aged between nineteen and sixty-five (only seven are female) and from a variety of different backgrounds: what unites everybody is a passion for cars and adventure.
This unique rally boasts the slogan, ‘No money, No worries, No sense.’ No sense comes into play in France when one team’s homemade roof rack slips forward pinning all the doors shut with occupants inside. Later two rally cars crash in the Pyrenees. No worries? You must be joking!
Neil Scudder, 36 and Chip Wilson, 37, anticipated problems crossing the Sahara in their Bedford Ice-cream van but not on day one, just a hundred miles into the trip. Dejectedly they tuck into strawberry cornets before the van is taken to a scrapyard. Unable to let them go home so early in the game we re-arrange our equipment to create more space. Chip hitches a ride with Team Vantastic while we christen Neil an honorary Lada Lad and head for the icy Pyrenees.
The bracing snow and gale-force winds exaggerate the slack in the Lada’s steering, making her impossible to drive in a straight line. With 2,499 miles of potholed roads ahead for the first time it crosses our minds that the Lada is completely unsuitable for the terrain. But for the moment our main concern is getting through the Moroccan border. Rumours of corrupt officials are rife and the group is nervous.
‘Another team member came flying through customs towards us hissing, “get rid of your CB radio,”’ explains Brett Tapping, 26, co-driver of a £20 Fiat Panda with his brother Ellis, 32, ‘Clive’s team had interrogated at the border for three hours because the Moroccans thought they were spies,’ continues Brett, ‘So Ellis distracted the guards while I ripped our CB out, stuffed it in a carrier bag and nonchalantly strolled over to the waste-bin to drop it in.’
It takes most of the day but eventually all 34 cars get through safely. Misa from the A-Team re-attaches our loose exhaust pipe with speaker wire and everybody heads along the beautiful Moroccan coastal road for the city of Rabat. The Moroccans have their own particular brand of driving. It does of course involve high speeds, blind corners and lots of horn action. But most notably the ‘Moroccan Middle’ – the art of driving straight down the middle of the road seemingly oblivious to other traffic.
Stef Pickles, 39, and George William, 31, from Wales discover the Moroccan penchant for speed when they blast through a police check point at 80mph in their £10 Montego Estate, ‘George didn’t see the police,’ explains Stef, ‘so he skidded into a ditch at eighty mph in front of two very bemused policemen. We climbed out the car in a cloud of dust spluttering, “pleased to meet you we’re British,” The police seemed to think this was fairly normal behaviour and took us for breakfast.’
Our second day in Africa brings our first serious problem – a gearbox that won’t stay in gear. Luckily we are travelling in convoy with a mechanic, Mike Rogers, of Team Vantastic. ‘Keep heading for Marrakech until you conk out and then we’ll tow you,’ is his advice. Mike owns a garage and co-driver John Ward works for an oil company. They are both from Southampton. ‘I read about the rally in a car magazine,’ explains Mike, ‘we both own classic cars and go driving together at the weekends. This rally seemed like a real challenge and I’m just itching to drive across the desert.’ ‘And we’re hoping to still be friends after three weeks in a car together,’ laughs John.
Driving our Lada soon becomes a two-person job; one pair of hands to hold the car in gear while the other wrestles with the heavy steering. Most visitors to Marrakech wander the Souks, we scoured the scrapyards looking for a second-hand gearbox. Without it we’d be on the next plane home. Tension mounts as Ahmed, our local mechanic, goes from scrap dealer to dealer. Our hearts sink as time after time he emerges shaking his head. Finally, after an hour and a half our man in Marrakech comes up trumps with a four-speed gearbox to replace our previous five-speed. We must be the only people to have ever paid £100 to downgrade a Lada.
The gearbox takes two days to fit leaving us two days’ drive behind the rest of the convoy. We cover 600 miles in one day, and although the Moroccan police constantly stop us for speeding, being an all girl team suddenly becomes an advantage as an amiable chat secures our bribe-free passage across the country. By now bush bodges have become the norm. Starter motors have been removed in favour of push starts, fuel tanks bypassed with plastic tubing and a jerry can on the roof; and a baked bean can is patching up the Allegro’s exhaust.
The fast-paced driving is exhausting. We only have time for one meal a day and rarely reach a destination in daylight. By now the group has split into smaller mini convoys. We stick together for safety – if one car stops we all stop, be it for a toilet break or puncture. Most evenings we meet at the designated campsite. From civil servants to solicitors and engineers the group is a mixed bunch. Beers, spare parts and tales of the day are enthusiastically shared whilst everybody mucks in with repairs.
Crossing the Mauritanian border involves negotiating two wooden shacks in the middle of nowhere. Not only is this stretch of land corrugated and unmarked it is also a live minefield. The Western Sahara territory is the subject of a long running dispute between Morocco and the Polisano, a movement who want independence for Western Sahara. Although there has been a cease-fire since 1991 the mines remain. The route through is not clearly marked and we are instructed to follow the tracks of previous cars.
We pick up the statuesque Ahmed Salim, our desert guide, let some air out from our tyres to prevent punctures and push on in our mini convoy for the dusty, windswept town of Nouâdhibou, Mauritania – our gateway to the desert. Our exhaust is causing problems: the middle is melting through the handbrake cable and the end is falling off. We pull off the end, tie it to the roof rack and keep going.
Ahmed guides us through the flat desolate landscape with a complicated series of frenzied taps, hand wiggles and screams, (we can only assume this is delight at our driving). ‘Allez, Allez,’ he shouts, bashing furiously on the dashboard as he anticipates a thick bit of sand approaching. We drop down into second; rev the engine and fly across the sand as the back skids out. We drive in our groups of five, sometimes in line, sometimes racing each other, sometimes bumping into other mini convoys. Desert etiquette dictates that if another car becomes stuck in the sand you keep driving until the ground is firmer and then walk back to help push.
Sand dust suffocates the air, penetrating everything: clothes, hair, car engine, boot, even our food is served a little gritty. A herd of camels strolls past as we pull up to a sand dune for the second night of desert camping before heading for Senegal the next morning. Senegalese law states that cars older than five years cannot enter the country. We are begrudgingly given an armed escort to ensure we don’t sell our cars whilst in the country and instructed to reach the Gambia in two days.
Thirty-five cars left the UK and thirty made it to the Gambia (we actually go a little bit further than Dakar but Plymouth to Dakar has a better ring to it than Plymouth to Banjul). We have crossed six countries, 3699 miles, in nineteen days. Our Lada may have no rear exhaust, a melting handbrake cable, a downgraded gearbox, a bodged fan, vibrating propshaft and a slow puncture – but she and her mechanically incompetent drivers made it.
A charity auction is arranged for all the cars; the Allegro makes £220, and the money is donated to Gambian charities. We have fallen in love with the Lada’s quirks and even through a local Gambian has bid a staggering eight hundred and forty pounds, for her we can’t help wondering… would she have survived the drive back to the UK?
©Liz Scarff2011
Photographs©Rachel Palmer2011
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