3300 miles - offroad towards Mali

An early start after a good night's sleep (and a hot shower!) - the Lavvies and Stoat's Escape joined the other teams as planned, and we fuelled up with our remaining Dingbats and set out on the "Hard Route" to Mali. This is supposed to be passable by 4wds and "maybe" 2wds, and let's just say that they weren't joking when they named it!



In fact, there wasn't much of a road - sometimes there was a track, broken by deep sand and a need to get out and push the Transit and Renault, but mainly it was a matter of picking the best route from hilltop to hilltop, with occasional help from the GPS in Nelson's car and frequent stops to ask the locals which way to go. The terrain changed as we travelled from dusty desert to open savannah, with trees starting to appear (and along with them, tree stumps and tree roots!) During the morning, things were basically good - after a quick stop for lunch, things changed for the worse.

First of all, we lost the two lead vehicles when we were crossing a small ravine - each vehicle picked its own route down into the valley, we came up the other side, and the others were gone! After a bit of driving around aimlessly sounding the dixie tunes horns, we sent back to the last place we'd seen the others, turned the engine off, and waited... for about fifteen minutes until the Renault turned up again, having come back to look for us. How I wish that the other guys had brought radios with them!

Almost immediately after that, the Renault got a front puncture, so we put the spare wheel on. Then, incredibly improbably, they got another one 500m later, with no remaining spare to use. We tried to fix the punctured tyres with tyre-weld and rubber patches, but both the sidewalls had big rips in them so that failed dismally. In the end we put a flat tyre on the rear of the Renault and two good tyres on the front, and the Portuguese had to drive on with a flat.

We were headed to Kankossa, the final sizeable village in Mauritania before Mali and the only one with a Michelin guy to sort the Renault out. We stopped and asked directions a few times more, and one of the locals explained that we were actually retracing the ancient Bamako, before the highway was built. Ancient road or not, it was incredibly hard to follow, often disppearing completely and leaving us stuck in the middle of a group of rocks or field of sand or cluster of trees with little clue which way to turn! GPS (and the map, and the sun, and more often, the locals) to the rescue.





We eventually made Kankossa before dark, but not before a Mauritanian palm tree had reversed into our Patrol and destroyed the rear screen and part of the rear cab. We lost the group again as we had to stop to pick up the damage and press the gaffer tape into service once more - in the end we bodged a repair using a survival bag to replace the rear glass, stopping all of our stuff from flying out of the back window. Kankossa was easy enough to find and we asked for the Michelin Man, where we found the Transit boys and the Portuguese watching a one-legged fitter change the tyres on the Renault. The rim that had been driven flat had fortunately survived with little damage, and we passed the time chatting with the Gendarmes ("Are you really going to Timbuktu?") and the local kids who knew everything about the Spanish football league.





We realised that there was no way we could make the border before sunset, so we left Kankossa and headed out into the bush to set up camp out of sight behind a hill. On the way out of the village the Renault spat out a particularly big cloud of oil - it had been threatening to do so all day, with the occasional wisp when its measly 1.2 litre 4-cyl was being pushed particularly hard, but this was enough to make us all stop and check things over! The Transit was also suffering, cutting out when it was put under too much load. Both engines still ran evenly enough, so we resolved to fix them in the daylight and set up camp a few km further on. The Nomad'ers handed round some carefully-hidden beers - well needed after one of our hardest days yet - and we chatted for a bit before heading off to sleep.

Everyone was up with the sun the next day to crack on with the repairs. We made a more permanent bodge of our rear screen, and found a way to make good out of bad by converting the screen hinge into a go-faster roof spoiler. The Portuguese checked the levels on the Renault and declined my kind offer of a compression tester, and the Nomad'ers changed their fuel filter. We wished they hadn't, because the Transit didn't run at all afterwards! It took three hours of everyone troubleshooting the problem (checking the pipes to and from the tank, checking the diesel pump, filling the filter up with fuel, towing the Transit around the hilltop with the Patrol to try to bleed any air through the fuel system) to work out that the replacement fuel filter in fact had slightly different fittings to the old one. Noel and Nick spent the afternoon kicking themselves over that one - the situation was made slightly better when Nick handed round some birthday cake!

We got underway around noon, after I'd made a present of my frisbee to a guy called Baramak (not sure of the spelling). He wore it round his neck and walked back to his village with it when we'd finished playing!