3500 miles - Aourou to Kayes

The locals had warned us that the route to Kayes took 4h in normal conditions (and four days in the rainy season!) even though it was only 115km - in fact the surface was a bit better than the road to Aourou, and easier to drive in the daylight, but it was still pretty bumpy. So bumpy, in fact, that more things broke - our centre speaker fell off the dash and (disaster!) our external hard disk stopped working whilst playing Def Leppard, so we lost all our holiday photos to date. Let's hope that OnTrack can help recover them when we're home.

There wasn't much sand on the road but there was still a lot of dust (evidenced when we shook the air filter out upon arrival and nearly suffocated in the ensuing cloud!) About 5km before we reached the tarmac road to Kayes, we heard a new exciting rattling noise. The front offside shock had finally given up - after all the abuse it had taken, we were amazed it had lasted so long, and grateful that it waited until the end of our off-roading to fail. Now we had a rattly bouncy Patrol with no brakes and no music and no rear window and a dent in the front wing and a bonnet that wouldn't open properly and so much dust inside that you couldn't read the instruments!



By a stroke of luck, we quickly found a mechanic in Kayes who took on the job of repairing the brakes for us. Nick the Nomad had already found the source of the fluid leak, in front of the rear axle, and the master mechanic at the Institute of Agriculture (!) set to work fixing it. It turned out that the rear flexi-hose was blocked and that had caused one of the solid brake pipes to burst - it took him four hours to find replacement parts and fit them, for which we paid 130 Euros. While we were waiting, the Portuguese and Nomads headed off towards Bamako (Jose had to catch a flight in just a few days), and we crossed the road to the nearest hotel, ordered beer, and chilled out on the hotel terrace on the South bank of the river Senegal.

After the car repair was finished, we went on a hunt for chicken and chips, on the advice of the Nomad'ers. We didn't find the place they'd eaten but we eventually did stumble upon a Malian restaurant (basically, someone's house) where the chicken was excellent and the company friendly. Since we hadn't had any chance to exchange currency, we had a bit of fun trying to pay with Euros before one of the locals stepped into help. We then went back to the hotel and drank some more beer, whilst discussing whether or not we'd make it to Timbuktu with the time we had remaining.