North Africa - 2

We drove south along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. After the mad dash through Europe we slowed down, stopping at a beach where we set up camp and....

....assisted in our discussions by a small and very friendly tortoise, for the first time began to think realistically about our plans. Olga drank petrol - I think she did less than 15 miles to the gallon - so we simply couldn't afford to drive her much further, yet we had to return her to the UK as my parents had put a hefty deposit on her. So we determined to make for Colomb-Bechar, which stood at the north end of one of Algeria's two trans-Sahara roads, where we would leave Olga and start hitch-hiking.

Half way across Morocco we came across two Germans, a young man and his heavily pregnant wife, who were cycling down to South Africa and, like us, planned to cross the Sahara from Bechar. Their sense of adventure buoyed us up, so we squeezed them in, along with their dog, tied their bicycles on the roof, crossed the Atlas mountains, and plunged into the desert. It wasn't the great sand dunes which one imagines but rocky, often utterly flat terrain with flat-topped hills. The road was a series of braided, rutted and sand-filled tracks so, for the first time, the Land Rover came into her own.

We drove from oasis to oasis. The shade, the water gurgling in the ditches, the birdsong, all were in stark contrast to the bleached landscapes and heat of the desert. We drew beautifully sweet water from the wells. At each oasis we had to register with the Cait, giving our estimated time of arrival at the next. The roads were patrolled by lone men on a bicycle like the one pictured.

The last oasis in Morocco, Figuig, was seething with troops. Had we done our homework we would have known that Morocco and Algeria had only just called a truce on a border war. The border, the Cait told us, was mined. It would be very difficult to cross. We couldn't drive hundreds of miles north to get round the problem so felt our way across it, through barbed wire entanglements and past the wreckage of vehicles. The Algerian army officer who met us thought we were idiots: we'd crossed a minefield. Idiots? He was right.