Thursday, January 25, – The Mauritanian Desert
Feb 2nd, 2024 by rallyadmin
The Moroccan border is closed until 6AM officially. In real life it opens whenever the staff shows up. And when it does open, they first process the lorries that have been waiting over night while the border was closed,
Since the border is yet another 80 or so kilometers beyond the Hotel Barbas, we have the group up and moving toward the border by 5:30 in an effort to get in line at the border before the crowds arrive. Last year this plan worked well. This year, not so much. When we arrive at the queue for the border, there is already a long line of lorries, maybe 10 cars and the border hasn’t opened yet. Patience is a virtue and it’s going to be tested.
The border crossing isn’t very complicated at the Moroccan exit customs. It’s a “three step process” as usual, passport control, customs and export of the vehicle, and it shouldn’t take more ttan 20 -30 minutes to complete,
Of course, that requires that cars actually get past the entry gate and into the customs area which is taking a long time, Three lorries and then 3 cars and then 3 lorries and then 3 cars. We inch forward and watch with amusement for the locals who are tryint to line jump and the officers who are trying to stop them. This is going to take a while.
Eventually, we get in to the area and find our way through the “three step process”. The group (all Brits) naturally queue up at every window and are promptly line jumped by a local. We’re visitors and don’t protest other than to occasionally do some position blocking to discourage the odd local that surprisingly doesn’t push the issue. We’re all trying to be patient (including the locals) which is easy right now. It’s early in the day and it isn’t hot yet. Later in the day, this would be more tense.
We get the group through Moroccan exit customs in dribs and drabs and head over the kilometer or so of no man’s land to the Mauritanian entry customs. Here we expect things to take quite a bit longer. Last year, it took nearly 9 hours to get everyone through the entry customs process and because of that Dahid has worked out some plan to do the visa process complete with photo and finger printing more efficiently.
Surprisingly, this does seem to work much better than last year. The visa payments have been included in the trip fees so the individuals won’t have to pay as they go through the photo/fingerprinting process. When that is completed, Dahid’s men collect all of our passports and have then entry stamped en masse and then come back for the drivers’ passports, driver’s licenses and the car documents to have then processed en masse. In short, this is a huge improvement over last year.
In the end, we end up spending more time getting our of Morocco than we do getting in to Mauritania, a complete reversal from last year. The only issue is that Clemo’s Land Raver is refusing to start… again. We do get it started and immediately start down the road away from the customs area to try to diagnose the problem again.
Just a few kms down the road, we stop again and the LR won’t start again. Obviously, the work done at Barbas didn’t fix the underlying problem and we start all over again. This time the focus is on the injectors which haven’t arrived yet.
The injector control wires are separated and isolated and then checked for breaks. There aren’t any obvious breaks but flexing one set of leads causes the engine to stall. That leads to replacing the leads with new wire. But that doesn’t solve the problem. Next, the complete wire loom from the ECM to the injectors is removed and reset. Still no luck. Finally, we take the loom out of our LR and put it in Clemo’s LR. Still no change.
Then someone follows the leads from the Mass Air sensor and the fuel rail pressure sensor to a hidden after market device that is meant to increase performance. It has some setting that we can change but the changes don’t seem to change the symptoms. As a last resort, we remove the device entirely and the symptoms go away. The LR starts easily and flexing the injector control leads doesn’t cause the car to stall. We try to search out info about the device on the Internet but we don’t have a connection (and there will be no connections in Mauritania until we are in a hotel as none of our phones can connect to the Mauritanian mobile network.
Dahid break the group into 3 smaller groups n assigns one of his guides to the lead car in each group. We get started again headed for the desert where we will spend our first night camping. Finally, we’re on our way again.
Down the road some kms and right off the pavement onto a short dusty track and hen onto desert hard pan. No sand yet. A few kms in and the first sand and the first extraction. The groups are still together and everyone pulls out their sand ladders and starts a very confused effort to get the stranded car moving again. Without much luck.
In fairness, most of the people are trying but they really don’t know how to get the car extracted or how to use the sand ladders. But they learn quickly by watching the guides and the more experienced drivers who have done this before. Eventually, through good instruction and brute force, they get the car out and moving again. They’ll get better at this. There will be plenty of practice over the next couple of days.
Just as the sun is getting low in the sky, we all get to the spot where we will camp for the night. And while moving in to the camping area, as expected, we get more extraction practice. Extraction is obviously still a work in progress.
Tents pitched, mats a sleeping bags set up, a large fire started and the evening bbq set up. We gather our chairs around the fire with our smuggled cocktails of choice about to have our dinner of roasted goat, couscous and salad. After the day’s excitement, the roasted goat meal is excellent and a fine change from the hotel food and/or rat pack meals of the last few days.
We are finally in the desert. The wind has died down. It’s beautiful night and everyone is excited about the desert run tomorrow.
Obi-wan