Written by Ben Samuelson
Photography by Matt Howell
I don’t think any of us had felt more conspicuous in our entire lives. Far above us, soldiers menacingly looked down from the top of a cliff, while all around was a traffic jam consisting almost exclusively of battered cars from the early 1980s. In front were dozens of CCTV cameras, guarded by yet more serious-looking soldiers. And then there were the three of us: regular Road Book photographer, Matt Howell, my colleague Martin, and me, inside 12.8-metres of the shiniest, most expensive British-registered aluminum imaginable. If we’d been dressed as Beefeaters and been driving the Queen’s Bentley, we could hardly have stood out more.
We crawled forward, the silence of the car’s engine and the effectiveness of its double-glazing making the scene outside feel even more surreal. With a curt nod and wave of the hand, we were ushered a few meters forward, out of the last outpost of the EU, and into a world as foreign as any of us had ever seen; straight into the pure chaos of Africa.
Hundreds of bystanders aimlessly milled around, either in hooded Moroccan robes or grandiose uniforms, and it was suddenly bright, dusty, dirty, and even more intimidating. One of the men in djellaba robes confidently knocked on the window.
He had a photo ID hanging from his neck but, as far we could tell, it could have been his proof of membership of the Tangiers branch of Blockbuster. He was quite insistent and, rather than create a scene, I opened the window to find out what he wanted.
Mohammed introduced himself in heavily accented English, to which I replied in even more heavily accented schoolboy French. Immediately the smile left Mohammed’s face. “Morocco, sir, is an Arab country and here we speak Arabic, not French.” Pretty quickly it became clear it was Mohammed who could help us clear customs And Martin, who had battled Russian and Ukrainian customs posts on past trips produced a folder of such color-coordinated, alphabetized magnificence, that Mohammed decided it would only take him an hour or two to get us through. Easy.
Just as he said this, a full-blown fight broke out in front of us, as an elderly Renault screeched to a halt, wheelspin madly towards us, and eventually came to a rest buried among a heap of rubbish.
Mohammed dashed off to see whether there was a better profit opportunity beckoning but, as he explained on his return, it was only a Frenchman who was trying to bring in a handgun without the correct permits. As you do.
As Martin and I nervously queued, Matt messaged his wife explaining that he had “locked himself in the car while the other two are off bribing the official.” They do say never to leave your photographer unattended, and the wisdom of this was reinforced as we arrived back at the car to find a very cross-looking Moroccan soldier, in a uniform rather more serious than any we had already seen, waving his gun at our slightly alarmed photographer. It transpired that thinking he ought to capture the mayhem we had suddenly found ourselves in, Matt had got into trouble as this chap felt rather strongly that people shouldn’t just barge into his country and photograph confidential military installations. Which is fair enough, really: Rather than have his camera confiscated, get arrested or possibly even shot, Matt frantically started deleting as our friend Mohammed pleaded our case to the soldier.
Pretty soon we were moving, picking our way out of that hellish place and into the traffic on the next, and most exciting stage of our adventure to the Atlas Mountains, pulling the world’s smartest caravan with the world’s smartest tow car.
“If we’d been dressed as Beefeaters and been driving the Queen’s Bentley, we could hardly have stood out more”
We’d chosen to take the ferry to Santand- er in northern Spain, as it cuts 2,400 kilometers from the return trip, and anyway it was the parts of the voyage further south that excited us. The ferry itself is a rather civilized way to start the journey, too, with decent restaurants onboard, perfectly acceptable cabins, wireless internet, and phone coverage. After two nights and 33 hours onboard, though, we were more than ready to set off from Santander to pick up photographer Matt from Bilbao Airport. What we weren’t ready for, was the beauty of that stretch of coast.
With Matt onboard, we headed up into the mountains for our first photo stop: the Marqués de Riscal winery and hotel – a stunning Frank Gehry-designed build- ing, whose own use of aluminum is famous the world over. As the new Range Rover is also manufactured from aluminum (as is the body shell of the Airstream), it seemed like a rather appropriate spot for our first photo shoot. As the sun set over a bottle of Rioja, we discussed how we’d be in Morocco in just 36 hours’ time, and passing back through northern Spain in just six days.
The first night in the trailer was at Camping Fuentes Blancas, in Burgos, where we arrived in the pitch black and freezing cold. While Matt worked his magic with camera, flash bulbs and car headlights, we hooked up to the mains, plugged in our water systems, and got the heating going before disappearing for more food and wine.
Before dawn, we were on the road again, a mere 900 kilometers to cover in order to reach our next overnight halt. The fabulous Spanish motorways are the perfect environment for the Range Rover. Huge distances passed effortlessly, in utter comfort and luxury with the amount of engine, road and wind noise at towing speeds being virtually imperceptible. The ride is phe- nomenal, too, with an ability to cope with bridge expansion joints that wheels that size and air suspension shouldn’t possess. As we reached altitudes more than 1,000 meters above sea level, the big Rangie finally seemed to show a sign of weakness, as it failed to maintain the speed set on the cruise control during a particularly long, steep drag.
While mentally writing a slightly patronizing sentence about the incident, I thought I’d see what would happen if I over-rode the cruise control and pushed the throttle to the floor. Blimey. Five tonnes shot forward like a sports car, with no let up of acceleration before good sense and an unwillingness to spend time in a Spanish prison caused me to back off.
Side winds became apparent as we sailed down the other side. You could see where trucks had actually been blown over and occasionally you’d feel a bit of buffeting, but the Range Rover’s Trailer Stability Assist actually brakes its own wheels individually, to eliminate any snaking before it can even begin.
We arrived at our second campsite after dark again, but to our mounting excitement, we realized we could see the lights of Africa across the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. We took the short ferry trip across them a few hours later and, as we arrived on the African continent, the sun was shining. Ceuta is a fascinating little place, yet the most memorable thing about it was undoubtedly the border crossing – the other side of which lies Morocco.
As we climbed up through the hills, the elation of surviving our adventure in the customs post, mingled with the excitement of driving on African roads, began to hit home. And we picked our way through some truly beautiful mountain vistas for an hour or so, enjoying the double takes our amazing rig caused at every turn.
Those first Moroccan roads weren’t in great order but were probably no worse than many British ones during the winter months. As we dropped down past the huge new container port at Tangier Med, we joined the motorway, following the signs towards Rabat and Casablanca. We stopped at the first motorway services, mindful of the fact you can’t bring any of the local currency into the country and that we were on a toll road. The services were surprisingly smart, tidy and clean and the fuel was very cheap. Rather less pleasingly, the cashpoint wasn’t working but, by sheer chance (or not) we discov- ered the man at the petrol pumps not only spoke French (like virtually everyone else we met in Morocco, despite Mohammed’s warnings) but would happily change some Euros for Dirhams. The fact he’d probably just unplugged the cashpoint was an example of the way moneymaking schemes work in some parts of Africa.
Before we left, we chatted to the driver of a Geneva-registered Pinzgauer, which looked (and had sounded as we passed it on the motorway) about as uncomfortable a means of transportation as could be imagined. The driver was only too happy to explain, in a splendidly cut-glass accent, that he was a doctor on his way down to Malawi. We felt a little wimpish, with our heated, cooled, massaging seats, the most comfortable headrests in automotive history, and the luxuries of the Airstream behind us.
As we drove down through northern Morocco, the terrain looked more like Northern Italy, albeit with camels grazing, rather than cattle. We decided to skirt the narrow streets of Rabat because of our tight schedule and kept going to Camping Ocean Bleu a, beachside site in Mohammedia, just outside Casablanca.
We got chatting to some of our neighbors in the campsite, including a Cornish couple with a baby, who were heading south in their 4×4 motorhome, seeing where the road took them. Another Brit, Mark, pitched his tent nearby after riding in on his battered old MZ motorbike, which he’d bought for £100 before setting off on this trip to the Sahara and back. The following morning, we made him a cup of proper tea and fed him Marmite on toast to give him a taste of home. As he packed away his tent, while I read The Times on my iPad, I felt a bit of a fraud. By contrast, when I checked out the campsite’s lavatories, I was extremely pleased we’d brought our own!
Not long after setting off for Marrakech the following day, the landscape became much more spectacular. Although we were still making good time on the toll motorway (too expensive for the locals to use and very quiet as a result), we climbed through some hills and all of a sudden the terrain and the architecture changed.
Houses were built from bricks made out of the local red mud, and lonely shepherds tended small flocks of sheep. As we dropped down towards Marrakech, it became sandy and rocky. This was it. This was what we had come to see.
Our destination was Land Rover’s temporary headquarters at the racetrack just south of Marrakech’s centre – an alarming place to navigate, indeed. Taxis tried to get into the gap between car and trailer, mopeds piled high with full families and a week’s shopping dived down our inside and it was a particularly stressful ten minutes before we were safe in the Land Rover bubble, where the calm, immensely-competent men from the Midlands took the rig to be prepped overnight for the following days’ photography shoots.
We set out for our first location – the ancient city walls adja- cent to the royal palace – early the next morning. As the sun rose, we even got into the middle of the Jemaa el-Fnaa, the famous square that forms the historical heart of the city, which might be a first for a car and caravan. But, before it got too crowded, we headed out of town and up into the Atlas Mountains, which vertiginously rise some 32 kilometres south of Marrakech. We made our way up ever-steeper mountain roads, and the character of the people and the terrain changed. Here the locals gave a grave nod of great dignity as we drove past, something we had to do ever more slowly as the road got narrower, the hairpins tighter and the drops at either side more precipitous.
And then we were at the top – in Oukaïmeden, at an altitude of 2,700 meters. Apart from its small military base, this place is best known for its skiing. While it hardly resembles the well-groomed pistes of Courchevel, where you definitely can’t get a donkey to carry you and your skis to the top, we were able to sit down to a magnificent breakfast in a pine chalet of astonishing Alpine authenticity. Refueled, we then drove back down the mountain and, by lunchtime, were in the middle of the desert. Morocco is nothing if not a country of contrasts.
We wanted to get a photograph of the trailer next to a traditional farmstead – what I had taken to calling our ‘Millennium Falcon in Tatooine’ shot – and so, eventually, we took to a track and headed out towards a place set right on its own in the middle of the desert. As we came to a respectful halt 100 meters away, a young man in a djebella walked over – the first Moroccan we’d met that spoke absolutely no French. After lots of smiles, hand gestures and pointing at Matt’s camera, he agreed to us using the setting and sat down to watch us prepare with absolute fascination. In between dashing about like idiots to get the best of the light, we made him a cup of English tea and parted firm friends, despite not having understood a word each other had said.
We headed back to the city in the dark – not something even Land Rover’s ex-military security advisers were doing if they could possibly avoid it, owing to totally unlit donkey carts and potholes the size of Volkswagens – having finally got all the pictures to document this mammoth trip.
As we pointed the Range Rover north the following day, for an even more intense return leg, we realised how very doable this trip actually is, if you had just a couple of weeks on your hands and a true spirit of adventure. Just one thing, though, if you want to do it in real style, make sure you do it in a Range Rover with an Airstream behind it. That way you’ll be prepared for almost any eventuality.
