We built our own road across the Sahara

On the Africa Rally, a few of us drive cheap old cars from Europe through West Africa until they fall apart. Two days into the 2023 run, on the Western Sahara coast, there was meant to be an old road by the ocean. We could not find it. So we built one.

It started as a joke and turned into shovels. One minute someone said why don't we just make our own road, and the next we were digging a line across the sand toward the water. Five minutes in, everyone was an expert. There was an officer on the beach trying to get our attention the whole time, which we cheerfully ignored, until we worked out that our new playground sat right on the border between Morocco and Western Sahara. By the time we checked the GPS, we had crossed it about ten times. Stupid, excited tourists. We reached Dakhla after dark, nine hundred kilometres done for the day.

We did it again a week later in Mauritania. We turned off the road near Atar, followed checkpoints left from old desert races, and spent a whole day pushing and digging thirty kilometres of our own line across open desert. Two of the cars needed serious welding afterwards. You learn fast out there how easy it is to lose the others: a few minutes in the wrong direction and you are alone with the camels.

The cars were old and cheap and entirely wrong for it. That was always the point. When the route runs out, you make one.

There is no guidebook for the bit where you build the road yourself. That is the bit worth showing up for.