Driving Western Sahara: the long road to Dakhla

Look at a map of West Africa and there is a stretch most itineraries pretend is not there: the long strip of Western Sahara between southern Morocco and the Mauritanian border. On the Africa Rally we drove the whole of it, and the plain summary is that the road is easy – it is everything around it that takes getting used to.

The road is sealed and mostly empty. Desert on the left, Atlantic on the right, wind all day. Sand drifts across the tarmac in thin ribbons, and camels graze at the roadside where nothing looks like it could feed a camel. Every so often a checkpoint, where an officer waves you through or writes you down. Every so often a fuel station that feels like an event, because out here it is one – we filled up whenever we saw one, whether the tank needed it or not.

The places on the way are few and far apart. Laâyoune, the territory's biggest city, breaks up the first day. Sahrawi tent camps sit off the road in ones and twos. A sticker-covered sign marks the Tropic of Cancer – we passed it in the dark before dawn, and photographed it by torchlight. Between all of that: hours of nothing, which is the appeal or the problem, depending on who is driving.

We rolled into Dakhla after dark, nine hundred kilometres done in a single day.

If long driving days are not your thing, this stretch will grind you down – there is no scenic detour to rescue it, and turning around means driving the same road back. Go in knowing it is a transit, not a sightseeing route.

But if the far ends of maps pull at you, this is one of the emptiest drives you can do on sealed tarmac anywhere, and the emptiness is the attraction. The desert does the talking for two days straight.

Fill the tank, queue the podcasts, and let it be long.