Sahara - XT500 - 1982

Greetings A Riders.

Let me tell you how it was back in the day, before the inch-thick Touratech catalog, when you sent postcards not texts (and usually beat them home), when you made your gear out of scrap metal you found in skips, and when you navigated with a rosary, not a GPS. This is the story of my first big motorcycling adventure; a plan to ride across the Sahara to the Ivory Coast on an XT500 in 1982.

Southern England, 1982. Like a lot of you I was dirt bike crazy, ate US Dirt Bike Magazine in one sitting and spent every spare hour bouncing my bikes off the scenery just for kicks. Here, after a brilliant day on a Cornish beach we got caught by the tide, rode out over the dunes but found ourselves trapped inside an army camp. The only way out was to do a Steve McQueen and jump the gate.

But man cannot live by jumps alone - he needs an adventure but in the UK we have no Nevadas, no Utahs or Arizonas. We don't even have a Colorado. We have Welsh bogs. Apart from Doncaster, the nearest bit of wilderness was the Arctic or the Sahara in North Africa. I didn't know anyone who'd been to the Sahara but figured it must be humanly possible and the Ivory Coast sounded like a nice place to end up. The Sahara Handbook had a lot about Kombis, Range Rovers and Land Cruisers, but just a page and a half on motorcycles: get an XT500 it said. Or get a BMW. They got shaft drive you know.

So I got an XT (that one I jumped wasn't mine) and spent weeks preparing it. A mate crashed it into a bus one night so I got some RM forks and a 19-inch wheel as compensation. A bloke took a month to make an alloy tank that didn't quite fit. I put on an oil cooler from a Citroen car or some such. The rack was made of Dexion industrial shelving, the panniers were sacks and chemical tins with the tops sawn off and hinges put on. When the big day came it was snowing but there was no turning back. I piled on the heaps of junk.
Like so many first timers before and since, I was massively overloaded but hugely under-equipped.

Here's another shot of the XT so you can be sure how ugly it is.
I didn't feel that confident, but what can you do? Set off and hope you get over it.

'Where you gowin on that thing?' a kid sneered at a fuel station on the way to Portsmouth.
'Afrika, my lad.'
'No yer not!'

Camping somewhere in France with my trusty Vango tent which tripled in weight when wet and stayed that way for days. Notice how I use a karrimat and duct tape to protect the jerries. A tip from Mr Know-It-All; you wouldn’t want to scratch them.
All the way down people were waving and shouting 'Rallye, rallye, rallye'. What rally? I'd never heard of the Paris-Dakar Rally back then, but in those days the Frenchies were mad for it and actually thought I was a front runner!

The idea of staying in a hotel was patently absurd. Here I'm camping in the hills near Cassis, just out of Marseille. I'd been on the road for all of 3 or 4 days and had run out of money already to pay for the ferry to Algiers. This travelling game; it just wasn't like being at home.
Nice Alpine Stars. Do they still make them in steel?

Next stop - Algeria...

this is great

+1

Chris S,

Amazing, Africa without Touratech? Got to love Old School. Looking forward to the rest!

Old's cool, keeping scaning those pic's This looks cool.

You had me at "XT500"!

In!!!

Brilliant. Why havn't you posted this before?????????

Keep it coming. Great stuff.

Awesome awesome
Xt500, my first love

Awesome so far


Need MORE



I can already tell this is gonna be really good

Because it's an XT 500 and it took 28 years to get home.

Great stuff, bring on the rest of the story.

Rallye, rallye, rallye!

I rode to Cameroon in 1979 on an SR500 and lost all the pictures so I am really enjoying this. I remember the jury rigged petrol can holders, the Michelin maps and stupid piles of stones in the desert marking the way. The horrid taste of the artesian water at In Guezzam and the flies in the food and the sand in the chain. How did we trust our lives to crappy clothing, no communications (bliss!) and total ignorance of each step of the way to come? We were privileged to live it.

Hi,
I was (and still am) one of the BMW guys and looked the same when I went into the sahara the first time in 87.
Totally overloaded and with no clue at all. But with an idea and a lot of "I want to".
I am rerally going to enjoy this. Got good memorys of those years when the Sahara was safe and free to everyone.
Keep posting and thanks.
Cheers Thomas