Petcul,
Is the turn off for Diama easy to spot -Any features to look out for?
Also do you have any sense of the mobile phone coverage on the tarmac route?
Ian
No, it's a PITA to spot, and even when on it, you'll think you've gone wrong for a good few miles.....
It's just before a petrol station on the right hand side about 4 miles north of Rosso.....though don't rely on that guestimation
IIRC, there's a second petrol station on the left hand side a short way beyond.
The track(s) go off inbetween some little shanty shacks and wiggle their way through some fields before you pick up the main track.....the best way of knowing for sure is to look over the edge after a few miles and make sure that you're on the dge of the dyke.
There are some big dips and humps, plus some nasty hidden sleeping policemen ditches, and there are half a dozen or more police shacks and barriers as well....you'll be stopped in daylight and you'll need a fiche for each one, but after dusk they retreat into their little huts and cluster around the B&W Tv's run off car batteries...you may still get challenged though.
Ideally, you want to be on that track in the morning, as towards dusk it turns into bitey insect hell, and you need to allow a couple of hours to get through the border and then another two to get from there to the Zebrabar.
I nearly got taken out by an extremely large and very angry wild boar and her two piglets along that track....came charging out of the reeds to the left and went across barely feet in front of me....this thing must have been 30 stone or more, unbelievably big and scary pointy tusks
Also make damn sure that anything that's loose is tightened down and check the bike over before, during and after that section...80 miles of washboard shakes fillings out of teeth, let alone nuts off bolts.
Stick everything you possibly can up with a loctite before you go anyway, but if it's loose to start off with on that track, the chances are you won't have it with you by the end
Phone coverage is great all the way down to the Mori border, then gets patchy for several hundred miles and non-existent for the Western Sahara classic route...make sure you speak to your phone providor before you go as well....several phones in our party were cut off because they didnt know they'd be used in West Africa.
On the tarmac route, there are lots of trucks and cat-cats (4x4's) so you shouldn't have a major problem if something goes wrong.
Try and give as little away as possible BTW.....so many people using those routes over the years bunging out money and tshirts and phones and stuff has caused a begging/expectation culture and adding to it only keeps that alive...with 6 or more police checkpoints on the way down the Dakhla and Nouadhibou peninsulas and the same on the way back up them for example, it could cost you an absolute fortune if you start giving stuff away
Having said that, if you've got an old mobile phone and charger that you can take to give out as an emergency measure, it'll go down as well as money.
