Morocco - April 2002

Chapter 1 - The wrong Land Rover and no tent

It all started innocently enough at the first Beaulieu 4x4 Show in July 2001. I had my Land Rover on display with the Series III Club and my wife and I were strolling round the show when we happened to walk past the Trailmasters stand. We wandered inside and got talking to the owner, Ray Montieth-Smith. Ray was incredibly enthusiastic and an excellent salesman and it wasn’t long before we were seriously considering signing up for a trip to Morocco.

To be fair, we really didn’t take too much persuading as it was the sort of thing we’d been considering doing for some time. However, one of the biggest hurdles was my then current Land Rover. It was a Stage 1 V8 and, whilst in excellent condition, it rarely bettered 15mpg and the fuel costs alone of such a trip were daunting, to say the least! However, Ray explained that the best way to get to Morocco was to take a ship from Portsmouth to Bilbao, which more than halved the driving distance in Europe, and then went on to tell us of how cheap the petrol was when we got there.

All of a sudden it seemed viable to go so we promised to think about it and went for a wander round. It was at this point that we bumped into two friends, James and Neil, and we told them what we were considering. They both thought it sounded like a great idea and we soon found ourselves back at the Trailmasters stand writing out deposit cheques

The following day we met up with some more friends, Steve and Vanessa, who had sold their Land Rover a few months before. We told them where we were planning to go and said they could come too if only they had a Land Rover. Vanessa then revealed that they’d bought a second-hand Range Rover only that day. It took no more persuading and she phoned Trailmasters there and then to reserve a place.

Not long after another friend, Malcolm was also signed up and it was agreed that Neil would ride shotgun in his 110 station wagon. James was keen to take his own SWB Series III and would be travelling solo.

The following months were taken up with lots of planning and assembling of kit including, for unrelated reasons, changing my trusty Stage 1 for a 300tdi Discovery. This raised some interesting problems, as it was the most expensive vehicle I’d ever bought and I was more than a little paranoid about damaging it. This gave me a good excuse to invest in some under body protection and various other bolt-on goodies, which are detailed elsewhere. We also had to buy all our camping gear from scratch as, although we’d owned a caravan for a number of years, neither of us had been camping since we were children.