Moroccan Road Trip 2010 a success!

We were at the top of one of the many Atlas mountain ranges when we found ourselves speechless. Even in Morocco, where tourism plays a big part in the economy we were able to find ourselves in awe of the seemingly infinite space around us. The Moroccan Road Trip 2010 was another truly breathtaking adventure. It exceeded our expectations of adventure, just as we entered Morocco thinking our trip would be somewhat tamer than previous adventures we found ourselves opening the door to a series of crazy events we could never have imagined. Almost every day there was some sort of incident which added to the adventure. From getting stuck on a beach with the tide coming in, becoming buried by a lake full of flamingo poo to getting lost at the top of the High Atlas and navigating sand dunes in the dark with a snapped car chassis. These are just some of the major events we had on our rally.




So we are back now, having finished the Moroccan Road Trip 2010 on Saturday 10th July. We arrived a day earlier than expected after completing a drive through Europe that can only be described as a mad European rally run. Driving almost nonstop from Wednesday at 6am through to the Saturday afternoon.

The photos from our rally have now been uploaded and are available on the photos page of our main website at http://www.rustyrhinos.com/moroccanroadtrip2010. The video is in the process of being prepared and there will be some additional updates to the site in the near future.

We have so many people to thank for their generosity and help. We are very very grateful to all of you who have donated to the Mercy Corps, we were genuinely surprised by the generosity of those around us and by the enthusiasm people had for our trip. We also had some pretty difficult moments in Morocco where we were in need of help and the Moroccan people we met were nothing but genuine, hospitable and kind. We were really touched by the actions of some of the Moroccan people we had the pleasure of meeting. Many people in England also helped us with advice and tips for our trip, both in Morocco and through Europe. We hope you enjoyed some of the SMS blog commentary we posted while on the trip.

Thanks to Chris and Kai at PebbleTrack who once again provided us with an excellent solution which enabled everyone to follow our progress on our website via the GPS tracking capability that they added to our vehicle. We have a vast amount of GPS data that is stored at PebbleTrack that will enable us to rebuild our exact route on the rally. We plan to post up the detailed route with some further information in the near future.

If you haven't yet had an opportunity to make a donation to the Mercy Corps, we hope our completed adventure will encourage you to do so. We drove over 5,200 miles on the rally in 17 days and visited almost all corners of Morocco in the process. We're very close to reaching 100% of our fund raising target but hope we will continue to exceed this as we believe the Mercy Corps is one of those charities that can make a difference in many countries around the world.

Moroccan Road Trip 2010 launches...

The Moroccan Road Trip 2010 launch day is almost upon us, we're only 6 hours away from heading to the Western Sahara. This blog will not be updated whilst we are on the road. Please visit our http://www.rustyrhinos.com/moroccanroadtrip2010 website, this will be kept up to date while we are on the road via our SMS blog.

We expect to update the www.rustyrhinos.com site 2 or 3 times a day when there is mobile phone reception.

Thanks to all of you who have supported us and we hope the donations will continue to come in for the Mercy Corps while we are on the road.

We're all packed and ready!

Getting our priorities right

While we're on the subject of technology, we thought we'd share the importance of a particular technology on our rally. Probably the most important gadget that we carry with us is the MP3 player. We had the MP3 player set-up with the right collection of music long before we even considered a satellite phone!



People have said that it is impossible to listen to music in a 60s Land Rover and normally they would be right. The engine noise makes it near impossible to hear anything, the stiff ride (especially with military grade suspension) makes even the best anti-skip CD player fail miserably.

We decided to take on this challenge and Alex came up with the ingenious idea of mounting the speakers directly behind our heads. It sounds like it isn't such a good idea for our ears, but it isn't actually as bad as it sounds. This set-up is something we did in 2008 prior to our Saharan Rally 2009. Alex bought 2 speakers and mounted one behind the driver and passenger seat on the cage between the rear of the car and the front seats. Sound quality? Superb, we have a good sound with just the right level of bass. It keeps us going on the long nights and days of driving.

Of course the MP3 player is key to this set-up as it won't skip as we're storming through even the rockiest of terrains. Our player of choice is the Samsung YP-K5 as it has some fairly decent (for the size) stereo speakers built into it which gives us the ability to listen to our music when in the tent or away from the car. The battery life is superb (Apple users get jealous now), with over 30 hours non-stop on headphones and 6 hours when listening to the integrated speakers.

Back to the 90s

It is here, it arrived today. Our satellite phone of course. This is the latest version of the Iridium satellite phone, it is a basic phone that supports SMS and email. It even has a USB port on it and yet it looks like something from the early 90s. In fact, this satellite phone makes my first ever mobile phone look modern and lightweight! It is supposed to be very reliable, with over a 99% connection success rate and works anywhere where you can see the sky.



We were never actually planning on getting a satellite phone, but a person who I don't think will mind being named and shamed (Milan!!!) reminded me incessantly of the benefits of a satellite phone. I'm sure he should be an insurance salesman, the last email from him was titled 'There is still time...'. Well many people are very grateful that he persuaded us into getting this.

It is of course a no brainer to take one of these along on the rally as we are completely without any support vehicles and are heading into the unknown. We've tried out the phone today and it works, we can make and receive calls. We're not planning on keeping the phone on very often when on the rally, but we will occasionally power it on when we are covering large distances without mobile phone coverage.

Stickers and can opener

We no longer need any can openers donated to us, as we now have one. We're quite pleased with it, it is basic as per anything else to do with our rally and it will certainly make our life a bit easier when we are hungry.



We've now got our Moroccan Road Trip 2010 stickers on the car. They are quite big! We've left our Saharan Rally 2009 poster on the doors from the previous rally.

Food shopping

In addition to the work on the car this weekend, we've been shopping. We often get asked what do we take on the rally. Well if we've learnt anything from any of our trips it is to take a can opener! Sounds like a basic item but somehow we got all the way to Mongolia in 2007 without one. It did mean that each time we had a can to open we'd have to gently hacksaw the top off without spilling the contents. A frustrating, but somewhat comical, experience when you are very hungry and it is 35c in the baking sun.

Anyway, I don't actually think Alex or I have bought a can opener yet, so we need to add that to our list of things to get before the 24th! Although feel to donate one to us ;)

What did we buy this weekend? Junk food of course. Junk food keeps us awake at night and keeps us energised between (the few) meals during the day. So we have nuts, carbonated drinks, energy drinks, custard, biscuits, sweets, crisps, popcorn, canned fruit, cakes and the list goes on. NO CHOCOLATE, we love it, but it melts and things get messy. Even in February in the Sahara our bag of chocolate truffles turned into pure hot drinking chocolate.

It isn't all junk food of course, for our main meals we do try to grab a bite on the road, we've developed a real taste for cheap roadside food. It is usually incredibly tasty and authentic and to date we've probably only had a couple of bowel related problems from it, not bad going really. But when we cook our own meals, we have a selection of things from pasta and various jars or cans of pasta sauces, instant rice, instant noodles (super noodles only please, pot noodle need not apply) and mixed beans, tofu and other can based meals. It is quite incredible how these instant foods which normally don't rank highly on the flavour scale at home taste quite amazing when you are out on the road.

We've captured a couple of snapshots of our latest purchases. You'll notice 2 key items that we can't go on any rally without. Granola bars and Lucazade. Granola bars are breakfast, basically the days when we need to hit the road running, a Granola bar (or two) keeps us going for ages. They are also great to give to people we bump into. As for Lucazade, that is usually used during the day but we'll often have more before starting a long night drive, although that will invariably be accompanied with a large bottle of coke and crisps. The rest of the time we try to keep it healthy.

Oil cooler gets added to the Land Rover

The Land Rover made a visit to the Sahara in 2009, but the conditions then were quite different. It was February and the climate varied from about 5c in the early morning up to about 30c in the middle of the day. Even with those temperatures we experienced over heating, but this was due to a blocked radiator.

However having developed some sensitivity to overheating and being conscious that we are a single car, we set out to improve the cooling situation. So in our last blog we showed off our new bigger 5 blade fan that we can fit if we need it during the rally.

We also have a shiny new radiator and an auxiliary fan (that we had from the previous Sahara trip). Well what more could we do? An oil cooler of course. Alex was busy this weekend fitting it and making up brackets for it with help from Moss.







In addition to the oil cooler, Alex fitted the complete new front brake system and replaced one of the wheel bearing kits. The wheel bearing kit originally started out as a messy job of replacing the oil seal, but after many hours of trying to remove the oil seal and not succeeding, Alex resorted to the "brute force" technique. Get the hammer out, we're going to bash this thing off! The side effect being the wheel bearings needing to be replace too. Good job we had a spare!

A very productive weekend on the car in the end and it is now completely rally ready!

Car preparation

Our Land Rover has been 'rally ready' for sometime now, but we have decided to do a bit more work on it prior to our departure on the 24th June.

We decided that it needed new tyres, and you could say it wasn't really 'rally ready' with the tyres it had on it as there were small holes in them! So it now has a nice new set of Insa Turbo AT tyres, we also have a brand new Insa Turbo spare. We'll be carrying 2 spares in total.



We have also been trying to come up with additional ways to keep the car cool as it hasn't been exposed to these temperatures before and we don't know what to expect so have to take extra precautions. We've opted for an upgrade on the engine driven fan and have gone for a 5 blade military alternative (pictures below, next to the standard fan). We already have our auxiliary fan fitted and we're about to install an oil cooler as well. There is not much else that can be done to make the car run any cooler after all this.



If you spoke to us after our last rally, you may have come to know that our brakes on the Land Rover are far from good, actually if we described them as bad, we were being generous. So a few weeks ago, we replaced the back braking system completely. We noticed an immediate improvement, but only up to the speeds of about 20 ~ 30mph. We debated whether to replace the front brakes as well, but given that we have quite a drive through Spain, we decided to go ahead and replace them too.

In other rally progress, our International Driving Permits have arrived following a very prompt service from the AA.

Rally preparation progress

We're finalising the Land Rover for the rally. We're getting some new tyres for it and looking at creative ways of improving the engine cooling so it can deal with the June Sahara heat.

We've sent off for our International Driving Permits and have our ferry crossing to France booked. We've decided against booking a ferry crossing to Morocco and we're just going to turn up! It has worked for us before.

We're very pleased with our tracking facility that you can see on this website currently. Chris at PebbleTrack has added inside and outside temperature readings, which will give everyone following our progress a good idea of the conditions we're driving through.

Change of plan, change of vehicle.

We've been quiet for a few months, but we are still on track for a June launch for the Moroccan Road Trip 2010.

After working on the SJ for a couple of months, we realised that time was against us and our little SJ wasn't going to be ready for a June launch to the Sahara. So, we've reverted to a vehicle that has seen the Sahara before, Red, our 47 year old Land Rover.

It is rally ready and good to go! We've been testing our GPS tracking facility and have successfully installed that today with Chris from PebbleTrack (www.pebbletrack.co.uk). You'll see the tracking map on and off our website while we test it, but it will be permanently on our blog site and main Rusty Rhinos site from the moment we launch.

So when do we go? Thursday 24th June is the Moroccan Road Trip 2010 launch day!

Some progress

Our last post we mentioned we are still after some tyres for our SJ. After getting tired of hunting around for bargain tyres that don't exist we splashed out on a set of all terrain General Grabber AT2 tyres. These are excellent tyres for giving us a balance of both road use on tarmac and off road use. They should do wonders for our fuel economy and power while giving us the off road traction we need (except perhaps in mud).

So the tyres went on without much trouble at all, we removed the spacers that were on the car, but we still have all of our wheels offset which gives us a wider track for more stability.

Tyres were done and we decided to take a break from the mechanical work and look at the electrics. We revealed a can of worms in the electric system. Bad earth connections were making the car light up like a Christmas tree, hit the breaks and the indicators come on, that kind of thing. After spending half a day with it, we tracked (by sheer luck and fortune) the bad earth, so we now have rear lights, brake lights, full beam and indicators. We still lack rear fog lights, reverse lights and side lights. We spent a number of hours working on these, but we can that we're still going to have to invest more time to sort it all out.

We did have some success with wiring in some new front fog lights, they look pretty good on our bumper, a photo of them will follow.

For now, here is a picture of the car (taken in the dark) with our new tyres.

We also have a problem with our hand brake. It doesn't work because the cable snapped. We did make an attempt to fit this today, it involved removing the rear prop shaft, which wasn't too bad, but we didn't get much further than that. So all in all, some progress, but we've also revealed some additional work!

Car details and progress

The car we've chosen for our Moroccan Road Trip 2010 is a Suzuki SJ413 Samurai. If you've followed our trip to Mongolia, you'll know that the Suzuki SJ is not a new car to us. We used the SJ410 to drive our 8,400 miles to Mongolia.

After driving the last one to Mongolia we decided that while it was a very fun car to drive, we'd never get one again. Primarily because of the suspension trouble we had, yet here we are, 3 years on, with pretty much the same car.

Well it is a very fun car to drive and actually fairly economical despite what some people say. So we bought our car for £750 in the beginning of February.

When we picked up the car, we knew there were some problems because the exhaust had a hole in it that seemed to be growing by the minute, the engine had been rebuilt but needed retuning and the tyres were a bit too wide and heavy for a car that only kicks out 64bhp.

We went for this car though because the body and chassis were in pretty good condition overall and the engine had been rebuilt and was also in excellent shape.

After driving the car away, on our very first mile, we broke down. We went up a hill, or attempted to, but the car did not have enough power. We had another problem, the battery was flat so we couldn't start it up again. So we had to turn the car around by pushing it and jump starting it by driving down the hill. This eventually led us to a different route that didn't require us to climb any big hills! Our drive home was almost without event, till once again, about 3 miles from home, the car stalled. It didn't start at this point, so we had to push it off the road into a car park. After a quick inspection, we noticed the starter motor had fallen off and was stopping the car from starting. The other problem was the bolts for the starter motor were missing. At this point Alex held the starter motor with his hand while I started the car. I think it is probably worth mentioning at this point that this is not a recommended way to start the car. It hurts, it burns and you can't get your hand out of the engine area quickly! Anyway after that we got the car home.

The following weekend we fitted a new exhaust to it, replaced the battery and refitted the existing starter motor. We then got the engine tuned and gave it a test run. It ran very well, but there were still issues with the steering and power due to the size of the tyres.

So we're currently on the hunt for some good tyres.

The car we bought had been set-up for mud plugging. It had 9" of lift and the tyres that I mentioned that were a bit too big for it.

The other major problem with the car was the suspension. The first thing we wanted to sort was the suspension, so we removed the leaf over axle conversion and removed the high lift shackles and replaced those with standard length reinforced shackles and uprated 3" leaf suspension. The leaf suspension we picked up is quite special because it has an extra leaf on the front and rear, something that can be quite tricky to find. The existing set-up is fine for mud plugging but not really suitable for long distance off roading adventures.

We spent today fitting the suspension, taking 9 long hard hours of bashing the car and fitting the springs.

You can see Alex in the photo above bashing away at the leaf springs. We spent most of the time bashing leaf springs, it kind of reminded us of the Mongol Rally. You can see the photos below of the car as we've worked on it. We've developed a technique with a scissor jack that allows us to control the axle to get the springs placed in the perfect position. It still isn't easy to fit, but certainly helps. This is probably not the safest way to fit the springs, but if you don't have a car lift then it does become quite a challenge!





And here is the car with the all new suspension system that we fitted.


Now onto the next thing, replacing the tyres! We'll let you know how we get on with that.

Moroccan Road Trip 2010 starting up

For those of you familiar with the Rusty Rhinos, you'll know that we did our first rally in 2007 going from London, England to Ulan Bataar, Mongolia. We completed the rally and caught the road trip bug on route. Since then, we completed the Saharan Rally 2009, driving deep into the Sahara in Algeria before eventually heading back to London.

We're heading out into the wilderness again, in fact, we're going to the Sahara again, but this time to the western region in Morocco.

We bought our car on the 30th January 2010. It currently isn't very mobile, but we're sure a few weekends of work and we'll have it rally worthy in no time.

You can use this blog to follow our progress or if you are after our headline news, then head over to our www.rustyrhinos.com site.