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.