Gleibat El Foula

From Smara it was a steady run along some smaller roads to Laayoune. Quite a large and modern city with an impressive stadium and some lovely palm lined roads. Leaving the city westward the road passes through a section of sand dunes on its way to the coast. After a couple of false starts we found a track down to the sea and parked up close to a military base. There are outposts all along the coast so they are hard to avoid. We were duly inspected. Twice. We were politely asked for cigarettes. Finally, we were left alone for a peaceful night just a few feet from the edge of a small drop into the water.

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We followed the coast road to Boujdour by which time we were pretty sure that we didn’t like the coast road. It actually followed a route several kilometres inland. It was boring and carried a lot of traffic. Just as we were leaving Boujdour we spotted a road heading inland. This proved to be our salvation and not long after that, we were on our own in lovely, quiet desert.

The road had become a track but even so, we had parked several hundreds of metres away from it. In the morning, a Land Cruiser turned up with some sort of national park logo on the door. The man asked what we were doing there so we explained we were tourists. This, apparently, was fine. He wished us well and left.

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The graded track became a rough track. We passed a well with some trough around it. Possibly for watering camels. We followed another well-used track southwards and then we came across some Dakar mounds. These are a relic of the old Paris-Dakar rally. They are simply mounds of earth, typically in pairs, made with a bulldozer to mark the piste used by the race. This gave us a good route to follow.

Two days later, we arrived at Gliebat El Foula. Mostly the route had been flat, open desert. Almost feature less. Then we approached a range of hills and came across some nomads herding camels. At the edge of the range of hills, we could see tracks converging from many directions and funnelling down through a shallow pass. We followed the main track down which then turned east and about 10km further brought us to a military checkpoint. There is a mapped route from here, south, to Aoussard but were told we could not go that way. Instead, we must go west, almost to the coast and then south-west from there. A military pickup escorted us for an hour or so to ensure we went the right way.

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