Race to Dakar Read online

  Many years earlier I'd filed away my childhood dreams of competing in the Dakar. In the days when I was fitting kitchens and painting living rooms it seemed a distant and unrealistic pipe dream. But, riding across America on open roads, I realised pipe dreams can come true provided you want them more than anything and if you focus totally on achieving them.

  When we arrived in New York I told Russ Malkin, one of the Long Way Round producers, about my plan to do the Dakar. Russ is one of those eternally optimistic people. In Russ's world, anything is possible. In fact, the more impossible it seems, the more Russ wants to do it and his response was typical.

  'Sounds interesting,' Russ said. 'Maybe we should do it.'

  When Ewan and I were hatching our dream of riding around the world, I bumped into Russ, who I thought looked the spitting image of Rob Lowe, at a party in London. Russ told me about his background in organising and filming events, such as the Venice-Simplon Orient Express Challenge, which involved celebrities and professional drivers in Lamborghinis, Aston Martins and Ferraris dashing from London to Venice in a race to beat the Orient Express train. He'd recently produced the World's Fittest Woman, a competition in Hong Kong that was broadcast by Sky, and as a fellow biker who shared the same outlook as Ewan and me, Russ was the obvious choice to help us produce the Long Way Round documentary. Over the course of the fourteen-week trip, Russ did a fantastic job and we became very good friends, so when I thought of the Dakar, Russ was my only choice.

  But Russ didn't mention the rally again that summer and I thought little more of it while I was on holiday with my wife and daughters. It was only in September, when Ewan and I received the first copies of the Long Way Round book, that I realised I'd been hoisted by my own big mouth. There, on the dust jacket, in the final sentence of my biography, were the fateful words: 'He rides a Ducati 748 and is preparing for the 2006 Paris-Dakar rally, if his wife lets him.'

  Oh shit. I'd forgotten I'd ever written that.

  A few weeks later, at a book signing, a member of the public pointed at the fateful sentence. 'You're doing the Dakar then?' he said. 'Good on yer.'

  Oh no, I thought. I really was committed now.

  I spoke to Russ again. Fortunately he was still interested.

  'Sounds good, Charley, but you need to think about how you're going to do it,' he said. 'You could try on your own, but you'd have a better chance with someone who's done it before. If you want to do it that way, I'll help you.'

  Even with Russ's encouragement, there was a part of me that was convinced my dreams might be quashed by the reality of having to earn a living to support my family. But, to my surprise, it soon became apparent that Long Way Round was going to be a huge success. The book reached number one in the bestseller charts and the television series sold around the world.

  Ewan had been right all along. It was going to change my life.

  And when I mentioned my Dakar dream to the people at BMW who had lent us three GS1150 Adventures for Long Way Round, or to the television executives at Sky who had bought the seven part series from us, or to the people who had commissioned the book, none of them looked at me as if I was mad.

  The BMW people tried to instil some reality. The questions came thick and fast. Did I realise the risks? Where would we get the money? They wanted answers. But they didn't say no. And the television and book people said yes straight away.

  After feeling that I'd been part of a double act with Ewan for the last year, it was very reassuring to hear everyone's confidence in me. Maybe Long Way Round had been my OBE - Only Because of Ewan - but here was my chance to escape years of mind-numbing hard graft and do something I really wanted to do. I had to seize it.

  At the end of October 2004, Russ and I travelled to Valencia for the final MotoGP race of the season. On the night before the race, shit-faced in a bar, I got talking to an Englishman with a massive smile called Chris Evans.

  Emboldened by maybe one beer too many, I grandly declared my ambitions to take part in the Dakar in 2006 and told Chris about wanting to make a documentary about Dakar privateers' experiences as all the coverage to date had focused on the professional factory teams.

  'Well you better come and have a look at it in January, then,' Chris said. He went on to explain that he worked with ASO, as their English representative. Shouting above the music and the din of the club, Chris regaled me with dozens of stories about the Dakar and encouraged me to pursue my dream.

  Christ, I thought, is no one going to tell me to abandon my Dakar ambition?

  Starting to realise the scale of what I was taking on, I began to hope someone would say no. Then I'd be able to say that I had at least tried, without actually having to go through with it. But here was Chris Evans, a man with a direct connection to the heart of ASO, telling me that making a documentary would be no problem.

  In January 2005 Russ and I boarded the first in a succession of planes that would take us to Tichit in eastern Mauritania. By now I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Dakar. But, as Russ liked to point out, I tend to think I know everything there is to know about everything anyway.

  'What page is that on?' Russ would say whenever I piped up with some fact or anecdote about the Dakar.

  'Whaddya mean what page is it on? What page of what?' I'd say.

  'What page of the Charley Book of Everything?'

  I knew the Dakar was tough. I knew it lasted fifteen days. I knew that it involved cars, trucks, bikes and support vehicles and helicopters and a travelling staff of more than 1000. But I had no concept of quite how tough and how big and how organised it was until we arrived at the bivouac in the Sahara desert.

  Our pilot had flown us from Dakar through a dust cloud thick as custard in a single-engine ten-seat propeller plane. Flying blind, she dropped the plane as we approached the airfield outside Tichit, a God-forsaken dot on the map of west Africa, then looked for the bivouac in the swirling dust. Everyone in the plane was silent as she strained to see some sign of life. The instant she spotted the encampment below, the pilot pulled the plane into a tight downward spiral, not taking an eye off the runway until we slammed on to the ground. You could feel everyone in the plane holding their breath and tensing for the landing. As soon as the plane came to a stop, I flung the door open and threw myself on the ground. It had been a nightmare of a flight, but we were safe.

  I wandered around the bivouac open-mouthed. The scale of the operation was so much larger than I had imagined.

  On the side of the airfield a huge Hercules transport aeroplane had been converted into an editing suite for twenty-seven editors. With its own air-conditioning, it had been made completely air-tight to keep out the desert dust.

  The bivouac was like a carnival. There was activity everywhere, much of it chaotic. And everyone's attention was focused on the arrival zone. For hours we waited. Then, before we could see anything, the faint whine of a motorcycle engine cut through the desert dust. A minute or so later, we spotted a headlight and the first of the bikes arrived, a Yamaha ridden by David Fretigne, the stage winner.

  It was early evening and only a handful of bikes had turned up. To everyone it was becoming clear that a scene of carnage was unfolding in the dunes before Tichit. The few bikers who had made it home were screaming at the ASO officials, shouting that people were going to die in the mayhem of the desert if they didn't take action immediately.

  While I was standing there, asking myself if I seriously wanted to be part of this crazy event, a blue KTM from the Gauloises team rode in. The rider pulled off his helmet and standing right in front of us was Alfie Cox, a Dakar legend who was celebrating his birthday that day. As a South African, Alfie was one of the few English-speaking stars of the event.

  'It's been a true day of the Dakar for sure,' Alfie said coolly, unfazed by the chaos surrounding him. 'Strenuous.

  Low vision. And lots of camel grass. A lot of the guys are going to spend some of the night coming out. The camel grass didn't stop all day -1 mean f
ive hundred kilometres non-stop.'

  Clumps of prickly camel grass were a familiar sight on desert rallies. Usually about three feet wide and a couple of feet high, they were so tough and so deep-rooted they'd throw riders off their bikes and stop cars. I asked Alfie why riding between the clumps was so difficult. 'No rhythm,' he said. 'Up, down, up, down. You can't get going.

  Second gear, first gear, second gear, third gear. And if you hit them, you fly through the air.'

  Whereas Alfie had taken about nine hours and twenty-three minutes to ride the 669 kilometres from Zouerat to Tichit - just seven minutes slower than Fretigne - most of the riders would take nearly twenty-four hours. At 9 p.m.

  more than 80 per cent of the field was still out in the desert, many of them having run out of petrol because they hadn't received the news of an extra checkpoint.

  By midnight the organisers realised they were facing a disaster. About a dozen trucks, the same number of cars and a few more motorbikes had reached the end of the stage. The remainder -several hundred vehicles in all - were stuck in the dunes, stranded because of mechanical failure, exhaustion or injury. I walked up to the medical tent to see what was going on and heard about a rider who had crashed and broke his arm. The medics had operated on him but he had now lapsed into a coma. Another guy had smashed most of the bones along the left side of his body.

  A squadron of ASO trucks was loaded with fuel and sent off into the desert. Gradually the racers appeared. The next day's special stage was cancelled. Stage eight, from Tichit to Tidjika, still need to be ridden or driven, but it wouldn't be timed, and competitors were told that they would still be in the race, without time penalties, as long as they started stage nine by mid-morning on the following day.

  In the early hours of the morning, just as I was about to search for somewhere to sleep, I spotted a familiar figure crouching over a bike in the pits. It was Simon Pavey, who had trained Ewan and me to ride off-road before Long Way Round. On his fourth Dakar attempt, Simon was struggling to repair a broken exhaust and sub-frame.

  Simon told me what had happened to him. He'd had a problem with his bike early in the day and fallen to the back of the field. By late afternoon he'd made it to the checkpoint where they were giving bikes twenty litres of fuel, but Simon had damaged both his rear fuel tanks and insisted on filling up his bike. The official refused, but Simon ignored him. Although he had agreed to ride with two Irish lads, he knew there were still more than thirty miles of dunes to be crossed. The Irish riders were fannying around, so Simon thought, sod it, I'll just go on my own.

  The ground around the checkpoint was so soft he had to get a push out of the refuel. Cars that had stopped to have their time cards stamped had to get their sand ladders out to move off again. It was crazy.

  The dunes were a nightmare. Really hard. And to make matters worse, they were engulfed in a sandstorm. Closing his mind to everything around him, Simon rode in his little mental bubble, taking each dune one by one, never thinking too far ahead, just concentrating on what he could see in the beam of his headlight as the sun disappeared.

  Every so often, a car would pass by and Simon would stop, if he could, on the crest of a dune to watch the line the car had taken through the darkness. He'd try to memorise the dunes he'd glimpsed in the car's beams and work out a route.

  It didn't take long for Simon to get stuck in a sand bowl - a deep hollow surrounded by dunes. While he was trying to dig out his bike a car got bogged down as well. It was a British team and Simon thought they'd help him get out, but the car left him behind. After maybe an hour of struggling, Simon managed to force his bike over the lip of the bowl, climb on to the saddle and move off, but he soon came to a stop on the upward slope of another dune. He made more than forty attempts to haul his bike over the dune, spending hours digging his bike out of deep sand then trying to get it moving before falling and sinking again.

  The dune was too churned up and too soft to cross so he turned around and rode up the opposite slope, where he saw the headlights of some cars following another line. Trying to memorise what he'd seen in the beams of their lights, he attempted a different route, riding down into a valley between the dunes, bumping blind over tufts of camel grass and getting thrown off his bike several times. Needing to build up sufficient speed to power his bike over a distant dune, he was riding as fast as his bike would move in the soft sand but dunes create a short horizon and the range of his headlights couldn't keep up with the speed at which he was travelling. For most of the time he was riding almost totally blind. Three or four times that night he went straight over the bars of his bike.

  It was nearly midnight and Simon had been riding hard since six that morning. He was so tired he was cresting dunes with his eyes shut. Just when he thought he couldn't ride any more, an American rider pulled alongside and found another line over the dune. Simon tried to follow him but he was so tired it took him three attempts. And, to make matters worse, the bike's air filter was clogged so the bike had no power.

  Riding over the brow of the next dune, he came across more than twenty bikes caught in a sand bowl. They'd made a little camp. Physically incapable of continuing, Simon stopped with them and slept through the night. At dawn he started riding with the other bikers, but they were all on lighter KTMs and left him behind.

  Simon stopped, changed his air filter and got moving again. A few miles further on, he met one of the Irish riders he'd left behind at the refuel, standing in the middle of the desert with no bike.

  'Gary?' Simon said.

  'My bike's about two ks over there. Can you help me?'

  Gary jumped on the back of Simon's bike and they rode together to the Irish rider's abandoned bike, which had a flat battery. They jump-started it, then rode in tandem to the finish.

  'Fucking hell!' I said when Simon finished telling me about his long, hard day. 'How d'you do it?'

  'It's what Dakar's all about. Never giving up.'

  To make things worse, it was a marathon stage. All competitors had to repair their own equipment. Simon looked exhausted so I grabbed some tools and dived in to help him. When we'd finished Simon handed me his road-book, a long roll of paper with directions for the rally, and signed it. 'See you here in '06,' it said.

  'Yeah, hope I see you too.'

  Chapter 2

  JANUARY TO MAY 2005

  I returned to England from Dakar wondering if I really was taking on more than I could handle. I'd seen hardened riders arrive exhausted at the Tichit bivouac and I'd trembled. They were among the best in the world and a lot of them were struggling. My only off-road experience was Long Way Round and there were many times on that trip when we'd averaged only sixty miles a day for a week. On one day we managed only fifteen miles, yet the terrain was no more difficult than anything on the Dakar. And if we were exhausted or fed up, we could simply stop and camp. There were no such luxuries on the Dakar. We'd have to average more than 370 miles a day for fifteen days with just one rest day at the halfway point. The longest day would involve riding nearly 550 miles, most of it across sand dunes, and if we didn't finish by the start time of the next day's stage, we'd be disqualified.

  To make matters worse, I'd be trying to make a documentary at the same time. That multiplied the stress by a thousand. Aside from the complications involved with filming an event that never stands still, there would be more pressure on me to do well and much greater financial pressures. Most of all it meant my participation would take place under the full glare of television cameras. I knew there were already plenty of bikers who would like to see me fail, who regarded me as little more than a playboy on a bike. I wondered if I also needed a national television audience expecting the drama of injury or physical collapse.

  But when I considered all my options, I realised that, as well as fulfilling a life-long ambition, the Dakar was an opportunity I couldn't ignore. I didn't want to return to installing kitchens and the Dakar was my only escape route.

  Even if it turned my Dakar dream i
nto a nightmare, I had to make it work. I just couldn't see how. Fortunately, Russ, reliable as ever, had a sensible plan.

  T know you're passionate about doing it, but it's an incredibly dangerous race. You could enter on your own - it might be less hassle and it would certainly be less exposed - but I think you'd be a fool.

  'Out there, on your own, you could get into serious trouble. You haven't the experience and you could get lost. You need a second rider to back you up, someone who's done it before. And, ideally, that second rider should train you too, and know all about the mechanics of BMW bikes.'

  There was one obvious candidate: Simon Pavey.

  I first met Simon in the spring of 2004, when he was nursing a broken collarbone after crashing out of the Dakar that year. With Nick Plumb, who had just finished the same rally, he took us on a two-day training course at BMW's off-road training ground in south Wales.

  Simon liked to joke he was a native of south Wales - New South Wales. He'd grown up in the Southern Beaches district of

  Sydney, near Bondi Beach, and got into bikes when a kid across the street let him have a ride on a mini bike he'd built himself. It had a lawnmower engine with a pull-cord start and no brakes, but Simon was hooked and from that moment on saved up all his pocket money until he had enough to buy a Honda XR75, a classic dirt bike. Aged thirteen, he rode his XR75 along footpaths, through sewers and drains to the Kurnell Peninsula, a vast area of sand dunes that formed the best playground any bike-obsessed kid could have wanted.

  After hacking around on his own for a while, Simon joined a kids' mini-bike club, a kind of dune-khana, or Pony Club on two wheels, where he learned the skills of riding off-road. At sixteen he started racing in adult motocross races, winning the first race he entered. But ten-minute races around dirt tracks 'didn't float my boat much,' as Simon put it. As soon as he was seventeen - the minimum age requirement - Simon entered his first enduro, a day-long off-road event.