John Ironmonger's Random Blog: Driving the Plymouth to Banjul Rally (2007): (Posted in April 2022)

Here’s how it all came about. Some of this might be apocryphal. You will need to decide. Once upon a time (so the legend goes) a London banker called Julian Nowill thought it might be fun to drive the Paris-Dakar rally. But when he looked into it, he discovered that a realistic entry could cost anything up to a quarter of a million pounds – once you’ve paid for several high-performance cars, a huge support team, a trailer load of spare tyres, and salaries and expenses for a retinue of mechanics and PR people and film crews and hairdressers and cooks. So he decided to set up a rival rally. This would go from Nowill’s hometown of Plymouth to Banjul in the Gambia, following a similar compass setting to the Paris-Dakar. The difference would be that cars should generally cost less than £100, teams should try not to spend more than £15 on preparations, and the whole event would lack organisation or support. Now admit it. That sounds a whole lot more fun. And to top it off, cars (or what was left of them) would be auctioned off at the end and the proceeds would go to Gambian charities.

It is fifteen years since Mike Taylor and I drove the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge. Dozens of cars set off on the same day and teams broadly choose their own routes, and you meet up from time to time along the way. Or you don’t. It’s all a bit random but that’s kind-of how it works. There were six of us, in three cars. Mike and I drove a 1988 Renault 5 we bought from a scrapyard in Brest. (The car costs us €200 so we had already broken the rules. But no one really cares, which is part of the charm of this rally.) My mate Graham Ibbotson (who appears from time to time in this blog) drove a big old Renault (I can’t recall the model) along with his son Tom. And Tom’s mates Adam Flowerday and Don Howarth drove some kind of Fiat Panda rip-off. (I don’t know what it was). Anyway, there you have our little convoy, and on the way, we grew to include two farmers in a little hatchback, two prison officers in a huge van, three guys in an unreliable Ford Modeo and a pair of Portuguese teenagers in an ancient Hillman Humber. (One of the two wasn’t old enough to drive, apparently).

It is an absolutely madcap rally. Bonkers. It isn’t a race (thank goodness). It’s a kind of test of endurance for man and machine. It rattles through eight countries (UK, France, Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia), has three ferry crossings (the Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Gambia River), and it includes one serious mountain range (the Atlas), one active minefield (see my blog on Guelta Zemmur), hundreds of miles of appalling roads, and around 350 miles of open desert sand. Which is AWESOME!

I would recommend this event to anyone with a sense of adventure. It takes three weeks – which is a lot of driving – but it is never, ever boring. There are days off in Gibraltar, Marrakech, Daklha and St Louis. The camaraderie is amazing. The adventures come thick and fast. I won’t regale you with stories because once I start I really won’t know where to stop. But trust me. The stories are good. Our little Renault barely made it. None of the dashboard dials worked. Ever. Which was a relief because we didn’t have any warning lights to worry us. We trashed the gears in the desert when we hit a massive rock so we did most of the second half of the rally with only third gear (the only gear that worked). And we bent the car so badly in Mauritania that afterwards the doors wouldn’t properly close. But hey. We kept going, we made it to Banjul, and we raised a shed load of cash for Kid’s Action.

As well as being an adventure, the experience was also pretty humbling. Mauritania is one of the world’s poorest countries. Senegal and Gambia have their challenges too. We are used to thinking that problems like these are somewhere on the other side of the world. We don’t imagine them as close enough to drive to. We all learned a lot on this trip. We grew up a lot. We are all linked. We all live on the same road. Literally. I still find it helpful to think of humanity this way. All of us just different numbers on the same road.

My what3words link takes you to the beach. (Did I mention that you drive along 200 miles of beach! That’s 200 miles of BEACH!)

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