You might remember reading one of Colin Goodwin's finest stories over your Christmas dinner 2004. Our festive double issue that year contained the yarn of Colin's week-long drive south, through Europe, to Morocco, in a brand new Ford Focus, with new staff snapper Mitch Peshavria.
As you'll read, during his week with the brand new Ford, Colin managed to traverse cities, climb mountains, and get stuck in the sand; his full story is below.
"2000 miles from home and we're up to our axles in sand…" by Colin Goodwin
Contents: part one - "so who's idea was this, exactly?"; part two - heading into Africa; part three - of all the towns in all the world...; part four - stuck in the sand.
Part one: so who's idea was this, exactly?
I should have been watching what he was doing more closely, but I still want to beat him to death with his own tripod. Photographer Mitch Peshavria has got our Ford Focus stuck in the side of a sand dune well over 2000 miles from home.
To be fair, we are probably not going to die out here. It is winter on the edge of the Sahara and the temperature is no more than a pleasant 25 degrees C. A metalled road is only a few miles away and we have half a bottle of flat Sprite in the car.
Besides, I'd rather be stuck in sand in the Sahara than on the M25. Remember when the original Focus was launched? We drove it for days and nights around the M25, taking it in turns to do six-hour driving stints. What a stupid idea. The car itself performed admirably, as it should have done. Multiple laps of London's outer ring road are more a test of a driver's patience and sanity than of the ability of a car.
It is also, unless you are one of those poor confused drivers who laps the M25 hoping to find the right exit, something you are very unlikely ever to do yourself. You would, however, love this particular trip. The brief is to take a brand new Ford Focus and drive it as far south as possible in a week. A very thorough test of a car and a great adventure through stunning countryside to boot.
We left early on Thursday morning, our dark green five-door Focus TDCi full of camera gear, a tent in case we get adventurous, luggage for two and a guitar for those David Crosby moments in Marrakech.
For Peshavria this trip is like an extended job interview. There's a vacancy for a staff photographer at Autocar and this man has got his eyes firmly set on it. If he does well here he gets the job. Simple.
Not surprisingly, he is dead keen; so keen that he's already burning through the Fujichrome at Dover, photographing a special branch officer at the port who, understandably, has a fit. He calms down after we have explained ourselves and warns us we'd have really been in the fertiliser if we'd snapped one of his French colleagues. (Never mind the French, imagine where careless snapping in Morocco will put us.)
France passes without drama. Glad we asked for a turbodiesel Focus. The 2.0 TDCi Ghia comes with cruise control as standard, which when set at 80mph with the six-speed gearbox in top means purring along at just over 2000rpm and fuel consumption of about 46mpg. That means that the 57-litre tank should give us a good 550 miles between stops.
We stop for the night in Bordeaux and then leave early the next morning, passing through Biarritz for breakfast and then across the Spanish border at Hendaye. Of course, by now we've abandoned the cop-friendly cruising speed and we're hammering along the motorway that winds through the mountainous Basque region towards Bilbao.
We pass a rather battered first-generation Mondeo wearing a black version of one of those Comic Relief noses on its grille. A nose that flashes. Eighty five euros down and we're on our way again, back with cruise control set and eyes peeled for anything that could be police.
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Part two: heading into Africa
Late next morning we're at Tarifa, 100 miles to the west of Malaga and about to board the ferry to Tangier. 1400 miles under our wheels and only a 35-minute blast across the Med between us and Morocco. This is where the adventure really starts.
I've driven to Morocco before, so I should have been better mentally prepared for the pantomime that is Tangier immigration and customs. I bought a box of 200 Lucky Strikes on the ferry specifically for bribes, but it seems that either the touts are on a health kick or that fags are not quite the valuable currency they were on my last visit in 1995. The latter, I fear.
As soon as you arrive at the check-point you're surrounded by dodgy-looking blokes offering to help with your transition through immigration. They've all got passes around their necks that may or may not be official. Telling the chief of police where to go is not a good thing, so you select the iffy-looking bloke, give him your passport, and hope that he doesn’t ask any questions that a few euros can’t mysteriously answer.
There are some interesting parts of Tangier, but its really a bustling port town with a mixture of faded colonial buildings, new offices and busy shopping streets. We head straight out on the main road to Rabat and to the town of Asilah, about 30 miles along the Atlantic coast.
We are under strict instructions from the editor not to get carried away with expenses on this trip, so he's going to be chuffed with tonight’s chosen accommodation: a twin-bedded room at the Hotel Marhaba for the very reasonable price of 80 dirhams, which works out at about £5.50 for the night.
Just outside Asilah there's a motorway that runs down the coast past the capital Rabat and on to Casablanca. Only a few miles of this were built last time I was here. The average income for farm workers, of which there are a great many in the fertile areas in the north of the country, is around £50 per month, so not surprisingly the new péage is very much for the middle-class Moroccans and tourists. Just one speeding fine from one of the numerous radar traps would utterly stuff the average Moroccan's finances.
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Part three; of all the towns, in all the world…
If, like me, Casablanca is one of your favourite films, prepare for disappointment. It ain't quite the place it used to be. Today it's a madcap city full of traffic, overhung with smog and very short of places like Rick's. Like the couple in the film, we're keen to leave Casablanca. Especially as there is a bit of an incident when Peshavria is shopped by a local to policemen as he takes photos of the Focus. Fortunately it all ends in smiles after the police chief arrives to quiz us.
From Casablanca there's a short stretch of new motorway that takes us in the direction of Marrakech. It finishes in a place called Settat, from where we join a main road that twists and turns for a further 100 miles to Marrakech, nestling in the shadow of the mighty Atlas mountains.
We've now covered nearly 2000 miles and the Focus hasn't missed a beat. Most impressive is the cabin quality, especially the dashboard, and the sophistication of the thing. Dynamically, it hasn't really leapt forward from the original, but in quality it's moved onto another continent.
I hardly recognise Marrekech. Never have I been to a place so changed in such a short time; not even India. There seems to be a whole new modern city that has sprung from nowhere, including several McDonald's. And there's so much more cash about. On the way in we see three Porsche Cayennes, a BMW M3 and, get this, a new Maserati Quattroporte. My trip in 1995 was with colleague Richard Bremner in a Ferrari F512M and boy, did we stand out. The only flash car we saw then was an early '80s Porsche 911.
Thankfully, the very special part of the city, the Medina and the souks, is little changed. We hole up in the Hotel Royal Tazi only a few minutes' walk from Djeema-el-Fna, which is the focal point of the old city, where fruit and food stalls are set up in the evening and from where the narrow streets of the souks fan out in all directions.
Travelling in Morocco can take a little patience and understanding, but in among the mayhem and apparent disorder, life is very well organised. A tip to the hotel porter leads us to an underground car park and another tip has the car guarded overnight, all at a reasonable price. Life in London might look better organised and safer, but there you really are being robbed.
If you follow in our footsteps, allow at least a couple of days in Marrakech because there's lots to see – for me it's the jewel of Morocco. However, we're ploughing on south to the part of the country that really knocks me sideways: the start of the Sahara desert.
First, the Atlas mountains are in the way. No motorways here, just a hundred mile drive across the most stunning roads that wind through snow-capped mountains. Our goal is the town of Ouarzazarte on the other side, built by the French colonialists in 1928 as a gateway to the Sahara.
The Focus is fitted with electro-hydraulic power steering that has various models from Comfort to Sport. Sounds impressive, but it's not as good as the previous car's hydraulic steering system. It's not, however, bad enough to spoil an incredibly challenging drive.
We hit Ouarzazarte just as the sun dips behind the mountains. As well as being the gateway to the Sahara, the town is also the centre of the Moroccan film industry. Dozens of Hollywood blockbusters have been filmed around here: the last biggie was Gladiator. You'll find bits of props and memorabilia in the town's bars and restaurants. We book into the Hotel Riad Salam, a modern joint that's above backpacker levels but still very good value.
From Ouarzazarte we head south again and follow the Draa valley to a place called Zagora. The valley is right out of the Bible, with a narrow band of palm trees clinging to the side of the Draa river; a ribbon of green along which there are dozens of villages. The road is spectacular but not to be driven quickly, because anything can be around the next corner and often is.
Through Zagora and over another band of mountains and you come to small town called M'Hamid. Here the road stops. South is about 1500 miles of nothing until you get reach Tombouctou. But before that, in only 25 miles, is the Algerian border with Morocco. The political situation in Algeria is dogdy at the moment, to say the least: the whole border in this area is disputed and has been for years.
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Part four: stuck in the sand
We are now where you joined us at the start. Abouth 10 miles before M'Hamid there's a piste that leads to a group of classic sand dunes. You don't find Lawrence of Arabia-type dunes just anywhere: most are in Algeria. Not surprisingly, Peshavria is desperately keen to photograph the car next to them. I, however, am scared stiff of getting the car stuck. No sooner have we left the metalled road than I select a dune that you could probably replicate on Bournemouth beach, but at least we are not going to get stuck. Except that we do.
Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I do not lose my rag easily. The prospect of a telephone call to Ford to tell them that their new Focus is stuck up to its axles in sand around about 2400 miles south of Essex is enough to get me somewhat inflamed.
We do a bit of frantic sand bailing until a local lad appears from nowhere and surveys the situation. "Pas de problem. Have you got a mobile phone?" he asks. "My friend is not far away in a car."
It turns out that, rather than being in a 4x4 as I'd expected, his friends Said Bahalou is in a Renault 4. Goodwin rather forlornly hands Bahalou the tow rope that Ford has thoughtfully provided. It isn't needed. For these guys the Sahara is home and within minutes they've extricated the Focus from the sand.
We're offered tea in Bahalou's tent next to the really impressive sand dunes. There's a temptation to distrust strangers in a place like Morocco, not least because guide books are often over-cautious, but if you're travelled widely you develop a second sense and Bahalou appears to be a sound chap. Certainly sound enough to be allowed to test drive the new Focus in conditions that its makers probably never envisaged. He's impressed by the equipment but quite rightly points out the simplicity of his Renault, or 'scorpion of the desert' as he calls it, is rather better suited to the Saharan lifestyle.
Certainly it would be a sight easier to clean the insides of the Renault than it will be the Focus. The Ford people will have a fit when they see the car. There's sand all over the place – some of which seems to have got into the stereo and centre console because the temperature controls no longer work and my Neil Young CD won't eject.
Add to the sand situation a few scrapes and scratches from a couple of 'inc idents' in Marrakech. A chap carrying an enormous bundle of pipes on a bicycle flew out of a side turning and rammed the side of the Focus, hitting it in the driver's window. Thank God I didn't have the window down or he'd have speared me. It did give him a huge moment though, which he only just saved.
And then there's the Spirograph patterns on the rear offside wing caused by a motorbike's footrest. But that could happen on the M25. It's been a heck of a trip. And as expected, rather more entertaining than 85 laps of the M25. Also rather more informative, truth be told.
We've driven through almost every weather condition, from fog in France through to blazing sun in the Draa valley. We've driven along arrow-straight desert roads and across twisting mountain passes. We've been up to 2000 metres and down to sea level. I don't for a minute expect that many Focus owners will need to know this, but we can also confirm that Ford's latest is more than able to handle light off-piste work in the Sahara. And in the hands of an expert like Said Bahalou it could tackle even more challenging terrain.
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