Rallying round

Matthew Bell

Foolhardy tourists go for total immersion, but regulars use a ladder, lower themselves no further than the shoulders and pop out in a flash. It is probably the greatest thermal shock the body can endure, but you are somehow able to withstand it. Fall in the water on a normal day, and you could be dead within minutes. All this is the thrill of ice-diving. It’s like floating on the Dead Sea: you do it not because it’s particularly enjoyable, but just because you can.

Swedes are infrequent ice divers but fanatical ice-skaters — and it would be a crime to leave Stockholm without attempting to join them. You hire skates, with blades twice as long as those for ice rinks, and it is surprisingly easy to get the hang of it. You simply move forward in a straight line. The trick is momentum: even debutants can cover a few miles in a day. The city authorities tend the safest parts of the water to skate on, where ice is at least a metre deep, and it is madness to skate on an empty lake where the strength of the ice is untested. Part of the kit is a set of ice picks, worn around the neck, to pull yourself out of the water should the worst happen. But statistically it’s unlikely: of the thousands who take to the ice each day, there are fewer than half a dozen casualties each season.

The safest option of all is Stockholm’s spas, and there are two outstanding choices: Sturebadet, in one of the city’s upmarket shopping precincts, and Centralbadet, off the main shopping street Drottninggatan. At just under £10 for entry, Centralbadet is superb value, offering masseurs, a luxury swimming-pool, three types of sauna, a hot tub and a Jacuzzi, restaurant and bar. Arrive late morning, slip into a bathrobe, take a book and settle down for the day — shuttling lazily between its various facilities. The result is a sustained sense of bliss. On the way home, stop by the Nordic Ice Hotel’s ice bar — a massive freezer where you can have vodka on the rocks on its ice benches.

It may be March but Stockholm still looks like a Christmas card, and is as cold as a Ukrainian coal shed. There is a Swedish saying, ‘There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing’ — and Brits are noted for arriving in Stockholm with bad clothing. The wind has an extraordinary ability to cut through trousers and freeze your legs. So your first stop should be to buy defensive items: long-johns, thermal gloves and a hat. Your holiday will be misery without them.

And your holiday can be surprisingly affordable. Ryanair, for all its ghastliness, has forced the punctual Scandinavian Air Service (SAS) to lower its prices and it now offers regular returns to Stockholm, from Manchester and London, from £88 inclusive. With the peppercorn sauna fees and free skating, a whole weekend can cost less than a day in Val d’Isère. You may well only go ice-diving once in your life. But you haven’t lived until you’ve tried it. ‘You insult me, you Eengleesh man — get out of my office! Get out!’ I am buying car insurance from a Moroccan. It’s not going well, but it’s only the first haggle of a three-week road trip down the west coast of Africa. I’m driving to The Gambia across the Western Sahara with a friend, on a pauper’s imitation of the Paris–Dakar rally.

The haggling ends in a puzzling deal: I pay for ten days (which we need) and get only five days cover. But I don’t care, I tell myself: a free-wheeling rolling stone doesn’t care about money, still less about insurance. We’re in a £300 Ford Escort and neither of us knows a nut from a bolt — our plan to reach The Gambia depends entirely on not caring.

With France and Spain hastily dealt with, we zigzag through Morocco, weaving between the grand imperial ex-capitals of Fes, Rabat, and Marrakech, and the ports of Tangier and Casablanca.

Without satnav and with only small-scale maps, we plot our route by following the sun and keeping the Atlantic on our right. On our third day we discover that Morocco is on GMT — we’ve been an hour out without noticing. It’s pretty chilled, man. Cigarettes and audiobooks have adopted a new cosmic significance: fags for punctuating the long hours, tapes for comfort and a source of conversation. (By the time we reach the Low Atlas mountains Will and I have six episodes of Fawlty Towers verbatim and we’ve heard the whole of War and Peace.) We arrive in Tan-Tan, the self-proclaimed ‘gateway to the Sahara’, late at night and go to bed excited at the thought of seeing sand dunes rise majestically outside our hotel window in the morning. But not a bit of it. The province known as Western Sahara is misleadingly named: we drive 900km from dawn to dusk the next day across a flat rock-strewn landscape known as the ‘hammada’; it is austere and dry, and inhabited by a smattering of Touaregs in their brilliant blue headpieces, but desert it ain’t. At least, not of the Lawrence of Arabia variety. Occasionally we think we can see a sandy slope in the West, and admittedly we spot some camels, but we have clearly based too high an expectation on the name Western Sahara. Mental note to self: don’t expect Iceland to be particularly cold, and Greenland may in fact be a brownfield site.

Dakhla is the last town before Mauritania; it is a military stronghold with an excellent fish market, jutting out on a peninsula into the Atlantic. We stay long enough to meet the only expat couple. He thinks he’s Sean Connery and she could actually be Sinéad O’Connor, but it later emerges that they import bathrooms. Their exalted position as the only whites in town has skewed their judgment: they claim that having lived all over the world, they find that Dakhla is where it’s at. ‘It’s the Paris of Africa,’ sighs Sinead on the roof terrace of the Paradise Hotel bar, not a trace of irony in her wide vacant eyes.

We reach the border with Mauritania at dusk and with five other cars on the ‘rally’ we recruit a guide, Hamin, for the next few days. He is immediately useful, deftly showing us a safe route across the minefield that separates Mauritania from Western Sahara. Halfway across no-man’sland we stop for a pee by the discarded husk of a bus, and I wonder whether my stream will get me blown sky-high.

Border guards are dotted at five-minute intervals towards the Mauritanian end, ferocious men with yellow staring eyes, apparently furious to see us. Is it because we’re Christians, we wonder? As we hurry over to their tiny corrugated-iron huts, cringing, we see why. Behind the desk of paperwork and stamps, the same cosy scene — a prayer mat in one corner, a bed in another, and hearty smells of meat wafting up from a one-pot supper on a stove.

It is night when Hamin leads us into Mauritania proper; yet rising up out of the gloom we are able to make out the huge curving outline of a lone sand dune in the near distance. We head for this feature and park in its lee to strike camp for the night. We simultaneously burst out of the car and run up the steep slope, ululating wildly at the thrill of feeling the cold sand between our toes. In the morning we are ashamed to see that our footsteps have churned up the smooth contours of the dune; it seems as criminal as leaving crisp packets on Exmoor.

For the next five days we have no road to follow, only Hamin. He has been a guide for 25 years and knows the whole country intimately (it’s roughly the size of England). We grind to a halt frequently in the soft sand, but after a while we get the hang of sanddriving (go flat out and don’t try to steer). Hamin’s paternal presence is reassuring, and his solution to any problem is modelled on the British: to make tea. At any opportunity he sits down cross-legged and unfurls a rag containing charcoal, mint, a lump of sugar and a tiny silver pot, from which he is able to produce exquisite little glasses of hot bittersweet liquid in seconds. When serving he performs elaborate rituals, lifting the teapot extravagantly high above the glasses and pouring the liquid from glass to glass to cool it and adjust the sweetness. We are a bonded band of travellers when we emerge from the desert on the other side, and travel in convoy the rest of the way to Banjul. Hamin’s village is on the border with Senegal, so he invites us to stay a night with him on our way out. We enter a collection of handsome Bedouin tents nestling in a grove of stumpy sprawling trees. After the usual scrummage of meeting the village children (‘Cadeau, monsieur, cadeau!!’), I notice Hamin stealing over to a goat tied to a tree. He slits its throat without a murmur and within minutes various hunks of meat are arranged over a small fire. We eat the fibrous charred meat cross-legged in our tent, his sons serving us mint tea but too afraid of their father to speak.

Mauritania is gone, and I’m not sorry. Nouakchott is a poor excuse for a capital — you can only buy alcohol under the counter from the Chinese takeaway — and the landscape is dreary (there’s no Lonely Planet guide for Mauritania yet; it would have to be pocket-sized). But Senegal is immediately captivating — the earth has a richer colour and the streets pulsate with music and people. We stay in St Louis as long as possible, an island city that feels part Cuba, part Paris (Gustave Eiffel designed the magnificent bridge) and, in that washed-up way of old colonial towns, St Louis makes us want to drink.

The last leg takes less than a day, and we reach the banks of the river Gambia, 4,000 miles from home. We cram ourselves on to a heaving brown ex-Isle of Wight ferry, and as we chug across the river into Banjul, we add extra tonic to our gin. That should stave off the malaria.