The itinerary so far:
Spain - Morocco - Western Sahara - Mauritania - towards Mali

Jez and I have rowed about all sorts of things on the road – on really important issues, too, as you can well imagine (the price of a pair of flippers, whose fault it is we got up so late, where we should have gone to eat last night) - but mostly we row about who's in the right.

I wouldn't like to say who that normally is; let's just put it like this: when we're abroad, and not on Planet Ali, it's him every time.

They're all petty spats and usually quickly forgotten, although I do keep getting threatened with the T-shirt – no doubt a winner in the biker book of humour - that says on the back, “If you can read this, the bitch fell off”. The main reason we row, though, is because we're hot, bothered, dehydrated, hungry, tired, or all of the above.

Timbuktu by motorbike Pt 4: into Mauritania

Alison Thomson and husband Jez thought travelling across the border would be a walk in the park

Timbuktu by motorbike Pt 3: Morocco to Mauritania

Alison Thomson and husband Jez go in search of petrol in the desert - but there's always a solution....

Timbuktu by motorbike Pt 2: roaring through Spain

On a three-month career break, Alison Thomson and partner hit the continent but find life on the road tougher than expected

A career break to Timbuktu

When Alison Thomson wed last year, she was promised adventure... a three-month journey to Timbuktu by bike

We've resolved many times not to overdo it and, if we do have long driving days, to take regular breaks, but it's often out of our hands. It didn't help that the mouthpieces for the Camelbaks both flew off before we'd even left Morocco - they're not the sort of thing you come across in these parts and we can't replace them. Carrying water in bottles instead of a tube means we have to park up somewhere and take the crash helmets off just to get a drink. And when we stop, our blood turns molten, so more often than not, we plug on and get dehydrated instead.

On the food front, there isn't exactly an abundance of motorway caffs in Mauritania. We had left Western Sahara so early to get to the frontier in good time that nothing was open, and our border formalities had gone so smoothly we didn't stop to eat.

(We heard later it took another couple seven hours, so we were lucky in one respect.) The upshot was 12 hours on the road with only a packet of chocolate chip cookies and a 11/2 litre bottle of water to fuel us. (We weren't short of petrol, though, oh, no.) Our arrival in Nouadhibou was not our finest hour, if I'm honest.

Despite it being only 50km from the border, we were stopped several times at checkpoints before we got there. (Someone back in Guelmim is laying a new patio or upgrading their car with the proceeds of a fabulous racket they've got going on: we've since discovered we're not the only ones to have bought several cartons of fags to distribute at checkpoints, thereby easing our passage, so we were told. The reality is that no one smokes in Mauritania, at least, none of the soldiers we met did.)

It was gone 4pm by the time we rolled into Nouadhibou. We've been told (perhaps apocryphally) that the reason there are no signs to anywhere in Mauritania is that they get stolen for the metal, but there was one that we saw pointing to “centre ville”.

Having reached the entrance to the port, it was obvious we'd gone through it without realising. Picture a scene of low-rise concrete boxes, one after another after another, many of which were shut up for the day. As we drove through, it was like watching one of those looped backgrounds you see in old cartoons, a blur of repeated anonymous shops. The only sign of activity in the sandy streets came from the suicidal goats and donkeys. Seasoned travellers both, we were taken aback that this was “centre ville” in the country's second city.

We hadn't seen anything resembling a hotel or restaurant where we might get food. We were both incredibly tired and overwrought by the heat and stresses of the day. Instead of pulling together and making a plan, I got off the bike and we proceeded to let rip at each other.

There were more tears, I'm sorry to say, and I think Jez was close to crying too. We dug out our guide book and found a place called the Centre de Peche Sportive, on the prettily named Baie de l'Etoile. Trouble was, it was 14km out of town. How had we missed it? And did we have the energy to look for it?

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