Features

So then you must get off and you sink up to your knees in pulverised frogs, and push. This is very tiring. Soon, however, we reached firmer ground, climbed back on board, opened the taps and... aaaaaaaaargh.

Now, there was a spray coming off the front tyres directly onto my shins. It looked like water but was, in fact, a highly saline liquid, which is the opposite of acid. But, Christ, it burns.

"No problem," said Super, "so long as you get it off within three days. After that, it'll eat through the skin". Great. Our safari was scheduled to take... three days. Luckily, soon we were stuck again, and I found that a million rotting trout will cure alkaline burns.

By this stage it was nearing noon, and the temperature had rocketed to 35 degrees. Out there, in the big white, with no helmet, doing 30mph into the wind, my face was beginning to ripen badly.

Super tossed me a ko koi which is a sheet of material, like a tablecloth, which, if you know what you're doing can be fashioned into a hat-cum-face cover. I made a mess of this, and ended up with what looked like a tablecloth-cum-tablecloth draped over my head.

In the course of the afternoon, it blew off 7,000 times. Eventually, I decided I'd rather have a burned face. And then I got a puncture. I knew this because suddenly the bike veered to the left.

Sadly we had no jack. But we did have an 18-foot Zulu, which is the next best thing. And he was useful again when neither Ralph nor I could see far enough over the horizon to spot our overnight rest-halt; a granite island covered in baobab trees that pokes through the salt. Thankfully, Super could.

As we made it back to base, burned and knackered three days later, we realised it had actually been a genuine voyage of discovery. I loved it more than any journey I've ever made. You can drive something amazing and that'll enliven your life. But if you drive somewhere amazing, that's even better.

An Enzo across Belgium or a quad bike across Botswana? No contest. No contest at all...