Tan Tan to Tarfaya

It’s a two day ride from Tan Tan to Tarfaya and the wind didn’t seem to let up the whole time. Mostly we had a cross wind, but once in a while the road would turn enough to give us a fantastic tail wind or an awful head wind. As Pieter said, the wind can make your day or destroy it.

The road from Tan Tan heads back out to the coast from the inland hills and mesas. Here are the first real sections of sand dunes and we found a somewhat sheltered spot behind some dunes to pitch our tents for the night. Then in the morning found that the wind had changed directions and we weren’t so sheltered after all. Still it was a beautiful area and I slept well on the sand.

We arrived at the little town of Tarfaya in the afternoon and found a hotel in our budget where we could take a rest day. Tarfaya is famous for being the place where Antoine de Saint-Exupery was based for several years when he was a pilot flying mail planes across the desert. There’s a little museum at Tarfaya about him and the early French air mail routes connecting South America and Sub-Saharan Africa with Europe.

Despite being small, there’s a tremendous amount of construction going on in Tarfaya. The town is expected to boom once the planned ferry service to the Canary Islands starts running in a year or two.