Triumphant tourists
Camping by the wayside in Egypt’s Sahara Desert, with their food and water all gone, Angus and Margaret were up before the sun at 4.30am. Thankfully, the next village lay a mere two miles further on, and as Margaret wrote in her diary: “There we drank (and the amount we drank would have been sufficient for several days in England), filled our water bottles and set forth.
“Egypt is no fit place to take a motorcycle combination,” she decided. “And yet, apart from a fifth break to the sidecar chassis, a puncture, and slight overheating when the shade temperature varied between 110˚F and 120˚F, it gave no trouble and its performance was commendable.” This was due in large part to Angus’s mechanical skills, which involved not only regular oil changes but also roadside repairs, such as occasionally lifting the Triumph’s iron cylinder head to decoke and grind in its valves.
Their onward journey down the eastern side of Africa during the autumn of 1956 was, by comparison, “a piece of cake”. The Sudan Diplomatic Mission in London had issued a visa only on condition that the couple did not travel by road in certain sections containing their full-page Belstaff advertisement.
