Starting and finishing his adventure in the once stable, now uncertain colony of Gibraltar, Pilan crosses the Strait to Morocco, and pauses in Fez and Marrakesh before traversing the mighty Atlas Mountains. In the stony, hostile wastes of Western Algeria he spends time in one of the refugee camps of the Saharawis, a population in exile. Recovering from an overdose of camel stew, he heads south to Mauritania, where he rides the longest train in the world, finds a holy city half-engulfed by sand, and nearly gets run over by the Paris-Dakar Rally. Arriving in Dakar a few days behind them, he samples the city's exhausting nightlife, then takes a train to the heart of Mali, home of great music, the largest mud building in the world and the great River Niger, on which Michael rides to the legendary city of Timbuktu. He walks with nomadic herders and rides with a Touareg camel caravan through Niger, scales the Hoggar Mountains and flies into the oilfields of Algeria, before investigating Colonel Gaddafi's Libya and the stunning classical remains of Tunisia, where Life of Brian was filmed and Palin crucified. Read Less