DESERT BY NAME, DESERT BY NATURE...

We hit the deep, sandy stuff to see whether Ducati’s latest adventure bike should be on your wish list.

It's not every day I wipe blood from my lips, dirt from my eyes, and arch my back in agony. Then again, it's not every day I return from hitting the desert on a 211 kilo, 110bhp pukka adventure bike, having had two days of utter off-roading extravagance.

When the invite for Ducati's DesertX Rally landed in my inbox, I was expecting good things but couldn't have imagined the dirt-fuelled delights I'd indulge in crossing the Atlas Mountains and camping out among the camels and fellow stinking journos with nothing more than rocks, sandstorms, and the occasional barking dog for company. It was a launch fit for the most audacious of adventure bikes, which was how Ducati pitched its pimped-up DesertX to us in a hotel lobby on the outskirts of Marrakesh a few days earlier.

It's time to level up and admit that I'd never so much as sat on the road-inclined DesertX that was to form the core for the more 'go anywhere, do anything' Rally-spec machine that saw a solid handful of enhancements over its base model brethren. New forks, a new shock, and a whopping 910mm seat height weren't the only features to the join the party, made all the more utilitarian with an added skid pan, enhanced off-road electronic algorithms, and tubed tyres on lighter Excel rims. You're probably starting to get the picture, but to hammer its off-road focus home, Ducati took things that bit further with a tall mounted front fender, MX-style graphics and a cockpit mount above the vertically placed 5in TFT dash to mimic the style and purposefulness of the kind of bike you see hitting the Dakar.

Of course, with a 937cc V-twin motor and more torque than a small car, this thing promised to be nothing like the featherweight singles you see bounding through the desert, but that's not to say it wouldn't have the minerals to tackle 400km of unforgiving, unruly and unrelenting trails in a place so arid not even weeds want to grow there.