Resting in Dakhla

We're writing this from Dakhla, a 'Desert Oasis' on a little peninsula in Western Sahara. The Sahara Regency is giving all the participants a special rate, so yesterday we had a small party on top of the hotel with a superb view of the Atlantic Ocean with about 15 other teams, including the American school bus which we found broken down en-route.

I'll add some pictures at the bottom of this post, but if you look at the link on the right, we're putting all the pictures in the web-album.

So, since Vendrell we've made it a few thousand kilometers down to Dakhla. As soon as the car was ready, we drove straight to Tarifa in southern Spain, which was quite uneventful. We met Team Click Sargent at the ferry, and got the 9am ferry to Tanger. Once in Marocco we got about 10km out of town before we decided to stop and check why the gearbox was making so much noise. Turns out it was completely out of oil. 2 hours later someone had kindly dropped off a few litres of gearbox oil, and we were on our way again.

We met team Short and Sweet in Marrakech, and then made it to Mirleft the next day, where we started meeting more teams. The hotel was run by a french lady who was very nice and the food was excellent. We even managed to get some exercise done, although Brede was feeling slightly worse for wear due to not having exercised because of the broken toe in January...

After Mirleft we had another long day of driving to Laayoune where we spent the night, and then finally we made our way to Dakhla.

In Dakhla we met up with loads of other teams (see picture below of car park), and there was a small celebration, as this is where we start hitting the real desert off-road driving sections.

Most teams left this morning, but 7 of us decided to have a rest day and leave tomorrow instead. Between us we've got 2 4WD vehicles, 2 satellite phones, 2 GPS units and even some people with knowledge of cars! So, as we couldn't just actually rest on our rest day we decided to go quad biking instead. Absolutely amazing experience, thoroughly recommended! Again, see pictures below and in the web-album.

Right, I think that's it for now. Keep reading, and if you are reading this then we would love it if you added comments as we don't really know if anyone is actually keeping track of what we're up to... :-)

Brede and Vegard