500k to Atar

In our road book there are only a couple of passable routes over the Western Sahara, and the first one is now a made road, so we plumped on route 2, the 4x4 route, unfortunatly we underestimated the desert and took a 2 wheel drive Jeep as well!

The learning curve begins!

Hue was convinced that his GPS and our natural talents would get us through unscathed, so no need for a guide..........

Tavis desperate to conquer a dune floored the jeep at the biggest dune we could find, of course this is not reccomended in the desert driving manual, and now we know why. We zipped up the dune at 80k expecting it to level out, why we thought it would level out I can't imagine, of course
it didn't there was a 75 degree drop on the other side, on flying over the lip the natural reaction was to slam on the brakes burying the jeep nose deep in the sand with a perilous decent to negociate! After we dug it out Tav bravely coasted down the dune, enough excitement for one day, time to set up camp!

We soon discovered that the 4x4 Cherokee is great off road, and even when stuck was easy to free, not so with the 2 wheel drive version which would make a great excavator. The only way to prevent it getting stuck was to floor it everywhere! on our second day we got it serious;y stuck at 2pm, it took until 6.30 to free it using every bit of kit we had, baloon jack, high lift jack, sand ladders, carpets even skis! possibly the most dispirating day, especially as we had another 40k to get out of the dunes and another 200k to get out of the desert.

Luckily Kev had brought some big wheels and fat tyres, time to upgrade the 2 wheel drive jeep, unfortunatly they didn't fit under the wheel arches, no problem, we cand soon modify the bodywork which we duly did. With the fatter tyres the performance was certainly improved.

We were definatly falling behind sceduale, too much time digging and not enough time driving, after some thought Hue developed a new recovery technique christned the high velocity snatch tow, whereby the towing vehicle starts behind the stuck vehicle with a very long rope and accelerates hard snatching the bogged down vehicle out of the soft sand. This techique had a 60 percent success rate, although there was a risk of ripping out the front of the towed vehicle!

We had lost so much time and had already spent two unplanned nights in the desert, with fuel and water running low it was time to get out of there. We were fairly close to a railway and decided to drive along it to bypass the soft dunes which did save us a day of digging, however there was a cost, after ripping the bottom off our silencer and suffering a blowout it was time to get of the rails, we had already chanced our luck avoiding the train! Another problem, the red jeep got the diff caught on the rail rack, a very bad situation. After some head scratching we realised we could all lift on the bumper to raise the diff and push it of, phew another near disaster averted.

Time to sort out our room, look out for the second part of our desert trials tomorrow!