No, we haven’t arrived yet, but Laci is driving with Lackó navigating, and I have time to summarize the first day of a two day marathon stage.

We spent the night at Borj Biramane in Icht, I still rembered the place from our visit in 2013, and again it was very nice with showers and toilets (and a restaurant for all those arriving in time).

We atarted the day with a long offroad section in the desert, which is flat and rocky here. We had to find a well and measure it’s diameter

the size of a tire

and ice cold beer

which turned out to be far away.

You can easily do a 100km/h here, but it is equally easy to roll over the car if you miss a ditch or turn the steering wheel abruptly.

After the bumpy stones the perfectly flat surface of a dry salt lake was a welcome change and we enjoyed driving there a lot.

That was the last one of the offroad sections in Morocco, in Western Sahara the Moroccan army does not allow us to leave the tarmac road anymore.

We are now heading to Boujdour and plan to have dinner there (something real, not just bread and liver spread with water), and will probably continue to Dakhla and finish the two day stage early in the morning already.

This was supposed to be a short day, but…

We started with some nice dune driving (e.g. touch the given points in any order using the shortest path).

Then we wanted to take an old Paris-Dakar track to Tata. There was a sign saying military zone, no entry, but the geochallenge was worth 12 points, who cares about some no entry signs. Well, the Moroccan army does. Soon we were stopped by them and asked to join a convoy of some 10 other rally cars waiting at their checkpoint already.

We were escorted back to the next junction and told to take the tarmac road to Tata. Which the other cars did. But I had the brilliant idea to try to enter the area from a different side. Being the only team getting those 12 points was very tempting…But I did not consider the dust. You kick up a pretty huge trail of dust when you drive in the desert, visible from anywhere, and it did not take long for the army to spot us and to catch us again. This time we had a private escort service of two armed cars only for us. The guys were very polite, but there was no doubt they did not like our second illegal entry at all.12 points hurt. Hurt a lot. There was one more road leading to the area from the opposite direction, we had to try it. It was a long detour of about 100 kilometers, but come on, 12 points were worth it. We went to Tata on tarmac and followed the old Dakar route in the opposite direction, with bigger and bigger smiles after every kilometer. No Military zone signs, nothing. It was a brilliant plan. Only to overcome by the Moroccan army who deployed a guard at one of the (otherwise probably deserted) checkpoints to stop that crazy Austrian car again. This time there was no escort, we were simply turned back.Eventually we had 0 points like the others but lost more than 3 hours. Not that brilliant.We still had more than 200 kilometers to go, mainly on narrow mountain roads. Our engine power issues which we thought to have solved 2 days ago by using quality fuel returned, and we finished the stage with a limping car in complete darkness.

Luckily Lackó had the most brilliant idea of the day and suspected the tubes and pipes of the turbo charger control system. He quickly identified the vacuum container to rub against the intercooler and to leak, which was fixed with the help of some duct tape. A brilliant and truly African fix.

Ready to go! Emptied half a kilo of sand from my socks and the garbage of yesterday from the car, went to do what you have to do and was greeted by a French speaking lady who was doing the same 2 meters away in the darkness, had a fruit bar for breakfast, and now waiting for the race sheets to become available for download. It is cold and humid, but we have beautiful clear skies with millions of stars and a bright milky way.