The first of two difficult sandy stages is done. It was tough, but we managed to reach almost all the geo challenges. 500km in 16 hours.

The oasis we are in now is said to be beautiful, unfortunately we will not see anything of it: we arrived at 11pm, will leave at 5am tomorrow, and there is no electricity and hence no lights here. Even sat phones don’t work, the oasis is located in a deep canyon without satellite visibility. I am blogging from the entrance of the canyon, about 5km from the camp now.

The only challenge today was to cross the border to Mauritania, and that is less and less challenging from year to year. Our data is not copied by hand into big black books anymore, there are computers and fingerprint scanners now. (Btw. the computers have been there in 2011 already, still packed in boxes. In 2013 we saw the same computers installed, but covered in plastic and not in use. Now they are finally in use.)

The camp tonight is close to the border in the dunes. There is always a big fire in the evening. In the afternoon ten of us bought a mutton which is currently being barbecued. Looking forward to a nice dinner.
The next two stages are the most difficult of the race (sand, sand, and more sand), we will go to sleep early today.

The last stage in Western Sahara is always short  because of thousands of land mines still buried in the area. We started the day with a high speed old Paris-Dakar route, for the first time we had to be careful not to exceed the generic 100km/h limit of the rally offroad.

But the surface quickly changed into a tire-killing rock desert, which was much less fun to drive in.

The highlight of the day was a visit at the “spa” in Dakhla. Actually not more than a big pipe with hot thermal water, but after a few days without a shower it felt like the most luxurious spa of the world. For 10 Dirhams (less than 1 EUR) the guard was even massaging our backs with the water.

The second highlight of the day is our camp tonight, directly at the border post. The tents are pitched on the tarmac road leading to the border between trucks and their drivers, our own cars, booths selling food, and many shady characters doing their business at the border.