Finally an easy stage of only 500km length, we hoped to finish within the time limit of 11 hours today (There are extra points if you finish within the time limit, usually between 12 and 15 hours. If you finish before the start of the next stage, usually 24 hours later, you lose the extra points. The whole day is lost if you don’t show up in time for the next stage).

To make sure our dream of a few hours of sleep would come true, we skipped the first challenges which were in a swampy area, which swallowed some motorcycles the night before.

However, Murphy’s law came true again: around 10 in the morning, climbing out of a deep riverbed, the soil under the rear right wheel of the car became loose and we broke into a 1.5m deep ditch which had been washed out by the rain. With one wheel in the ditch, the rear axle and the chassis sitting on the ground, and the front right wheel about to break in too, it was a delicate situation. With the help of two other teams (22 and 23, thank you very much for the help again) it took 2 hours to rescue the car. We had to fill the whole ditch with stones and then lift the car slowly to fill the space below the wheel too. 10 people were working hard, it was a great example of good teamwork.
Our dream of finishing on time gone though. Finally we arrived at the camp around 10pm.
The camp tonight is at the outskirts of Boujdour very close to the beach, I can hear the waves murmur. It is now much warmer than at the beginning, currently 15°C, but the wind is strong.

This was the first day in the dunes and we enjoyed it very much. In the morning we had to reach around 10 points in the dunes on the shortest path, it was a great challenge to find a way through the sand as close as possible to a straight line. Janos was driving and I was giving him instructions via the radio. Unfortunately the straight line strategy did not work for the last points. The dunes were too high (around 10m) and the sand too soft and we had to use shovels and sand ladders more and more often. Nothing really serious.

However, on the way out of the sand, at the third last dune, we maneuvered our car into a hole and could not get out anymore. We got up until 1m under he rim of the dune, but from there we had to shovel. Three hours later, at 4pm, after having moved around 3 cubic meters of sand, we finally managed to escape, but still had 650km in front of us. One more night without having to pay the camping fee, we arrived at 5:30am, just in time for the next stage starting at 7.

The stage of Wednesday covered the crossing of the High Atlas (~0.5m of fresh snow), lots of offroad driving, and a camp in the dunes.
That wasn’t challenging enough for us, we added two special events:

1. Sliding off the muddy road in the Atlas, paving the forest with sand ladders and stones and pulling the car back. With the help of 5 Moroccan men it took us 5 hours to escape.

2. Losing the front right bumper of our car. A cattle transporter which we passed suddenly pulled to the left and crashed into our front wing. Fortunately the only damage is the front bumper.

Tonight’s camp is beautifully located in the dunes. The others say there was some nice food prepared by local Berbers in the evening, of course we missed it because of our adventures with the car. Its 3:45am again, time to go to sleep.