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.

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.