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.

It has been raining a lot here, many areas in northern Morocco are flooded, roads and river crossings are impassable.
The 650km stage planned for Tuesday has grown to more than 1000 kilometers because of the many detours and instead of the planned 13 hours we needed 23 to finish it. No sleep last night, we arrived just in time 2 minutes before the start of the next stage.
One of the 23 hours we spent at a police checkpoint in Ben Guerir: in lack of alternatives available at 3:30am we asked at the checkpoint for directions to Hammam, the door of which we had to photograph. The guy at the checkpoint was extremely helpful, he even insisted on having a police car escorting us to the Hammam. Unfortunately the police chief of the town, whom he called to show us the way, considered our intentions as highly suspicious. He took us to the police station, and made a few phone calls to check that everything is OK with us. Judging from the time it took, he made a lot of calls….

Finally (with the help of a pack of cigarettes) everything worked out well.

We arrived at the finish line around 6:30am, only to find out that the camp, and hence the start of the next stage, was on the other side of the city. Luckily there were not too many policemen at that time of the day, we managed to arrive at the start just in time at 7am. Dead tired, we grabbed our race sheets, and left for the next stage immediately.

Many of the teams spent the afternoon with car repairs, we are lucky this time, the 3400km until now went smoothly. We went to Tanger to change money, to spend most of it right after on Diesel, to buy a local SIM card, and to have breakfast, lunch and dinner in one. Tomorrow’s 650km stage will start at 7am, the finish is close to Marrakech.