First shower after 3 days! Tonight’s camp is at the “spa” in Dakhla, a thermal spring in the middle of the desert. There are no facilities except for a valve and a hose, but for a small tip the guard is happy to massage you with the high pressure water beam. We accepted his offer to wash the car too, now the whole team is clean again.

This is the first evening that we have time to meet the other teams, to have dinner, and to enjoy the stars of the African sky.

Today was the longest stage of the rally, 840km. We reached the Atlantic Ocean around noon and would have had to drive on the beach for about 30 kilometers, but the high tide did not allow that. Hence we used an inland track and drove to the beach only to reach our geocaches. At the last one we got stuck in a deep sand pit. Fortunately Team Játékshop (aka Gumisember) were around and towed and pushed us over the dune. Thank you very much for the help! It was really a last minute escape, the water was  already 40cm deep, a few minutes later we would have drowned the car.In order to avoid more troubles we skipped all the remaining beach and dune driving tasks.

In the evening we entered Western Sahara, the land of cheap fuel, police checkpoints, and of even more sand. Our camp tonight is on the beach near Laayoune (in safe distance from the high tide).

Today’s stage was meant to be a relaxing one after the Atlas tour (we were not the only team arriving in camp in the morning), but it started with a tire killing car torturing rocky section. We made it even worse by taking a shortcut that turned out to be dead end. Finally we were rewarded by one of the most picturesque oases I have ever seen.