2700 miles - more breakdowns

Given the pounding that our cars are getting, it's no surprise that they keep breaking down. The desert changes almost instantly between soft sand (soft tyre pressures required, go fast and don't stop), hard rock (the opposite strategy; hard tyres, go slowly and carefully), with nasty corrugations thrown in to smash the suspension and occupants around for minutes upon end.

The Transit is holding up well since it's propshaft incident in Morocco, and the Renault is going stong (largely due to the drivers revving the nuts off it and refusing to stop for anything) though it is using a suspicious amount of coolant. The Hyundai and Escort are having a hard time of it, getting battered by high rocks and stuck in almost every sandy stretch (I'm bored of digging and pushing). Meanwhile the Patrol just goes on and on. We've used 4wd twice, to get out of sand when we stopped to help the other teams. She's absolutely the right car for this, and we're feeling so much better for suffering 2500 miles of slow driving and rattly diesel noises on better roads.

Towards the end of the day the Escort threw its arch liner out of the front wheelarch, and stopped dead. When we inspected it we found that it had thrown a driveshaft. Thirty minutes of swearing and it's back on the piste, though without the protective gaiter to stop the sand getting in to the bearing (that got ripped up when it broke). Another ten minutes and the Hyundai had a puncture, so we fixed that and set up camp for the night behind another dune before it got dark.

Unfortunately, the breakdowns have meant that we are taking much more time to complete the desert leg of our trip than anticipated. It's frustrating in a way, because the Patrol, Transit, and Renault are flying along and the other two are breaking and getting stuck all the time. I keep reminding myself that it's a team effort - and everyone gets out to dig and push no matter whos car is stuck. In any case, we have to pay the guide for an extra day already, and I hope that it's only the one.

We'll make faster progress tomorrow by using our radios - one front and one rear, to let the guide know when people get stuck. The convoy can stretch out for a km or so because of the varying terrain and necessary distances between the cars, so it's a good plan...

I took advantage of our extra desert-camping night by launching the rocket that I'd brought along - I'd built it a few years back at home and never got round to flying it. I was worried about getting it into Mauritania, and didn't want to chance it to Mali - and the desert sunset was the perfect setting. We launched it three times and didn't bother to look for it after the third (all good deserts have bits of space hardware lying in them, this one is no different!)



We made tuna pasta under the stars and were surprised by a family of three camels! It looked like they were saying "what are you doing camping our back yard?" They had a good nose around and left, we turned in in preparation for an early start.