Camera: Canon EOS 1Ds MKIII
Lens: Canon EF 16-35 mm. f/4.0L IS

At the exact minute we took off from camp this morning the rain started again. It had rained all night and only paused a few hours while we packed up and had breakfast, the desert-base now began to reveal some scattered puddles of water.

After driving for some 30 minutes the skies went dark as ash, way darker than you would like to experience, and the light from the sun had a hard time shining through to illuminate our path. And then without any further warning all hell broke loose and the heavens opened it´s sluices, it was truly a near tropical rain-storm, - we were still some kilometers north of the tropical-line. At one point the rain and winds got so hefty that we could not see where we were going; we simply had to park on a hilltop and wait for awhile.

Ten minutes later the storm had settled down a bit and we could drive on, although the rain still purred down, a truly rare sight in the desert. After some challenging true off-road driving on slippery stones and rocks we located a piste that from time to time resembled a river way more than a track. The progress on the piste started to get really difficult due to the amount of water on the track as well as crossing it, and then also because of the sticky mud. Finally we had to bail out and take a break, water and mud was beginning to stress our vehicles to much. From a small hillside we watched a nearby wadi transform from being a dry, dusty and empty recess into a wild river within minutes; flooding bushed and trees. A somewhat scary experience. A bit further upstream a waterfall was reborn, the color of the water cascading down over the cliff resembled hot chocolate more than water.

In order to make any reasonable progress we had to search for higher ground, - we decided to take an early lunch-break to give the rain-storm a chance to settle down a bit, - hopefully. After lunch the rain dropped in intensity and then finally stopped, the sky gradually regained that more blueish color we had become so familiar with during the last two weeks. But the terrain had changed into a maze we could not recognize, all the wadis had changed from a tinny dusty valley into a sticky collection of water and mud; trapping vehicles time after time. At one point I were preoccupied with repeatedly driving from stuck truck to another stuck one to pull them out of their misery, it lasted several hours. My five meter long non-kinetic tow-strap and Paul´s kinetic rope took a lot of beating. Ken in his Defender and I were the only ones whom got though this day without getting stuck.

Sometime during all this drama Paul´s Land Cruiser 80-series decided that it did not want to cooperate any longer, and a well-worn CV-joint gave in to all the stress, reducing the vehicle from a capable off-road vehicle to a heavy truck with just a rear wheel-drive. Not something you would wish for under these circumstances, but then a CV always collapses when you need it the most.

Finally when Steve´s 100-series, Paul´s 80-series and later Thomas´ Defender 110, the only one with mud-terrains, got stuck more or less in the same small wadi we all looked at each other with frustration and despair in our eyes. During the many hours of fighting the mud in the Western Sahara we had barely traveled five kilometers over ground, and out of those only one in the direction we were heading.

The clock had just passed 1.30 pm. when we decided to set up camp on a fairly high leveled stone-filled plateau that still were somewhat dry, and also looked safe from any further rain-storms and floods coming down from the mountains. We so badly wanted the wet desert to have some time to soak up some of the fluid and dry out the mud in order to make driving more realistic again. The early afternoon in camp also gave Paul a fair chance to repair his CV-joint and thus regain all-wheel-drive; a job that would take the rest of the day and finished just a bit after sunset.

With lots of spare-time available people began to do a bit of maintenance work on their trucks; I had no real issues to deal with so I decided to have a beer. After a while I got a bit bored, so Thomas and I decided to empty a Jerry-can worth of fuel into each of our main tanks to extend our range a bit. I also grabbed the opportunity to clean my air-filters from dust.

Although we had covered a very short distance today we had after all crossed yet another imaginary line in the desert, the tropical-line, we had entered the tropical region, another scalph in our belt. But we still had fuel and appetite to venture further south.