Have You Got Any, er.. You Know..

Mum and Jane have become the drug dealers of the Plymouth-Timbuktu run. So far they have offloaded pain killers, two courses of antibiotics and they have a roaring trade in steroid inhalers. Well, nobody wants to sniffle and splutter their way across the Sahara, now do they?

The 'herd' took a rest day in Dakhla yesterday, eating in rooftop terraces overlooking the West African coast and being informed by local residents that the sand storm they had driven through the day before was in fact the worst the region had experienced in three years and the media had warned people not to go out in it. Ha! Softies! They didn't find Dakhla very exciting as a town, much less colour and vibrancy than Marrakesh, so they found themselves raring to go this morning. The japes continue apace as last night they planned to start today by throwing all the car keys in a pile and randomly taking a set per team - like the vehicle equivalent of a suburban wife swapping party - and driving each other's cars for half of today.

They have decided not to take a guide. This isn't as crazy as it may sound. They don't plan to go 'off piste' in the desert - there are hard top roads to go on through the desert, and in the trickier parts of the next leg, where the mine fields and so on are, the routes are already very well marked as they are the last of many groups to travel this way. They have radio contact between the five cars that are travelling together, and know how to navigate using GPS, so they ought to be quite safe.

The satellite phone is not working tonight, but one of the group's mobile phones can still miraculously get enough signal for an SMS message so I have been informed that all is well after their first day in Mauritania, and they will be in touch as soon as possible.

Sorry, I can't fulfil the request for more photographs as the one I included in an earlier post was sent to me when the teams were last at a hotel where the Irish boys could get an internet connection, but I can assure you that as soon as they are back home mum will need little encouragement to grace her blog with her own fair and witty presence and will no doubt fill pages with the photos she and Jane have taken all the way. There really will be pages, too - in keeping with their manic tendencies to prepare for every eventuality twice they did have memory card space between them for around 800-1000 shots.