Our intrepid adventurers made another early start this morning, after a very relaxing stay in the posh hotel, with one of the best meals they had ever eaten inside them. They had originally planned to do 450 miles today but decided to split the next leg on to Dakhla into three days' travel rather than two, so they can relax a little more.
Team Teletubbies haven't followed them on from the hotel last night - the five teams who stuck together in Gibraltar are now quite the dedicated herd, very attached to each other and with a whole collection of in-jokes to bond over - do you know anyone else who says "bastard apes!" (in honour of crazy Keith the Gibraltarian tour guide) when a photo is taken? Even so they haven't really lost track of other teams on the route - there was a happy meeting with some of the teams who are headed for Banjul rather than Timbuktu today, and they usually catch sight of other runners at the queues for security checks. There have been six police checks today on the road, but so far very few of them have wanted 'un petit cadeau' in return for safe passage, so with the watches they took with them for this precise eventuality, they still have a few dozen options when it comes to checking the time. Ken and Kenny win 'cheapest bribe', they managed to get away with giving one official a handsome souvenir of two humbugs and a biro!
After another comedy round-and-round lost session in a market town, on market day, stuck behind donkeys and cracking each other up on the radios, the teams headed into the Western Sahara. Roads here are very narrow, which makes overtaking very precarious, and so the drive is tiring even though it's quite straight. The scenery changes depending on how close to the coast they are - sometimes they are surrounded by argan bushes (from which a compound used inface creams all over the world is made, very useful when you are being sprayed with Birmingham Irish's dust!) and sometimes the fact that they are entering the desert is very real - they drove through their first sandstorm today, time to break out the Tilly hat! Best sights of the day have included shipwrecks on the skeleton coast and baby camels. It is very odd to think that they are only a relatively small number of miles inland from the island of Lanzarote, which will no doubt be a haven of bikini spotting and lager swilling even at this time of year...
They have reached Laayoune this evening and found themselves yet another smart hotel with wine and European style bathrooms. I'm not sure what happened to that resolution they all made a few days ago to "camp from now on", but they sound much happier this way! Plenty of 'roughing it' to come in the desert, anyway - one team in the group who are ahead of them have updated the main challenge website to say they have been eating chewy camel cooked by their Sahara guide, nice!
20:00 edited to add: Mum's just rung to ask me to include the quote of the evening: they're sitting in a fabulous restaurant eating awesome food, and they are discussing JJ's wife, who is pregnant - one of the other lads said his wife was in labour for 36 hours with one of their children, to which JJ looked aghast and said "36 hours! 36 hours?! I've never even done shit I like for 36 hours!"
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