Five hundred miles of sand, not just flat level sand but a sea of dunes many of 300m and it is often half a mile from the bottom to the top. Theses dunes are an exciting and exacting challenge for any off road car and its crew to say the least, not a place to break down.

Impala entered this sea with a group of French men and women being looked after by a friend of ours Laurent Roy and our mandatory guide (Mabrouk from Niger). Our vehicles and drivers were tested to the full and the first casualty was a Nissan Patrol with a broken engine, luckily this happened just after we left Derj and before the soft sands so Laurent got them back to civilisation quickly.

Four days in near the famous rock arch one of our Landrover 110’s broke a front differential so we disconnected the prop shaft, took out the half shafts and the 110 continued on its way with the occasional pull up to the top of a dune. As we were slower than the rest of the group we decided with Mabrouk to leave the group and find an easier way out of the sand to take the strain off the 110’s rear differential. Louise and I in our Range Rover, Alec in his 90, Mabrouk in his Land Cruiser and the damaged 110 of Nick headed west towards Algeria and an easier route.

Our little group was nearing the end of the dunes, which always increase in height as the level plains to the south appear on the horizon from on top of each crest, getting ever nearer in an inexorably slow way when at the last crest Mabrouk’s Toyota came to an abrupt stop, luckily on the downward side.

The Toyota’s crankshaft had broken.

We were some 35 miles of soft sand and hard mud away from Ghat so we attached the stricken Toyota to my old Classic Range Rover and enjoyed an exhilarating tow across the dusty landscape to our camp at Ghat where our first duty was to quench our thirst with a cold coke from the camp’s fridge.