Crossing the Mauritanian desert on old rally coordinates

While planning Mauritania I found an old map on the internet: checkpoint coordinates from some long-past rally that cut across a stretch of open desert just outside Nouakchott. We could not leave that alone. On the way back from Atar to Nouakchott, our three cars turned off the tarmac at the old start point. The deal was a slow, careful race to the desert road on the far side. I waved a flag.

Within a minute my friends were flat out, as if it were a real race. The cars split in three directions and vanished from each other. The walkie-talkies went quiet - the gaps were already too big. Three street Subarus, separately lost in the Sahara, in heat over 50 °C.

We still had the coordinates, so we bet everyone would aim for checkpoint one or two. The first checkpoint was a lone farm in the middle of nothing. One car turned up. The third did not. We drove back to the start - nothing - then followed tyre prints through the sand until a bar of signal and a distant dot found them: wrong direction, buried, and red as lobsters from digging.

We restarted together, hours behind, with tens of litres of water aboard. From checkpoint to checkpoint we got stuck, dug out, and picked lines around the dunes. A huge one near the end forced a long detour that cost several more stucks, and one car's body tore loose from the running gear underneath - the wheels steered, the car barely followed. It needed welding we could not do in the sand.

We reached the desert road and drove into Nouakchott in the dark. Next morning a local workshop quoted €400 to weld everything back together. We paid. For the day the desert had sold us, it was cheap.