Moroccan-Mauritanian border

The tank was fixed yesterday. Gyula drove until 5.15am yesterday, so we could reach the rest of the teams. Respect! He was awake by 10 am, he said that much of sleep was enough for him. Gyulacell.

We’re driving towards the border at our maximum speed, 70 km/h. The terrain is the same as yesterday: flat, sandy, smaller dunes, a lot of camels. We stop to fill up, and I took the role to push everyone. Instead of the usual 30 minutes, we’re ready in 15 minutes, although now some of them don’t talk to me. Anyway, mission completed. We have to push it really hard, because the customs officers will take a longer break at 1pm. It would suck to queue 2-3 hours on the sun. The other thing is, that all the faster = every single car in the race is going to queue in front of us. I wouldn’t mind reaching the camp in time, and look around a bit, or have a swim in the sea for a nice change.

We are a bit worried of the landmine zone, although up till now 150 cars in race passed it without a problem. Taking alcohol to Mauritania is forbidden. We can’t really hide the bier barrels and the bier tap, the plan is to bribe them. We wasted half a litre of coke on bribes until now, which is a great result I reckon. Aravind will be the one. He says that corruption in the Sahara is nothing compared to that in India.

The Moroccan-Mauritanian border is literally a shithole. Visibility is 0, eyes burning, lungs aching. The officers are lazing the whole day off. I wasn’t disappointed in our fellow Hungarians when 2 of them overtook us in the queue. Hungarian is Hungarian even in the desert. Moreover, stupid Hungarian doesn’t know that it’s not the position in line what counts but the speed of the paperwork. And they CB us where to get official forms from and how to fill them out. You idiot, it’s been on the official B2B site for half a year, and it’s in the itinerary as well written in 2 European languages. I want to give advice through the CB radio, but me teammates don’t let me.

We give submit the passenger list approx. 20 times, along with queuing for it, then customs, we watch how they kill a sheep. A Moroccan comes up, he demands bier. I don’t give him the last bottle of Astra, he gets a bottle of wine instead. Looking at his teeth he’d rather deserved a tooth brush.After the wine we proceed quite fast, although 3 officers hold us up when they are getting their pictures taken in front of our bus.