Miguel Angel Menendez
Stage 3: Maadid-Merzouga (11-03-2014)
One of the objectives of this raid is to bring the children of the south about 20 kilos of school supplies. Well, this was the day his delivery to the NGO Camino al Sur took place in a ceremony held at the Blaghma school. We filled a large room with the material that family, friends and some companies had donated, and the school gave us some pastries and tea.
The children were shy at first, but little by little we talked to them, some in French and others in the international language of gestures. Then, after a few words from the authorities in the area, they gave us some drawings of the Pandas that they made with the different numbers of the teams and we ended up sharing games in the schoolyard. The truth is that the school and the children made a very good impression on us.
Later, we went out to travel the 100 kilometers of the stage towards the dunes of Merzouga. On this occasion, a navigation test was also launched where several beacons had to be found in the middle of the desert.
When we left school the alternator that we put in the day before made a hellish noise, everything indicated that from one moment to the next it would stop working. Indeed, before entering the town of Erfoud, the absence of noise and the presence of a burning smell forced us to stop and, after verifying that it had been blocked, we proceeded to replace it with the one repaired the night before.
In an hour, burns aside, we were on our way. Luckily that day we had to get out of the first and although we were overtaken by quite a few Pandas, we did not waste much time.
At approximately kilometer 40 we left the asphalt and concentrated on the mandatory control where every 30 seconds we were given way. At this stage, the 4 × 4 had, at some points, different steps that were forced on the 4 × 2.
I prayed the roadbook “Be careful, you are in the middle of the desert”; Indeed, we tried to follow the indicated route but the references were lost, heading 90 degrees, heading 130 ... Cars in all directions. In the end we decided to join a group of Pandas as lost as we are, better to get lost in company. We had missed the indicated route and had to go back. At this point we were pulling binoculars to find the next obligatory point of passage.
Some cars were overheating, thank goodness it was March. At one of the group's stops to discuss and reorder our course, we don't know from where a native Berber appears in a Mobylette who wanted to sell us some fossils or exchange them for something. We ask him, and after negotiating a "reward" he takes us to the next step point. You don't know how that bike ran!
Once the correct route was resumed, we found more Pandas and helped to unblock some that had been left in the numerous "Oueds" sandy we had to traverse. The car is behaving well despite the tute it received, although it heats up a bit when we force it into first gear through demanding sandy areas.
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The camp
At kilometer 75 of the route we reach the point where the navigation test begins. We prepared this test the day before and made a small outline of how we had to face it. It is about finding two 7-shaped beacons in the middle of nowhere from which a kind of stapler hangs to mark the road book and justify that we have passed through there. The maximum time is 20 minutes.
We begin and the important thing is to forget about the ruts, since there are in all the directions that you are, and control, maintain and follow the correct course, being very exact in the measurements of the distance. We easily find one, mark the book, and move on to the other. Soon we found the second one, we stapled and we continued towards the verification point. Some doubts about the route to follow afterwards almost make us forget that we had to show the staples at the control point but we rectified in time and managed to get out of the trance with ease.
We followed the marked route and passed through a semi-abandoned town where we had to find a reference to a door of a house covered with "elf" stickers. The car continued to warm up a little, only putting third it lowered, to about 90 degrees; But we could not carry that much speed in some sections, the tracks were full of surprises in the form of potholes and stones.
With two kilometers to go to the end of the stage, the regularity section began, divided into two sections. First a stony mountain with an average of 15 kilometers per hour, riddled with potholes and pointed stones that we passed without almost any problems, and then more than a kilometer through the bed of a sandy "oued" in which many Pandas were trapped at a side to side without any rest area. With the 4-wheel drive we were able to go through little by little with the car very revolutionized so as not to stay.
Suddenly a dense column of steam comes out of the engine, if we stop we stay and look for a slightly firmer area. We try to open the hood but it won't stop, it must have some mechanism that prevents it if the car is hot. We managed to open it and cool it a bit, and in this we see that the people at the hidden control of the passage tell us to push a little, which we are penalizing, we had stayed two meters from the passage. Without a doubt we prefer to keep the mechanics for the rest of the days.
At the end we fill up with water and we manage to leave the "oued" towards where the camp awaits us. Shop, check car and rest. That night, until very late in the morning, the work on the mechanics truck was heard to leave the cars that had broken down ready for the next day.
Read the 2st part of the Panda Raid chronicle →
