That's me still sleeping under the blanket. It was particularly windy that night and sand was flying everywhere.
Early morning tea
Restrapping the mattresses down on the roof. One of them had just flown off!
The guard dog that terrorized Pascal every time he woke up to go to the outhouse. He was trained to attack the legs, but apparently on one of Pascal's night trips he chomped down mighty close to the family jewels...
Human jawbones and other miscellaneous bones
Human skull and partially mummified remains
The strips of cloth you see are mummy wrappings
An ever-familiar sight: filling the radiator with water
In this tomb, we hit the jackpot
As our eyes adjust to the low light, we first see this human skull, and behind it in the darkness...
Two fully wrapped mummies!!
Later on, wreckage from the Paris - Dakar race
At this point we're stopping every 3 minutes to refill the boiling radiator...not good.
Fathy and Sayeed spend an hour pulling the radiator out of the engine
What in carnation's name are they doing to the radiator??
During our increasingly frequent pit-stops, Pascal and I find ways to pass the time...
They're patching the holes up with dates!! (At this point I knew I had fully entered the Twilight Zone)
Out of water. Little did we know at the time how symbolic this would be. When the car finally broke down completely, we only had one bottle of water left each, not even enough to survive one day in the desert (you need 4 per day).
The dates didn't work. Soon after, the car breaks down completely, with us facing the necessary task of walking 30+ miles in the desert to the next military checkpoint. This is the view of the road we are to follow.
Salvation! Although this road only sees an average of one car per week, an archeological team shows up just at the right time!
We camp for the night with the archeologists
I slept on the ground
With no mats or blankets, I used a T-shirt wrapped around my head to block the sand
Meanwhile, Pascal contorted himself to sleep in one of the pickup's cabins
