Day 18 on the road to Atar

Teeth brushing by sunrise this morning before hitting the road towards Atar.

We’re bush camping again tonight so needed to shop for food and water in Bon Lanour on the way.

Bon Lanour is inevitably filled with goats and enthusiastic kids practicing their English/French and showing off their muscles to the tourists. Mark and I were looking at the maths in their exercise books.

This is apparently not the best shop in Bon Lanour, a guy originally from Cuba pointed us in the right direction. It was hard to tell the difference.

Mark is still living up to his reputation as a true romantic. We are covered in sand and sweat from head to foot but he still offered me a hot date in the truck:

It’s been a long day of just sitting and looking out the truck window, which is absolutely fine as I can do this forever. I also don’t think I realised how much I wanted to see the Sahara desert and it has not disappointed. When I was ~11 years old, my father took a group of young adults across the Sahara desert in land rovers, aiming for Nigeria. They had to turn back pretty much slap bang in the middle of the desert in Tamanrasset, Algeria, close to a town called Djanet. I think my faint memories of him doing that trip had planted a seed that has grown into the astonishing beauty we’ve seen during the last week. Both these photos have just been snapped through the window of the truck.

Our bush camp tonight is also in the middle of nowhere, tagged “camel camp” as that is all you can see in any direction.

We spent the evening with the milky way above our heads and beetles beneath our feet before sleeping in only the silk liner of our sleeping bag, under a mosquito net so we could see the stars all night long.

We realised this was a phenomenally stupid idea at about 3am when it was really cold and windy. By really cold I probably mean 20 degrees C but relative to the 30+ during the day, we really should have slept in the sleeping bag. However, every time I woke up I could see satellites and shooting stars.

Magical.