<font size=+1>The Sahara is an awesome place, there is no other desert I have slept in where the shooting stars are so frequent or the skies so bright with stars. You do have to keep an ear out for rogue vehicles roaring across the sands that may squash you flat where you lie, and to be honest we didn't get nearly as much time as we would of liked looking at the stars as most of our time was spent sandmatting. So slow going in our big yellow truck that on one particular day we travelled a measly 10 kilometres after sandmatting continuously from sun up and past sun down.
The heat knocks people flat and lugging sandmats across the heat shimmering dunes does not help. If the truck can go it goes until it gets stuck again. Which meant we would have to walk, sometimes up to 3 or 4kms carrying the very heavy sandmats between us, as well as water and the tools (shovels and sledgehammers) we'ld been using. For some strange reason we were all happy to reach the coast of Mauritania.
The bonus side to the desert crossing was that we ate well, with no supermarkets out here it was into the trucks larder and a varitable feast after a diet consisting mostly of tomatoes, onions and couscous since Spanish North Africa. </font>