Sidor

Friday, April 30, 2010

"The last 40 km through the desert"

Sorry to keep you hanging so long before to get the opportunity the find out about the end of the story but I have never really been writing this expedition down and the more I think the more I want to explain. Well back to the story...


The sunset came at around 6:30 and it turned the surrounding desert reddish, it was a totally unbelievable view. Camel who is a faithful Muslim positioned himself for prayer with the setting sun, the desert breeze and the reddish colour around him, everything was like taken from a movie! I tried to film it but it did not come out as I wanted it.

Sitting outside the hut of Kazim, my feet where busted up, my legs started to feel the long walk and the mind was still suffering from the memory of the grizzling heat during the day. I checked the GPS and after this point we had like mentioned before around 40km of desert before reaching Douz and the oasis hotel with a nice bed that waited. In this area there where no Bedouin camp of any kind which means if we got stucked/hurt/sick we where FUBAR... (Military expression, but I will not teach you the meaning but please google it if you want)


The plan was to sleep at Kazims and start in the morning at around 4 but due to the situation we decided to walk during the night, and keep a lower tempo to save the strength. We started of and the darkness soon surrounded us and we put on our headlights. We decided to walk 10km and then have a 10 min break and so on after that.


lights from the oasis Douz was filling up the sky 40km in front of us and this made us not take it as easy as we planned and the first 10km we did in a little bit more than 1,5h which is a crazy speed at this part of the march, soon after the next 5km the calve on my right leg locked it self in cramp and I screamed in agony.... Not good and extremely stupid of me not to fill up with important salt and water during the march.


We took something like 15 minutes extra pause in the dark and I was sitting down when suddenly Camel told my in his relaxed voice to stand up because I have a scorpion behind me! I flew up as a rocket and after that we did not sit down during the rest of the night. The scorpions was everywhere and it was like a scary movie with them walking around our legs all the night. If we would have been bitten by one depending on the size and colour we would have been forced to take the antiserum and then try to get to Douz as soon as possible.


After the next 10 or 15 km the calve on my left leg called in as well and the tempo really went down. Every step was a torture and every little movement where extremely painful. Camel was also suffering and I think we look a little bit like penguins with our rocking slowly walk in the night. The last kilometeres took many hours...


When approaching the oasis we realized in our happy frenzy that I did not now where the hotel was where we should sleep and panic came. As we approached the city border sign, DOUZ, at around 3:30 in the morning we had been walking for 23,5h and was in terrible need of rest, shower and a bed.


Camel had a low low signal on his phone and I called my agent at the northcoast and tried to explain to him to call the hotel and make the send a taxi to the city sign so we could get to the hotel.


The taxi came after maybe 10min and of course he did not believe us that we had been crossing the desert that they but we did not really care at this moment... We were smiling!


We were finally at the end of our journey....


Thanks for having patience with me...


//Your explorer

No comments:

Post a Comment