Carry on Camping.

Camping in the desert is a wonderful experience. Watching the sun set over massive dunes, settling down around a good fire, then falling into a tent as the night chill begins to bite. On this trip up through the Great Sand Sea we had little of that. A persistent strong and dust filed wind from the south for the first few days, swinging round to a northerly for the last two days. The problem with this was that it happened in the middle of the night. We retired with a hot sticky southerly - tent doors facing north, but as the wind swung round in the night our tents morphed into a wind blown shapes and filled with at least a bucketful of sand each! Bob reported that he went out for a pee in the night and could not see a thing for the swirling sands. The wind hit a maximum of 37 kph according to data retrieved by Jason upon our return. Character building stuff! Our logistics team supplied by Siag Travel did a wonderful job of supplying three meals a day in all conditions and never was there a grain of sand in anything. Top marks to Taraq, Mohamed and Islam. Pics show, the team about to hit the sand, the Jeeps descending to the camp, a long shot of a dusty camp near ‘Russian Well’ and our tents after the sand storm.

Champion.

Apparently the LRDG were not as keen on the Ford 4x4 truck as the Chevrolet of similar size. The Chevy was faster and more frugal on the juice. Perhaps this explains why their wrecks outnumber those of the Chevys. ‘Hardly worth returning for as it’s only a Ford’, would be the cry in the barracks. This one is fairly northerly in the Great Sand Sea, it’s flathead V8 removed and dumped in front of it. maybe an abandoned repair. One for my old pal Affer though. A Champion spark plug that he will no doubt pass comment on. Pictures are; a kite cam shot of the scene, a long shot that shows the nothingness surrounding the wreck and detail shots.

Another wreck and again it’s a Ford. What is so nice about these is the evidence of hastily welded on bits to take machine guns and sand ladders. It looks like these were cobbled together from bits of steel lying about on various workshop floors in the back streets of Cairo back in 1941. The upright tubes are just bits of pipe. Maybe gas pipes in civilian life, but welded onto the tub of the truck to take a Vickers, or similar. The sand ladder brackets were clearly too low at the first attempt, then lengthened a bit later on by about 3 inches. I assume they were lashed in place with rope. Sam found a genuine LRDG sand ladder that would have been fitted into these carriers in a shop in Siwa. A lucky find - especially for the shop keeper who had his best sale of the day! He was using it as a shelf.