We jumped on the road heading toward Benni Kadech and blasted down the gravel road. It was a much less sandy road for the most part. We tootled along happily, not passing a single land rover or for that matter any other vehicle. We encountered several patches of sand which we easily traversed but finally came to one that did us in. This time there wasn’t any Tunisian military around to help us. Remembering my sand training from previous trips to the desert, I pulled out my leather gloves and started grabbing handfuls of a small shrub growing all over the desert. It was woody and made a good roadbed for the car to drive on. We made about 10 feet worth of track for the car to drive on to get up speed and get out of the sand. Marie jumped in the car and floored it while the other three of us pushed from behind. Once up on our roadbed, the car took off and shot through the remaining 100 feet of sand and to safety. That was the last real bad patch of sand we encountered.
Maybe another 30 minutes beyond our sand encounter we started smelling something like gasoline and felt an odd feeling from the rear left of the car. I got out and took a look under the car. The shock absorber was completely blown out, leaking fluid everywhere that smelled like gasoline. Good thing shock absorbers aren’t critical pieces of cars! We hopped back in and continued on toward the Tataouine district of the country.
