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Dune Tunes

Rob Howard / 15.12.2008

After days of sunshine the racers woke to a surprise at Moreeb Dune this morning – the camp site was cloaked in thick fog. They packed up in the gloom of a damp and dark dawn and lined up under the start arch just after 7am to hear the race briefing for the next day and a half. They were reminded that the trek had a strict time limit of 24 hours plus 6 hours of mandatory rest which had to be taken at checkpoints – and that there were severe time penalties for finishing the stage late or not taking enough rest. They were also reminded that the penalty for missing the optional CP’s on the stage was 6 hours per CP, but those who were already tired and just wanted to finish the race could take the shorter route.. Oh, and to watch out for scorpions!

As they set off into the fog visibility was no more than a few metres, but it made little difference to navigation, which was all compass or GPS based anyway. There are no readily available maps so they’d been supplied with detailed Google Earth print outs to show the shape of the dunes (or the shape when the satellite photo was taken anyway!) The only real navigational choices were whether to go over or round large dunes and the local advice was that the dunes were softer in the heat of day but easier to cross at night. The trouble was that in the fog it you couldn’t even see how high the dunes were!

It was like this for the first 4 hours of the race as the fog was very slow to burn off, and racing through the mist was eerie. What was more eerie was the sound made when descending the large dunes. From a distance it sounded like a muffled bass note repeated over and over and it was only when I got closer to teams I realised they were making the noise with each footfall as the sand compacted and shifted. The noise of the ’dune tune’ echoed through the mist as the race passed by.

It wasn’t until the mist lifted that the racers could appreciate the splendour of their surroundings, with the dunes stretching away to the horizon in all directions, seemingly endlessly.

In truth, they were just on the edge of The Empty Quarter, which stretches into Saudi Arabia and other bordering Emirates, and when the heat of the sun hit, and the sand seeped into their shoes, it was best not to think of the distance or time ahead in the desert.

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