Saharan Rally 2009 completes successfully!

It is not often that you will find yourself driving a car, being offered a digestive biscuit and hesitatingly ask "Does it have any sand in it?". It was at this point that we realised we were in the depths of a great place.



We launched as expected on Friday 30th January in the very early hours of the morning in order to catch out ferry to France, this allowed us the extra time needed to get to Genoa in Italy for our ferry to Tunisia. Our first night was a cold one, spent sleeping in the car behind a service station in France, where the temperate dropped to -5c and ice formed on the inside of the Land Rover, completely covering all windows.

We made our ferry for Tunisia with plenty of time to spare and from that point a truly memorable adventure was started.

We have uploaded some of our photos from the Saharan Rally 2009 and these are now available from the photographs link on this website. We hope you enjoy the photos and in the near future we'll try and write up a bit more about our adventure and also upload some of our rally video.

We want to thank everyone who has supported us and donated to the Mercy Corps. We've had donations from people we didn't even know were following our adventure. We really appreciate every donation. We have recently reached our fund raising target, but please do not let this put you off donating, as the more that can be raised for the Mercy Corps the better! We also want to thank Integralis, who donated a very generous £500 to the Mercy Corps for our challenge.

Thanks are also due to the Mercy Corps who have been very quick to help us with press releases and fund raising material, it really makes fund raising for the Mercy Corps enjoyable and satisfying.

We have a monumentally huge thank you for Chris, and son Kai, from Pebble Track for all the time and effort they have put into the GPS tracking facility. Without Chris, the map you saw on our website pinpointing our location would not have been possible. Chris provided us with all the equipment and the backend systems required for the tracking. We found the Pebble Track system to be very reliable when we had mobile network coverage and the integration with Google Maps worked a treat on our website.

If you haven't already made a donation to Mercy Corps, we hope now that we have completed the rally you'll feel tempted to make a donation. The rally lasted 24 days, covered 6000 miles, 3000 miles of which through the Sahara desert.





Adam & Alex

Launch details

The car is now ready! Even our rally stickers are on the car, we still have our sponsor stickers to place on the car.

Our ferry crossings are all arranged, we now must leave London at 4.30am on Friday 30th January 2009 in order to make Genoa, Italy by 4pm on Saturday 31st of January to catch our ferry to Tunisia. We expect our first day in Algeria will be the 3rd of February.

Our crossing back from Tunisia is on Saturday 21st of February, getting us into Palermo, Sicily the next morning. We will then take a drive through some Eastern parts of Europe before heading back to London.

Thank you to everyone who has donated or helped us in any way with the rally and we hope to hear from you when we get back or via SMS while on the rally.

Adam & Alex