11 January - Mauritania - It's dusty, dusty... very, very dusty... it's very dusty

Mauritania - it's dusty alright

What a night!

After finishing the programme I went into the bivouac, to have dinner and then take a look around. Steak and mashed potatoes, with pepper sauce - for the first time all event, a meal Leah might just eat some of... Apart from breakfast, that is...

Caught up with the guys from Micron, who are putting on-board cameras in Robby Gordon's Hummer and posting loads of stuff on Robby's website and videos on YouTube - go and have a look, there's some great footage! Robby had been filmed during the day speeding along some extremely fast tracks, catching other cars and pushing them until they pulled over...

He'd been VERY quick, ideal Hummer territoru because a lot of the stage was flat fast and wide f***ing open, as NASCAR drivers love to say. But the race stewards took a bit of a dim view of his tactics and summoned him for a chat.

My German Eurosport colleague Sebastian asked him if they'd given him a "Yellow Card"

"Is that the one where they tell you, if you do it again, you're out?"

"That's right."

"Yeah - that's the one... they gave me a good slap on the wrist..."

Tried to find the guys from the Peterson / White Lightning team, who I know as a Porsche race team from ALMS days, Le Mans, Sebring etc. They've now won all big three endurance classics, Le Mans, Sebring and the Daytona 24 but I knew that Mike Peterson and Dale White had started in desert racing in the States.

Turns out they've won the Baja 500 and 1000 races, and they figured Dakar is their next big challenge. So they've got a buggy, painted exactly like their racing Porsches and are having a great run. They'd gone to bed but the French mechanics from SMG, whose buggy they've rented, were changing the gearbox, as the dust and wind blew up.

Ronn Bailey (of the monster Corvette-engined yellow buggy) had also turned in but the car is still going and I bet he had a hell of a time on the fast stage, as well...

Anyway, my little tent called, so I headed back.

Hercules flight desk - for Ness

After being woken up by the cold for the past couple of nights, when I went to bed it was good to be dressed in just t-shirt and joggers and to be feeling warm. Even the wind flapping the tent didn't worry me too much and I flaked out.

Woke up at 4am, with the tent blowing like billy-o but as there was me and two heavy bags inside, I figured it wasn't going anywhere and went back to sleep.

When the alarm went off, I turned on my light to find everything, including me, covered in an even brown layer. This is fesh fesh, sand as fine as flour, which blows into your tent (and everything else.) It was also howling a gale, so I got dressed, went through the packing-up rituals and crawled out of my tent.

To collapse the tent, you have to empty it. Of the only things now stopping it blowing away. So I hauled my bags out, standing on the windward edge, as it tried to lift me off with it. Then, somehow, I managed to fold it up and jam it into its bag, in howling wind, in record time.

Naturally, I had looked at my goggles the previous night, as I repacked my bag for the plane, and thought that the weather was so nice, there was no way I'd need them... so I had to squint a lot until we finally boarded the plane to Zouerat.

Which is very different from Tan Tan. Mauritania is not a rich country and it is a step down in comfort from Tan Tan but the people were very friendly, offering constantly to sell you 200 Marlboro and who knows what else...

Waiting in the hangar (liberal use of the term - corrugated open shed in which you could put a plane, if anyone had one) it transpired that the lad in his mid-20s, who was looking after them with his mother, had been to college in Leeds, spoke good English and had also lived in Paris for a couple of years, so he got on very well with the French guys too.

Zouerat is an iron-ore mining town, with all the glamour that description conveys - after Leeds it must seem like paradise!

Mmmmm attractive look

It's been blowing on and off all day, so again, everything is dusted nicely with fesh fesh and the goggles are now round my neck, ready for use, like Rommel. Only less distinctive-looking, I suspect. They're big and purple, for a start and I suspect the old Desert Fox would rather have been shot than be seen in something like these...

Anyway, today's stage was very long and very fast. Robby Gordon won it, by 17 seconds from Jean Louis Schlesser's buggy, after just under 400 timed kilometres.

Before they got to the start, they all had to drive/ride from Tan Tan, across the Morocco/Mauritania border and to the start... a mere 450km liaison. Half tarmac, half dirt road. Blowing a gale as the first riders left at 3.30, it soon turned from a dust storm - where they were forced to slow down to 40kmh, because visibility was so poor - into a rain storm, which flooded the road and turned the dirt into a quagmire. Everyone arrived at the start caked in mud. And I thought MY morning was a bad one...

We didn't arrive here until after 11am, after a long and very bumpy flight - like being in the back of a truck on a very bumpy road, except without the comforting thought that you were only a foot or two off the ground... The day started late and, of course, that meant that the editors were still changing the programme while I was on air... taking stuff out and adding the trucks, which hadn't even arrived as I started at 6.15 but were in by 6.40.

After more conversations this morning about the scripts and how I have to get them out within half an hour fo the end of the feed, we hit on a new plan. As I was voicing, Alessandro and Sebastian were in the plane and the moment I had finished a section, they were running through it on the computers, noting the timings of each section...

As a result, and under much pressure, we finished transmitting at 655 (after another couple of technical problems) and the script was completed (Truck sectgion written, all the changes in bikes and cars made) by 7.15.

But it took three of us to do it, so how just one is expected to do it, I don't know. We also spent half the day just focusing on the script. Now the Eurosport guys have gone to the bivouac, to find people to interview live for their evening show - so they're going to be really pooped and looking forward to another windy night's sleep...

I did speak to Gael, my boss, this morning and he admitted that because of the digital equipment they're using for the first time this year, the editors are making changes way after they used to, as they don't have to dump it from tape to tape, just make changes on a computer. The play-out is then also taken from a computer, so they can change any file, apart from the one we're actually using... so today, riders disappeared from the bikes and drivers from the cars section, to make room for a minute and a half of very late-arriving trucks. which is fine and I can commentate round that...

But writing it all down afterwards does take time.

Now we seem to have come up with a system to deal with it, I expect the editors will work even later.

Tomorrow, I also have to do the first half of the "weekly" - a round-up of the stages so far, which Manu the car editor has been putting together each day before the car pics arrive.

I imagine someone will want a script for that as well.

Oh joy!

Ah well, I'm going to put my goggles and head-scarf on now and off to eat some dust. Hope there's some food under it all...

More pictures posted on Photobucket (follow the link on the left) and trying to get some flaky videos on YouTube... I need a 10-year-old to talkl me through the technology, though...