Today’s group was eager to take on an unfamiliar stretch of the Abu Dhabi desert closest to Dubai.

All Fellas were gathered at the meeting point and ready to drive ahead of the scheduled start time. Since this was an exploration drive, nobody was quite certain about what lay ahead. However, once the driving got started it quickly became apparent, that this area was perfect terrain for a trained Junior convoy.

The dunes near the starting point were large with smooth slopes and  were spaced perfectly for establishing a beautiful, almost hypnotic, flow. After scaling the first few dunes the convoy gathered momentum and completed a series of side slopes by see-sawing in the valleys between adjacent high dunes.

After more than an hour of continuous driving, our sweeper trainee was called on for the first recovery of the day, which imposed a short break in the drive. This pause in the drive gave us an opportunity to survey the surrounding landscape and truly imbibe the splendour of the area we were driving in. Since it was such a picturesque location (captured in the trip photo), and the convoy was making much better progress than anticipated, we decided to take an extended break here for breakfast.

Shortly after resuming the drive we encountered a large bowl with steep sloping walls which we simply could not resist. So after an initial pass, Javier took the convoy for a few more spins around the bowl. I’m almost certain that the bowl was a little wider by the time we were done.

There was no shortage of high climbs and bowls of all sizes along our route.  This area has a lot of potential for Junior and Off-roader drives, and I know that today’s convoy wished that the drive would go on just a little longer. The only element that detracted from the otherwise perfect dune formations in this area, was the random grader tracks all over the place. These could cause serious damage to your car if you underestimated its depth and crossed it at high speed.

Fortunately, our convoy had an incident free drive and made a spirited dash to the exit to end the trip on schedule.

Thanks Johann (SW) and Javier, for keeping the convoy safe and expanding the breadth of today’s exploration drive. Looking forward to our return to Nahel.