Just one hours drive from Abu Dhabi we headed into the desert for some serious dune bashing. Four 4×4’s with at least one driver who thought he knew what he was doing.

Rudolf, the crazy Frenchman, was the expert. The photo above is his vehicle – the front bumper was lost in a previous dune bashing excursion. In the photo below he is not actually stuck but preparing to tow someone else out.

Everyone got stuck at least once. The first victim was Jean-Francois who was convinced that you did not need to let any air out of your tyres. So while the rest of us pounded up the side of a dune with 15psi in our tyres he slid into a hole and had to be pulled out. While this presented a photo opportunity for some of the spectators, others practiced dune driving with their own vehicles.

Daniel won the prize for the most difficult extraction. Fortunately Jean-Francois had Daniel’s boys to advise him on how to attach the tow rope and Rudolph was up to the task of pulling him out.

We sat around a camp fire until far too late and then had to trust Rudolf to get us back to the road in the dark We all had great confidence in him which was rewarded by him taking a wrong turn and getting completely stuck!

We did make back to civilisation eventually after a fabulous day in which we discovered that our car really could be driven just about anywhere.