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RUNNING THE 2008 DUNE-UP
written and photographed by Pinaki Chakravarty

“There are two kinds of runners: those who run against time, and others who enjoy the exertion and the landscape”

RAVING MAD
Hit the desert
It is baking hot in the middle of the Sharqiya Sands, hot enough to send Bedu and iguanas into a dopey haze of little, if any, movement. Ghaf trees droop, tufts of scorched grass harden and clouds fade into wisps. Even the Wahaibis turn up the air-conditioning. You’d have to be crazy not to. But Martin Trier, a few days out of Germany, might just be raving mad, because he abandons his SUV and starts running through the desert.

YALLA YALLA
The 4WD expeditions
Martin looks like some sort of mutant desert insect out of a B-grade science-fiction movie with his loping long-distance stride, his running shoes wrapped in electric tape, a sock-like floppy cloth over the head (not to mention a GPS instrument in hand and an iPod strapped to an arm), heading into nowhere.

Don’t laugh too loud. Martin can clock up to 80km a day, and has been navigating 4WD convoys through the deserts of Africa for the last quarter century. “I was 21 when I first got to the Sahara. My father was organising a group drive from Cologne to Khartoum to Cairo, and some cars had to separate because they weren’t adequately prepared. My father put me in charge of 20 people, and told me to guide them to the Red Sea.” Martin hasn’t looked back since. He went on to earn a master’s certificate in off-road driving in Germany twice, and, seven years ago, was asked to create a “4WD paradise” within 30,000 hectares in Germany. Such efforts led to Yalla Yalla, a war cry he yells every time he jumps on the lowest end of his 4WD.

Yalla Yalla is his off-road expedition company, a venture that takes convoys of often heavily customised cars through the deserts of the world. That’s the plan, at least. The first Yalla Yalla was in Tunisia last year, the next will return to north Africa in September. But the hope is to have one across every desert in the world. And the next one? Perhaps Takla Makan, or the Gobi, or the Namib. But before any of that, Martin will focus on the sultanate.

OMAN
Up the dunes
Most of Oman’s desert is regularly trampled over by weekend campers, freewheeling dirt bikers and pickup-crazy Bedouin, so a Yalla cry might just be drowned out in the cacophony of pleasure-seekers.

Instead, Martin has come up with the idea of a so-called Dune-Up (also conceived and tested in Tunisia), where a group of particularly hardy runners will slog a couple of hundred kilometres over desert and mountains, followed by a support crew in 4WDs. This isn’t a race, but only those who manage to finish the course without dropping out get their medals.

Oman’s first Dune-Up is scheduled for the winter of 2008, and the rough plan will start unfolding at Wadi Bani Auf, from where the group will cycle up 20km of excruciatingly steep mountain slopes, down 15km the other side, sleep at Nizwa and then be ferried to the desert coast, somewhere south of al Ashkharah. And that’s where they start running.

“There are two kinds of runners,” Martin says. “Those who run against time, and the others who enjoy the exertion and the landscape.” Martin is banking on the grit of the second group, who will pay to travel to Oman and go further than anyone else. They will have to run to base camp, of course, ten kilometres into the desert, and then about 30km over the next four days.

WHY RUN?
Ten million Germans
Martin looks home for inspiration. “We estimate that ten million Germans run seriously. One of the oldest is 90 years of age. More than 40,000 people take part in the Berlin Marathon and three
million watch it.” Martin himself didn’t start till 2000, when he was alarmed by his life passing by (he sells used 4WDs for a living), his 100kg and the amount of smoking he used to survive.
That’s when he started running, then a few feet at a time, now a couple of deserts a year. “You just need a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and shoes – and you can do it anywhere in the world.”
When Martin isn’t running, he’s driving. And there’s no one better to teach you how to negotiate the desert than the Saharan master himself. Over a week of off-road reconnaissance spent
looking for Dune-Up routes, Martin showed us how. Read the following appendix for the short version.

APPENDIX
Sand driving
“Yalla Yalla!” yells Martin for the umpteenth time, as we extricate ourselves from yet another dune. The more you drive through the desert the more you understand that getting stuck is an integral part of sand driving. Most weekend drivers talk of specific cars as if they had a life of their own, swearing that it is practically impossible for them to get stuck – although if you get into trouble they’re quick to assert that it’s your inexperience that got you bogged down. But if the car was so good, how could it get stuck?

A collection of parts
The truth is, a car is just a collection of parts strung together. Vehicle performance differs from one to the other over the sand because of a few extremely basic factors – it’s the humans who add complications. Some cars have more ground clearance than others, some are lighter, some are more powerful. But the most powerful are often the biggest and heaviest, and in the end might, ironically, sport the same power-to-weight ratio as something less powerful but lighter. Many swear by the Toyota LandCruiser, but there are others who actually prefer the Prado. Martin used a little Daihatsu Terios through Tunisia. Length is also a player. Longer cars get stuck more easily when going over the crest of a dune. And no matter which car you choose, you can bet your last crumpled rial that you have the wrong tyres.

The wrong tyres
Look to the Bedu and learn the lessons. Almost every single one of them is in the LandCruiser pickup they affectionately call the Abu Shenab, which is much smaller than the luxurious-by-comparison LandCruiser wagon that city-slickers prefer. Being a pickup, it is also much lighter, simply because there’s a lot less of it. Which also tips the power-weight ratio heavily in its favour.

Most importantly, almost all of them in the desert are fitted with sand tyres: balloon-like and smooth with only minimal lines running around the outside. You don’t want to grip the sand, you want to float over. That’s why people lower their tyre pressure till the wheels balloon out at the lower end – this way you have a larger imprint that distributes weight, the same way broader shoes might work better over snow or sand than sharp heels.

Backward and forward
Soft sand may be separated from harder-packed grains by just a few feet, so when you get stuck you might have to walk away from your vehicle and decide which direction you have to be towed in and where the other car should head, and stop. If the sand is too soft, it is best if you park facing down-slope, so gravity will keep you going when you start. Reversing down a dune isn’t a bad way to start, but it means you will have to reverse up another in order to head straight again. It might sound complicated but you’ll get used to it the more you drive through the desert.

Easy does it
Tread lightly. When you want to stop, just let off the accelerator lightly. Breaking will dig you in, and hard breaking will embed you even where the sand seems hard enough. When in doubt, aim for a slope. And when stuck, or towing, remember that reverse gear is your most powerful, so backing out is always your safest bet.

The more the better
Drive in a convoy – it makes digging a single car out seem almost laughably easy. Three vehicles are the barest minimum to take for a desert crossing – six is better. When one car gets stuck, the second usually does too because by the time the driver realises the plight of the first they’re already in the soft sand and sinking fast. A third might be far enough away to manage halting well, but now you have two stuck with just one to pull them out – easily done but too risky to bank on. When you are in a convoy, don’t even bother trying to drive out of your hole. The less you try the better because you’ll probably dig yourself in deeper. It takes a minute to connect two cars to a heavy-duty towrope and seconds to pop a car out of the sand. A single vehicle could take hours to dig out. We’ve tried it.