Today’s the day: finally entering a few hundreds km off-road, on stones, sand and mud. Of course, for a good start, we took the wrong way.
My family wanted to cut across the cedar forest and had thoroughly discussed various alternative routes. One really looked great, but also very hard and they opted for another looking safer and easier. They fed all waypoints to the GPS and we drove off.
Yet, something went wrong after a few Y-crossings. Don’t ask me why: they drove me right instead of left, taking to increasingly difficult paths, then tracks and finally just a line of bumps and stones. But they were right – what a breath-taking landscape! Dense forests of cedars that must have been hundred-year old, then sudden open breaks on the plateau. Nature had fun turning this land upside down: rock layers jump out almost vertically along fractured planes.
When we reached the top, I mean the very top of the last mountain, we couldn’t find the slightest sign of tracks so the lady asked some cattlemen but they only spoke the local dialect (which is not Arabic). Understanding wasn’t straightforward but somehow they made it: after a few km full of doubts here’s the track and finally the road. What a great team working!

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