We woke up at 7 a.m. at put food for 7 days, tents, sleeping bags and tools into two cars. We took 4 barrels of oil, total of 800 liters. We also put 580 liters of oil on the cars and then we drove off at 11.15 for a day tour. The driving conditions were very good but sometimes we drove into up to one and half meter high sastrugis. The speed was usually around 20-30 but sometimes up to 40-60. After a while one of my lug bolts broke but we manage to tighten it up and continue. We tried to find the best route without getting into areas with a lot of cracks and followed partly a route that airplanes had found when flying over the area. We had some cracks on the way, not too big though – maybe half a meter wide – and it was easy to drive past them. Since the weather and driving conditions were very good we decided to drive further than we had planned. We ended up on ETL which is the place where the competitors will be picked up by an airplane after the training period and transferred to the Start line. It had taken us 9 and a half hour to drive those 200 kilometers and on this spot we left all the four oil barrels since we had enough oil on the cars to get us back to Novo.
We turned back and on the way drove into some cracks where the cars sank 50-60 centimeters but we were able to drive up from that without using the tow. For security reasons we fastened the cars together with a 40 meter tow, if one of the cars would fall into a big crack it was more likely it would hang in the other one.
We drove back to Novo without stopping and arrived at 3:30 in the night.
This day we drove 384 kilometers and used 100 liters of oil on the way up (50 liters pr. hundred kilometers) and 60 liters on the way down (30 liters pr. hundred km). The temperature at ETL was minus 22 degrees.
Gísli Jónsson
