Words By: Marina Bruce
Photos By: Marina Bruce, Debra Galvin and Murray Kinnaird
The Wahiba Challenge is an annual event run by the Oman-based Ras Al Hamra Off Road Adventure Club (ORAC for short). It’s open to members of the club, and others by special invitation; Oasis Offroad were delighted at being allowed to participate.
The weather forecast for the original date in November 2013 proved an insurmountable challenge to the organisers and they had to call it off 24 hours beforehand. They were right to do so – the area experienced one of its most prolonged storms for many years and some of the event’s emergency get out tracks ended up under two metres of water!
A new date in 2014 was scheduled and 26 teams, including Oasis Overlanders from Oasis Offroad gathered on the edge of the Wahiba Sands on the evening of 17th January, ready to battle our way some 60kms to the east.
The Wahiba Challenge is now in its 16th year and is very well organised with solid safety rules, pre-event training and lots of support from the ORAC committee; it got off to a very good start as we all enjoyed a delicious buffet dinner provided by their gold sponsor, Omantel.
Friday morning saw the event kick off with a 7:30am meeting when ORAC Chairman Fahim welcomed everyone and delivered a safety briefing, before a photo call for all participants and support staff – over 300 people.
Our Oasis Offroad team are used to long distance overland trips – everyone in the convoy is accustomed to driving up to 150km in a day through Liwa – so we thought that 32km straight lining might not be much of a challenge. We were wrong!
In a foreign land, driving over unfamiliar territory turned out to be a huge challenge; the Wahiba is tricky at the best of times travelling from east to west.
Aside from the Empty Quarter, the sands are the largest sand desert area of Oman and stretch 170km from north to south and 100km from east to west. The dunes are in regular lines in a north-south orientation and with the prevailing wind from the sea they build up in the east and fall off into slipfaces on the westward side.
The west to east route proved exceptionally tough as we were going against the dunes with many high climbs through soft sand, interspersed with lots of plants and scrub. The biggest challenge to our team, who are all used to the beautiful “naked” sands of Liwa, were the plants – it seemed like we were driving through a garden at times. For the non-off-roaders, I must explain that every time you hit a bump it saps your car’s momentum, so we had to very carefully pick our lines when ascending the dunes. It’s not very comfortable for the driver or their passengers either.
Once on top of the ridgelines, we had to contend with tricky, small technical dunes which were extremely soft and made the drive hard work for us all – most cars had to engage 4LOW on a regular basis to get through the choppiest of terrain.
The first objective of the challenge was to reach the designated camp spot by nightfall which is around 5:30pm, but at 5:15pm we were still 9km short of our target. On speaking to one of the organisers the next day, it turns out that half the challenge teams hadn’t made it to the campsite – driving in the dark is prohibited under the event rules – so about 100 people, including our team of nine, were dotted around the Wahiba Sands on Friday night. It was to our advantage though as we benefitted from a very peaceful, comfortable and scenic campsite where South African Mike cooked up a braai feast which we enjoyed immensely.
Oasis Overlanders hoped to gain a little time the next day so we were up early and left our camp about 7:30am to take advantage of the damp sand courtesy of the early morning dew. Over the course of the day the dune conditions changed with the red sand of the west giving way to softer, whiter sand nearer the sea.
We had to “medevac” one car out – Karen’s Land Cruiser wouldn’t change into low ratio gear so we took advantage of one of the many north-south sandtracks and Tom accompanied her out to the safety of the blacktop. After progressing at less than 9km per hour the previous day we were all slightly envious that he had achieved speeds of 100km/h along the sand track!
Vince continued to blaze a trail over the dune lines and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when we saw the organiser’s encampment at the end of the trail. It turned out that despite starting 9km from the campsite, we were one of the earliest teams to check in at the end.
At the time of writing we don’t know how Oasis Overlanders’ performance compared against the other teams, but we did have a challenging drive with lots of highs and lows. The main competition is based on photos – documenting our favourite nature, action and stuck shots – and we have good entries for each category.
ORAC have been kind enough to invite us back next year and perhaps we will take up the challenge again, but we also hope to pay back their friendship and hospitality by inviting them on one of our Liwa trips in the near future.
