A resolution to remember

The two friends, Karine Savary and Mélissa Simoneau, had chatted for years about their mutual desire to travel, but it was a resolution made last New Year’s Eve that led to them taking part in the Rose des Sables Rally across the Sahara last month.

“We had been toasting in the New Year with champagne when we decided that this year we would participate in the rally,” Karine Savary recalled. “I called Mélissa the next day to see if we were going to stick to our resolution.”

“We absolutely were,” confirms Mélissa Simoneau. “We’re both quite determined individuals. We were going to do this.”

The Rose des Sables Rally is a women-only, week-long race across the Moroccan Sahara Desert that has been held annually since 2000 and was inspired by the Paris to Dakar Rally. Driving motorcycles, quads, dune buggies, and 4X4s, the participants cover some 5000 km of desert in seven days. The race puts an emphasis on orientation rather than speed. As well, the event also has a humanitarian aspect as participants bring goods and equipment to disadvantaged children in southern Morroco.

While the rally itself began on October 13, preparations began in early January with an information meeting held in Sherbrooke. The Rose des Sables Rally is quite popular with Quebecers. “There were 125 teams from a number of countries,” Karine says, “including 25 from Quebec.”

Little in the background of either of the two women would have singled them out as possible participants. Mélissa Simoneau is a mother of three children, aged two to 11 who works as a lab technician at a Drummondville high school. Karine Savary is in charge of artifacts and archives at the Sherbrooke Historical Society. She also writes a weekly column for La Tribune and while Record readers may not know her name, it is she who writes and prepares Glimpses of the Past that appears regularly in these pages.

The first task facing Karine and Mélissa was fundraising. Registration fees alone are $11 000 per person. Both women found this to be the hardest part of the year-long project. Still, Mélissa’s two older kids helped by selling hot dogs, and one of Karine’s cousins helped by getting Air Canada to act as a sponsor.

Along with other Quebec participants they took part in training sessions that focussed on both the mechanical challenges and the driving challenges they would be facing. On disused gravel lots they learned how to control skids and in abandoned sand pits they got a taste of driving on dunes.

The adventure itself began in Biarritz, a French city on the Atlantic coast near the Spanish border. After getting their car, a Toyota Land Cruiser with two gear boxes, they were given a three-day training course in the Pyrenees.

“We were on some roads,” Karine recalls, “that were both narrow and steep. Sometimes there were boulders that seemed to block half the road and I thought we’d never get through.”

Although the race started officially on October 11 at Biarritz, the first day of driving did not count towards the standings. The participants drove the length of Spain to the port of Algeciras, near Gibraltar.

“We were up at 3:00 the next morning,” Karine says, “to catch the ferry at 5:00. We docked at Tangiers, in Morocco, two hours later but going through customs seemed to take forever.”

Despite the ceremonious send-off in Biarritz, the rally began in earnest on October 13, in the desert just beyond Tangiers and finished eight days later, on the 21st, at Marrakesh.

While some teams shared the driving and navigating duties, Karine and Mélissa opted to stick to one role. “I was the navigator,” says Karine, “and I was equipped with a compass and a Road Book that gave us our daily instructions. We had no maps and no GPS. At irregular intervals there were check points, sometimes manned, sometimes electronic, that we had to pass through.”

“It was challenging,” she continues. “The Road Book might tell you to go a certain distance, sometimes only a few hundred metres, at other times dozens of kilometres, and then change your bearing by so many degrees. But you’d get to that point and perhaps see another car heading off to the left when the instructions said to go right. Or you’d come to a fork and wonder which one would lead you more directly to your next check point.”

When the two friends embarked on the adventure there was little doubt as to who would be doing the driving.

“I’ve always loved driving, and loved cars,” says Mélissa. “I learned to drive with my father long before I reached the legal driving age. He would bring me to some large, deserted parking lot and let me get

behind the wheel. I learned a lot about the mechanics of a car both from my father and my first husband, who was a mechanic by profession.”

“I studied biology,” she continues, “but I’ve always seen the workings of a car a little like the biology of the human body.”

Still, the rally was not without its challenges. “The conditions were unusual, to say the least,” she continues. “You couldn’t always tell what kind of ground you had in front of you. At times it was slippery, like a road surface here might be when there’s blowing snow. The sand in the dunes was soft and we had to reduce the air pressure in the tires almost by half to get good traction. You’d find yourself going up a dune and the only thing you could see in front of the hood was blue sky, then suddenly you were over the top and plunging downwards. You had to be quick, and always alert. It was very intense. It was nerve-wracking.”

The team did have one accident. They crested a dune and as they pitched downward their car ploughed nose first into a small ditch. Neither of the women was hurt but the air bags deployed and they were stuck. They were obliged to call for help. At that point in the race they were in 30th position. Because of the mishap they plummeted in the standings and eventually placed 61st.

Their days began at six in the morning, sometimes to the sound of bells calling the faithful to worship. Breakfast was local food—coffee, fruit, a type of pancake with jam. The car would get a quick final inspection and they would be off by 7:30 or 8:00, the teams leaving at one minute intervals. They drove on highways, byways, past towns and villages, through forests, over mountains, and across sand dunes. They saw camels and monkeys. By 5:00 in the afternoon it was dark. After eight to ten hours of driving, both were stiff and sore, hot and tired. Once arrived at the staging area, Karine would head off to a debriefing for next day’s instructions and Mélissa would bring the car for a mechanical inspection. Keeping air filters clean and the radiator full of fluid were paramount.

One stage of the rally saw them driving at night. “It was a short distance, perhaps 20 km, but it was challenging,” says Karine. “We did it in an hour or so, but some teams took two or three hours.

The last two nights of the rally they slept in tents.

The arrival at Marrakesh produced mixed emotions. “We suddenly found ourselves in an upscale hotel with a swimming pool and all the amenities,” says Karine, “and for the last week all the people we had seen were living in poverty in primitive conditions. We had brought presents and delivered them to a village, and we were welcome so warmly. The disconnect between the two worlds was hard to reconcile.” Would they do it again? “Absolutely!” says Mélissa. “We were friends before, but the rally made us bond in a special way. I couldn’t have done it without my mother who looked after my three children, nor the support of my husband who is a teacher and football coach at the Cégep de Drummondville. It demanded a lot, but yes, it would be great to do it again.”