My Ridealong in a 9-Day All-Women's Extreme Truck Race in the Moroccan Desert

At team at the Gazelles Rally, Xaviere Zimmerman and Justine Saupin of France, canvassing the Chegaga dunes during a marathon leg. (All photos courtesy Gazelles Rally)

I’m standing atop the Erg Chigaga dunes, Morocco’s largest, watching a succession of Isuzu D-Max pickup trucks swoosh by. Each vehicle — more than 4,000 pounds of heavy machinery — guns it while teetering atop the peaks of fine-grain sand. Each driver whoops and hollers in unadulterated joy. The dunes are as steep as ski mountains, and the late afternoon sun casts shadows over them, lending the illusion that we are on the surface of the moon.

We may as well be on the moon, as remote as we are, in one of the most desolate parts of the country about six miles from the Algerian border. I watch the trucks wend toward the treacherous Oued Draa riverbed and hear the refrain I’ve been mulling for the last seven days: How has no one ever died on this trip?

This is no prepackaged tour. This one year ago on the Rallye Aïcha des Gazelles, also known as the Gazelles Rally, the world’s largest all-female motor sporting competition. It’s a nine-day trek through southern Morocco, using only a compass, a glorified protractor called a Breton plotter and a hand-drawn set of 1950s maps to find a series of checkpoints hidden in the landscape. Distance, not speed, is the crucial factor; victory belongs to the team with the fewest kilometers logged on the odometer. This year’s rally started March 20 and runs until April 4.

Navigator Rhonda Cahill of Team X Elles taking a heading during a sandstorm in the final leg.

The brainchild of the French entrepreneur Dominique Serra, the 25-year-old rally is a European tradition that more and more drivers, from the United States and the rest of the world, are discovering. The Gazelles Rally, much like the Dakar Rally, which is considered the world’s toughest and most prestigious off-road rally and has been contested in South America for the last six years because of security concerns in Africa, is a test in endurance, vehicle management and precise navigation. But the Gazelles Rally can be tougher than the Dakar because competitors are required to fix their own vehicles while on the course, set up and tear down their camps, and avoid communication with the outside world. What’s more, they have no set course and must choose their own path without knowledge of the other teams’ progress.

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Some competitors, such as the two who spent hours moving boulders to build a quarter-mile road to reach a checkpoint atop a mountain, come to win. (As a testament to the rally’s complexity, it should be noted that this team — it is composed of 2013 winners Syndiely Wade, the daughter of Senegal’s former president; and Flo Pham, a marketing executive at Nissan — actually misplotted that checkpoint, a mistake that took them from second place to 24th.) For others, it’s an expensive (each two-person team pays $18,500 to register plus about $10,000 to rent their vehicle) breed of adventure travel, an opportunity to discover auberges, riads, and empty, opulent (and cheap) hotels that rival five-star resorts. For those travelers, including myself, a journalist tagging along for the ride, the rally is an opportunity to get lost, over and over again, in one of the last corners of the Earth that’s untethered to GPS and mainstream guidebooks.

American team Rhonda Cahill and Rachelle Croft of Team X Elles at the closing ceremonies in Essaouira, Morocco

Last year’s rally started in Nejjakh in mid-March and ended in Essaouira, winding through Mech Irdane, Tinfou, M’hamid and Foum-Zguid, as well as Morocco’s two major clusters of sand dunes (known as ergs), Chebbi and Chigaga. Most of the 320 competitors met in Casablanca for the ceremonial start and traveled for three days to the starting line in Nejjakh, where the central camp would remain for three days until moving deeper south. Our leisurely drive through Meknes to Erfoud, the final resting spot before the rally began, belied the challenges that awaited us.

Soon I would say goodbye to my suite, a two-story stone structure at the Hotel Xaluca that resembled a drafty medieval castle and included a private outdoor terrace roughly the size of my Manhattan apartment. I realized with trepidation that the five-minute navigation lesson given to me on the hotel patio by Emily Miller, a top former competitor who would be driving the Mitsubishi Pajero that would be our home for the next two weeks, was going to be important.

“That dotted line is a camel track,” Ms. Miller said, pointing to a vintage pen-and-ink map as we sat by the pool. “It’s not necessarily a road, but it could have become one since.

“And those squiggly lines are dunes, but bear in mind this map was made 60 years ago, so the sand may have shifted.

“But the most important thing to remember is that one lost checkpoint can mean hours traversing the desert with no idea where you are and not a car in sight.”

A Rally support truck.

We decided to ease into the rally. The next day, after watching 160 trucks, SUVs and motorbikes cross the start line, we spent an afternoon battling a checkerboard of camel grass, Morocco’s deceptively rough terrain. It was time for a break. Miller, an expert in where to find hidden food and drink along the rally’s path, took us to Auberge Derkaoua, a 22-room hotel that didn’t look like much from the front but resembled an Arabian palace from behind, with an expansive courtyard and ornate pool empty save two tourists. We sat outside with a plate of olives and drank lemon Fanta in glass bottles.

We planned to immerse ourselves more fully in the rally’s route the next day, watching the teams depart from the line at 6 a.m. and plotting our latitude and longitude coordinates north of the village of Merzouga, but the auberges called our name. Tucked at the base of a checkpoint hidden by the Erg Chebbi dunes, we found two more gorgeous hotels with magnificent courtyards: the Kanz Erremal and Tombouctou, where we enjoyed more lemon Fanta. We drove back to the bivouac, the rally’s version of a traveling tent city, in the dark, still feeling confident in our ability to balance the demands of the rally with our new soda habit, when we drove into a marsh and found ourselves in water up to the Pajero’s radiator. We called out to a passing French team to tow us out of the marsh. The mud at the bottom of the marsh splattered all of our windows so that it looked as though our SUV was covered in chocolate. We fretted that it was not the most glorious look to wear for the drive back to the bivouac, especially when we weren’t even part of the competition, but the troubles only started there.

Residents just outside Foum Zguid, Morocco, arrive to receive medical aid from partner non-profit Heart of Gazelles.

That night, a fierce sandstorm blew, leaving 47 teams stranded in the desert. But it was a good omen, Miller said. The rain would harden the sand over the next 36 hours, a critical factor that would cut down on the time it would take for teams to get through the dunes, the crucial leg of the competition and a source of anxiety for most teams.

On the third day — dunes day — Miller deflated our tires for the first time, signaling to myself and the SUV’s other occupants — a photographer and another journalist — that the course was about to get serious. It was the first of several days of driving through the dunes, which is a mood-shifting series of getting one’s vehicle stuck and unstuck. Soon we were stuck.

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The Erg Chebbi dunes.

With our car perched on the crest of a dune, we flopped belly-down underneath it and cleared sand away from the tires with shovels and our hands. It was not to be the last time. By the end of the day, we were coated in the thin layer of sand that was to remain in our ear canals and the pockets of our cargo pants for weeks. Suddenly, we were hot, cold, dirty, tired, operating under worst possible conditions, and we had five more days to go. It was almost enough to make us feel like true competitors.

Our first day in the dunes transformed us into a ragtag bunch, loopy and sunburned with wild hair. The volume of opulent hotels petered as we headed deeper into the rally’s course. We traded olives and Fanta for French army rations in cardboard boxes. Soon we were regularly hunched over the ground like vultures, lighting melamine tablets to produce enough heat to cook our unsatisfying containers of tajine de poulet. At the final checkpoint on the edge of the dunes, Pham and Wade were among the first teams to drive up, despite spending more than two hours to drive the 14 kilometers from the previous checkpoint. “In the mountains, it was like the guy forgot to finish his job,” Pham speculated of our midcentury mapmaker. “Maybe he ran out of toner.” She laughed maniacally as she said this. “I guess I need to die to feel alive,” she added before opening her rations.

We soon had trouble of our own, when a rogue rock broke the shock mount of our Pajero. Miller drew a line on the windshield with ChapStick and a corresponding line on the dashboard with spit. It was a no-frills method of navigating, she explained. As long as the sun’s shadow aligned perfectly, we would head west, straight to the nearest village. In Fezzou, where visitors are rare, locals quickly gathered around us as we explained we needed to find a welder. We were escorted to a table outside the grocery store, Fezzou Gite Rural, and men brought us tea, café au lait, bread, bananas, and oranges as we waited. Soon enough, a young boy of about 7 produced a wheelbarrow full of welding equipment to fix our car.

A media support vehicle treks through the rugged terrain of Oued Bou Haiara during leg 4.

That night was the first of two “marathon” legs, where teams set up their own makeshift camps, away from the bivouac that organizers were busy moving to Tinfou, and sleep in their sleeping bags under the open sky. We planned to do this too, until a charismatic man approached, promising to show us a better place to sleep. We followed him, driving deeper into the narrow valley of Tafraoute, until there were no lights at all and we wondered if we made a poor decision.

We were soothed to find a three-room mud hut with running water and surprisingly modern décor. Mustafa and his friends, all 20-somethings who had never ventured beyond Tafraoute, taught us Berber phrases and cooked us the most elaborate chicken tajine we had eaten on the trip (and there were many), complete with Moroccan bread, salad, and oranges, which I enjoyed contentedly until I saw a light brown spider as large as a cat sprint across the floor of the Kasbah.

At dawn, we were on our way, passing lost competitors sitting by the side of their cars, helmets in hand, crying in desperation. We, however, were off to see Ismail, Miller’s favorite rug dealer at Maison Berbere in Zagora and a man known across Morocco only by his first name. Among his many holdings, Ismail, the entrepreneur son of a former governor, also owns the nearby Palais Asmaa, a hotel he purchased in the 1970s to entertain his backpacker friends, the Rolling Stones among them. Miller decided that she would wait until we could go to Ismail’s shop in Essaouira to buy her annual rug allotment.

Moroccan desert landscape.

We declined his invitation to spend the night in favor of indulging in the true Gazelle experience, a decision I deeply regretted the next morning. Kept awake by a sandstorm that pummeled my tent from midnight until 3:30 when I started to fear suffocating in what had become no more than a human-size plastic bag, I faced a decision. Do I pack up inside my tent, now a narrow, collapsible wind tunnel, or out in the open, where 50 mile an hour gusts of sand sent my clothes flying?

It took 90 minutes to pack my bags, sleeping bag and sleeping pad in what was the toughest, least gratifying morning workout I’ve ever had. With nothing inside to weigh it down, my tent inflated and took on a mind of its own. I chased it, zigzagging around the central camp. When I finally caught it, I licked the layer of grit that accumulated on my teeth and shook the sand out of my downstream-facing ear. It wasn’t even 6 a.m. yet.

Black-tie finishing gala filled in Essaouira, Morocco.

“All right,” Miller told us. “This is the hardest day of the rally because of the sandstorms. Teams are going to get more lost than you can keep track of, and we’re heading into the most remote part of the course. You have to drive whatever you get. This is a day when everyone’s really, really tired, but it pushes people beyond their limits and they feel like they can overcome anything.”

I looked around at our foursome: we were wild-eyed and happy, a true team. Without the distractions of modern life, we became attuned to each other, like a crew of racecar mechanics wordlessly completing the tasks and repairs required to keep moving forward. That night, too close to the Algerian border and lost in the black night amid grass taller than our Pajero, we weren’t afraid.

Silently, we four climbed onto the SUV’s running boards until we could spot a distant light that marked the checkpoint where we planned to make our camp. We sped toward it in victory. Fifteen minutes later, we parked, opened a bottle of Pastis and quickly fell asleep slept on the sand, where we soon awoke to a brilliant orange sun in the horizon.

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