Western Sahara - MW6
 

I am interested in doing is MW6 and have plotted the waypoints from MK Overland. Towards the end there is a big jump in the waypoints between KM281 and KM369 but the route can be made out by following Olaf. However according to the data on Ulrichs's posting on landmines - www.desert-info.ch :: Thema anzeigen - Minen/Landmines/Des Mines - alle/all/toutes infos - it would appear that the route cuts through a minefield (entering at N26 56 04.3 W11 39 07.7 and exiting at N26 52 18.7 W11 41 16.5). There are several other tracks going through the minefield as can be seen on Google Earth. Does anyone have any information / experience on this part of the piste? And maybe some reliable gps tracks or waypoints that they followed?

The Landmine Action web site shows the mine fields along the berm between WS and Maur/Alg but does not show this mine field or other small ones within WS. http://www.landmineaction.org/resour.../5kmBuffer.kml

MK Overland makes reference to a tarmac road between Hawza and Smara. Is there any info about this? I cannot make out a tarmac road on Google Earth in this area.

Hi, I did MW6 with Waypoint Tours in November, if you pm me your email address I can email you the track log. OUr route wasn't exactly on the published one but started and ended in the same places

Didn't know about the minefield until this week:eek3: but I think the info may be old and I'm sure Barrie wouldn't put a group at risk.

There is tarmac between Awaza and Smara and it looks pretty recent, there are also some remains of an old spainish tarmac road to the east of Hawza

tbh, it was only by chance that I uploaded the the minefield data. I had seen that site a long time ago and forgot about it but it was mentioned recently, so I looked ut up. It is possible that it is out of date as I think that some of the data was collated a while back and by looking at Google Earth, the area seems to have a fair bit of traffic. If the surface is tarmac I would assume that it is safe.

I will pm you.

thanks

Reinhard

emailed the logs over :D

there are also some photos here
Morocco Overland - a set on Flickr
MW6 are the earlier photos and should be tagged saying MW6

I've been there and back. In answer to my question, there is tarmac all the way from Hawza to Smara.

And unfortunately there will be more soon:

As you climb up from the dries lake bed (about 15kms before Hawza) there is road building along the old badly pot holed Spanish road. On the Michelin map it looks like the road will follow the route of the old P42 and seems to be coming from Talha to join the tarmac west of the military post in Hawza.

Also at the Assa end of the piste, there is another stretch of road building, linking the Assa - Zag road to TanTan, and running along the route of MW6 as far as Labrouirat. At the moment you need to drive on the piste parallel to the road.

MW6 is a brilliant piste and in February, we only saw one other vehicle - a local Land Rover Santana.

saw the road building back in november

your right it's a fantastic route

This parallel pistes are terrible, worst than the worst fech-fech. Unfortunately they are not going to put tarmac on the road. In a couple of month we´ll have 80 km. of tolé ondulé.

The old spanish road you talk about ends at Djeria, Jdiriya in the French maps, West direction it ended at Smara


Ah! During the construction of El Boirat road machines have "found" some mines and other explosives, take a look to Escipion´s pictures http://www.aventura-africa.com/index...ic,3534.0.html