Sunday, April 13, 2005
The team said goodbye to their friends and families today as they left Britain and flew out to Johannesburg in South Africa. It's an 11 hour flight from London to Johannesburg so let's hope they showed a couple of good in-flight movies!

The next leg of the trip is to fly to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, where they take a coach out into the wilderness.

Read the team's diaries over the next three weeks to find out what life in the desert is really like.

Monday, April 14, 2005
Ellie: All we've done yesterday and today is travel and I'm already exhausted! The first half of the plane journey was great! We had our own TV and headset and the array of games, movies and music was huge! However getting ourselves to sleep proved uncomfortable and unsuccessful and we only managed to get a couple of hours sleep. I found the most comfortable way to sleep was on the floor underneath my seat. We had a few setbacks as our flight was delayed, Holly was sick, Chris had a nosebleed and we found out that ten of our bags had gone missing in Johannesburg. But all in all the beginning to our great adventure was fun with trolley wars and water fights along the way!

Tuesday April 15, 2005
Chris: We had a long coach journey but there was loads to see. It's just such a different landscape to what I was expecting and to what I see at home. I had nothing to base my expectations on, it was all blank and what I saw was absolutely amazing - we saw a few springbok and a giraffe on the way to our camp. Our camp is just like a real African village, and that's what I wanted. Our huts are made of cow dung and we've got up our mozzie nets and our roll mats and it's actually really cool. It's really cosy.

Wednesday, April 16, 2005
Holly: I'm really knackered again. It was sunny yesterday but now it's non stop rain and it’s still raining. I swear we are going to have a flood. It's worse now than what England can be. Our hut is the only one that is dry and doesn't leak...well touch wood it doesn't! It's called the desert here 'cos it gets less than 25mm of rain a year - we've had about 25mm per hour! Hope it gets sunny tomorrow.

Thursday, April 17, 2005
David: Today's been quite exciting, we got to ride the camels which was cool and we packed up in preparation for our big desert trek. That's going to be really hard as today we walked from base camp to this dune camp. It's only one and a half kilometres but that took us 45 minutes so can't imagine walking 50 kilometres! Tonight we are sleeping under a poncho thing in our sleeping bags with a roll mat and of course a mosquito net.