During the Desert Challenge 2006 Marshals' Dinner, Ian “The Dog” Barker, Mike "The Pieman" Smith and myself discussed finishing off two of last three Oman land based Confluence Points. For those of you unaware of what this might be please check DEGREE CONFLUENCE PROJECT
In brief, the goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures, and stories about the visits are posted on the site.
I had already completed five of the confluence points on previous trips with other friends, however for Oman, there was still three left unattempted and one failed attempt.
Given my previous trip with Streaky earlier in the year, we planned to increase vehicles to a maximum of five and with some back-up team in Dubai just in case.
We would be entering a couple of countries illegally (Saudi and Yemen) in order to acheive our primary target of N19 E52 and although we were aware of the consequences of being caught we felt very optimistic, however logistically looking at satellite maps it was going to be quite challenging.
Planning was mainly done by the Dog and Mike using Google Earth and Ozi Explorer, and the final team consisted of:
Mike Smith in a Toyota Land Cruiser
Be Smith in a Nissan Pathfinder
Ian and Sheila Barker (+ three dogs) in a Nissan Patrol
Linda Burgess in a Toyota Fortuner
Myself in a Land Rover Discovery
Our planned Confluence visits were N19E52, and N17E53, none of which were recorded as visited or planned when we departed Dubai on Wednesday 27 December, 2006
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