Our team can't smell sand yet to get home

THERE's a story they tell around here, of an old Sahrawi who smells the sand to find his way in the desert. To test his skill one night, his fellow Polisario guerrillas blindfolded the old man and drove for several hours. I use the verb "drove" in the loosest sense there are almost no roads in this part of the Sahara, and the Polisario scud across the sand as if their land rovers were speedboats, bouncing over the bumps and hollows at bone crunching speed.

Before these mischievous guerrillas left their base camp at Rabuni, they scooped up a handful of sand to take with them. And when they asked their blindfolded companion to smell it, he cursed them. "You idiots!" he said. "You've been driving in circles for hours we're still in Rabuni!"

No one could love this desert, with its infinite, featureless stretches of grey brown sand sprinkled with black shale pebbles. It is a God forsaken moonscape so in hospitable that even camels find it hard to survive here. The sand is an enemy that lodges in your ears and nose and scratches your eyes like razors. It grinds your teeth when you talk or eat, lends your skin the texture of sandpaper, penetrates shoes, socks, sleeping bags, even unopened suitcases.

The bread they serve at Rabuni camp has almost as much sand in it as flour. But that is the least of discomforts. The foreign journalists invited by the Polisario don't mind sleeping 12 to a tent. The greatest trials, we all agree, are the mud brick showers and Turkish hole in the ground toilets infested with cockroaches the size of mice. "It isn't Paris," Mr Mansour Omar, the Polisario's Madrid representative, warned us before we set off. He wasn't kidding.

Once we had settled at Rabuni camp, the Algerian town of Tindouf (population 25,000) was a magnet pulling us 30 km back across the desert to what suddenly seemed like civilisation. Tindouf is a sun baked, indolent place of donkey carts, houses hidden behind high walls and little cafes where Algerian men dreamily smoke their pipes. A huge wire sculpture of a camel stands like a beacon on the hilltop. The immensity of the desert and the fact that the whole region is an off limits military zone have so far kept at bay the civil war that ravages the rest of Algeria.

For entertainment, the 15 MINURSO personnel in Tindouf all drive out to the airport, past the Algerian air force's clapped out MiGs, to greet the twice weekly supply flights from Agadir in Morocco. MINURSO was created by the UN in 1991 to supervise a referendum on independence for the Western Sahara. The referendum never took place, but MINURSO stayed on to observe the truce, albeit with its staff cut down from the 4,000 originally planned to a miserly 338.

Ireland has eight soldiers in MINURSO, and Comdt Ted Shine stepped off the Russian made Antonov 26 transport aircraft that was ferrying Australian beef and Heineken beer out to 10 desert team sites. Comdt Shine, from Dublin, was on his way back to Mahbas, in the Moroccan occupied Western Sahara, where he and 15 UN observers from different countries ensure that Moroccan forces don't increase their troops or weapons. There are no local inhabitants, no wildlife, only mile after mile of flat gravel plains.

"You don't look outwards because there is nothing to see," Comdt Shine said. "You look inwards, physically and mentally." The men live in air conditioned tents temperatures are already in the 40s centigrade, but in the summer they reach 50 degrees. "You really appreciate Ireland when you go back," Comdt Shine said.

By comparison, Comdt Gerry Sullivan from Co Meath lives in the lap of luxury. Comdt Sullivan, along with Comdt Frank Bolger and Lt Col Paddy Curley, form the largest national contingent at the MINURSO base at Laayoune, the capital of Moroccan occupied Western Sahara. Col Curley is in charge of MINURSO's air operations, providing the means for Comdt Sullivan and Comdt Bolger to deliver food and supplies to the team sites. For MINURSO's logistics are an Irish operation.

"They like to have Irish at head quarters because we speak English and are capable," Comdt Sullivan explained. "The Irish are sought after for headquarters assignments in UN peacekeeping in general." Back home, Comdt Sullivan pilots a Dauphin search and rescue helicopter, but out here, travelling to Agadir to buy groceries for UN troops, he takes after his brothers who are caterers in Dublin.

"We watch satellite TV, read books and listen to the BBC World Service and look at the Hale Bopp comet," Comdt Shine says. He hasn't yet learned to tell where he is by smelling the sand.