Deon Jansen Van Noordwyk and his family; wife and two sons Jaeden (11) and Simon (9) from Durbanville, near Cape Town read about BLOODHOUND’s search for Desert Volunteers and wanted to help build theworld's fastest race track. They planned a 680 mile (1100 km) road trip across South Africa to visit the Hakskeen Pan, calling in at the Augrabies Waterfalls and Kgalagadi Gemsbok National Park on route.

On 08.08.11 they arrived at the Pan and were astonished at just how perfectly flat the desert was. They followed the piles of rocks out across the Pan for a couple of kilometres until they found the action and met Pastoor, the team leader. 

Deon and his sons joined the workforce shovelling rocks into buckets, emptying buckets into barrows and tipping the barrows into bigger piles ready for collection by truck. At 16:00, after a couple of hours of hard graft the workforce clocked off and headed home. "I left with a new found admiration for the people and the landscape” Deon said, “I’ll definitely be back!”.