The continuation of the start on 18 May.
The previous post is here.

The beginning of something huge — Day 1: arrested on the start ramp of a five-year dream?

On the day that carried five years of preparation and dreaming, full of expectation and excitement, we went under the start arch.
The engine roared, we waved, and off we went in style —

and then!

An ordeal nobody expected was waiting, right from that moment.
The situation looked like this on video.


Overheating, hissing steam

Barely a few hundred metres in, the car began to overheat.
We had only just opened the first page of the route book. It was hard to believe. We stopped again and again on the motorway to top up the water, and still it would not stop overheating, and the water we carried ran out.

While we were stuck, police appeared, and being on a motorway, we moved to a service area with their help.

Peking that day reached nearly 40 degrees, and it was not only the car overheating — I was too.
Even so I kept running to the tap at the service area, carrying a five-litre water container
back and forth over and over, soaked in sweat.

And how dirty the water from that Peking service area tap was.

I never imagined running into difficulty this early, and it nearly broke me — but I told myself this was part of the adventure. How to explain it to everyone cheering us on in Japan? Impatience and anxiety kept building.

In the end we called a recovery truck, but by then hours had passed since the start, the light was going, and we were stranded for hours more waiting for it to arrive.

Car 6, in the same pre-war class as us, turned up too — they had broken a gearbox. On the first day, in this state, all we could do was laugh wryly at each other’s trouble.

In the end we travelled with the recovery truck to the Peking hotel that would be the start of day two, ready to go looking for a workshop in the morning.

A first day of chaos. We went in to dinner and I could not even get water down,
and spent the hours until midnight in the hot wind, turning over things there was no point turning over.

Continued in Day 2 …