27 May — the report from Day 10.
The camp in last night’s gale was still just as wild this morning.
Look at this — fighting the wind (video)
We packed the tent away quickly and took refuge in the car.
Breakfast was instant noodles brought from Japan.
But the inside of the car is full of sand, and the food tastes of nothing but sand.
Even so, joking that we rather missed the quiet days, we filmed our time in the car.
The campsite in the storm (video)
I wanted to show what we actually say to each other, spending 37 days in a car.
In the gale, the crews in open cars were chatting away as cheerfully as ever, which impressed me.
They really are the brave souls who take on the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge.
Though at a time like this, I was glad of a roof.
Our start position is eleventh, but because of the trouble we have had, today we went off second. Through the national park in the gale.
The car ran well and we enjoyed taking photographs even in the wind. Seeing other crews take our cue and start photographing too, I felt the shared spirit of people enjoying this challenge.
Looking back, simply getting to the start of this was a hard road — and every day of driving turns into memory too.
The painful days and the hard moments are all precious now.
But you can only photograph in the moments when there is any room to spare, and the very worst of it went unrecorded.
Which is why anyone reading this blog may only be getting the fun of it. What I would really have liked is a proper documentary of the whole thing.
We had led the way over the rough stuff and I had just started thinking we would finish comfortably today, when an official’s car began waving at us.
We were sure we had not gone off route, and I felt a jolt of worry that something had happened.
In fact, as yesterday, the campsite had been cancelled because of the wind and a nearby hotel arranged at short notice. We had missed the announcement in English and were already tens of kilometres on. Nothing for it but to turn round and go back over the bad road.
By the time we reached the hotel the other crews were already in, and having been going so well, we were last again.
Even so, the beauty of the sunset along the horizon felt like something washing me clean. I put what I felt then into a video.
Driving into a beautiful sunset (video)
“If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. Whatever you do, keep moving forward.”
“Life seems long but it’s short. If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”
More bad roads tomorrow.
Continued in the Day 11 report …