30 May — the report from Day 13.
Day after day of driving China.
In the thin light of dawn we left the campsite quietly.
Running through China’s enormous landscape, the despair of the early days crosses my mind.
Thrown about by mechanical trouble from Day 1 to Day 4, out of ways to fix it, without even the money to get the car home, I did at one point think we would have to abandon this car — which had cost tens of millions of yen — deep in the Chinese hills.
What face would I go home with, to everyone in Japan who had backed us?
I want to disappear here in China. Carrying that black thought and refusing to give up, we drove on — and ten days have already passed.
Tomorrow we finally reach the end of the difficult Chinese route and head for the Kazakh border.
Today we escaped the desert and the rough country and came back into a town for the first time in a while.
We ran the short route set for today on tarmac, and meant simply to fill up and get to the hotel — and then, again, something unexpected.
Thrown by the complicated route through the town, we went wrong repeatedly, and then could not find a petrol station.
The desert and the wilderness were one thing — is the punchline really that we get lost and stranded in a town?
And then, suddenly, worse.
The engine would not start.
Our 1929 classic, stranded in the middle of a town, drew fascinated looks from everyone passing.
Something had to be done. I screwed up my courage and kept asking anyone at all — ordinary passers-by — for help.
And a young man on a scooter stopped.
Explaining through the translation app, he told us there was a workshop about 500 metres away.
“Push this heavy car, the three of us? For several hundred metres?” We hesitated — but once we started pushing, streaming with sweat, hand after hand reached in to help, and we got there.
At the kindness of the Chinese, something overflowed that was half sweat and half tears, from tiredness or from being moved.
There was, naturally, no spare capacity to photograph or film those few hundred metres.
The owner appeared unsmiling with a cigarette in his mouth, which worried me slightly.
And in ten minutes the engine came back to life with a good, healthy note.
The cause was sand and dirt collected in the engine filter, and my astonishment and gratitude at how fast he fixed it have not run out yet.
When I asked to take a photograph to remember it by, the craftsman — tense at first — smiled for it.
And then the young man who first helped us, and the people who could not bear watching us go round in circles and led us to a petrol station, and finally the kind locals who navigated us to the hotel. That such meetings happen at all warmed me right through.
Another day of being genuinely moved by how deep human love goes.Even at the hotel there was no rest: checking for oil leaks, working on the brakes.
Praying that we cross the border safely tomorrow, and thinking of all the people in China who have been like gods to us, I sank into bed.
Continued in Day 14.