19 May — the report from Day 2 of the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge.
To sort out yesterday’s overheating, we began by hunting for a workshop willing to work on an old car.
We were not the only ones who had broken down since the start in Peking the day before. Between China’s poor-quality petrol and outside temperatures over 40 degrees, cars had been in trouble from the moment we set off, and the early morning was full of the noise of recovery trucks being arranged.
There were staff who could organise things locally through an English interpreter, but with my language skills
I kept sliding down the queue.
So I stuck to the interpreter like glue and made a great show of being in trouble, pressing to be dealt with first.
Here, brazenness wins. I dropped any dignity and negotiated with gestures.
And then — at last, one workshop.
Repairing an old car in China is not merely difficult; nobody has even touched one. Finding the right parts and an experienced mechanic is genuinely hard.
Our car is pre-war and needs unusual parts, and when it was delivered to a workshop run by a young couple in their thirties, a flicker of doubt went through me. But here you have to trust China.
Communicating with the mechanic was not easy either, so to get anyone to start at all I first caught the young wife and talked to her in my broken Chinese.
And then the cause of the fatal overheating was found. My guess was right: the head gasket had cracked.
We were carrying plenty of spares, but a cracked gasket is a serious matter.
They had never done a repair like this on an old car. But we want to drive.
My dream — I told them everything, well beyond the car itself.
I even told them about the cancer, and put everything into saying that we had to get it fixed and get to Paris.
By evening it was fully dark, but the boss shouldered the heavy gasket, disappeared somewhere, and did not come back. There was nothing to do but trust him.
On this second day the main convoy had already left Datong and was hundreds of kilometres on towards Hohhot, while we were stuck looking for somewhere to stay in Datong, about 300 km from Peking — as close to the workshop as possible, ready to leave in the middle of the night the moment the car was fixed.
But this is China, and there was nowhere that would take foreign guests.
More direct negotiation. By now the young wife I had been talking to and I had thoroughly warmed to each other,
and she helped us with this too.
With nothing to do on day two but wait and chat with her, and no idea when we might leave, we went to eat local food at a restaurant run by her relatives.
Honestly I had no appetite, and having not moved all day I was not hungry either. But here
there are obligations, and there is warmth, and there is keeping people company.
Even so, her relatives knew our situation and made us very welcome. In broken Chinese, with the route map open,
I told them about the dream of driving from Peking to Paris.
We went back to the workshop again and again to check on progress and wait for the repair to be done. One day was never going to be enough.
Still, what could be done was finished by midnight. We took the car out — and a few hundred metres later it overheated again.
That flattened everyone.
But we did not give up, and went looking for another cause.
This time it turned out the coolant box had a hole in it. From there the car went to a welder, and another three hours of waiting.
By now everyone was exhausted, and to lift our spirits the young wife and I, by this point firm friends, sang songs
and talked through a translation app about all sorts of things in our lives.
There is no wall of language, no border. What was there was human love.
The Facebook report from that day (video)
Singing “Hana no Ko Lunlun” together is a memory I will not lose.
It was well past midnight, so we left it to the morning and could only hope the car would run again.
Another sleepless night.
Worn out by trouble we never expected from Peking onwards, and yet: refusing to give up, beyond anything work requires, was not mine alone. The workshop stood with us, and it became a precious experience of trust I will not find again.
They will start again at first light tomorrow.
The Peking to Paris Motor Challenge crosses borders, so if we cannot catch the main convoy, we are out here.
Nothing comes but impatience and anxiety. There is nothing left to think about except believing.Tomorrow we will surely start.
Whatever the difficulty: stay calm, never give up.
And believe.
Never give up. I feel again how much it matters to keep moving forward.
But — my heart is already in pieces. And I will not cry. I will laugh.
Continued in Day 3 …