2 June — the report from Day 16.
Out into the Kazakh wilderness at last. The adventure opens, and a good start?
Today we were fully ready to run across the vast emptiness of Kazakhstan.
Yesterday’s check on the car had gone well, the morning felt good, and my chest was full of the hope of driving a normal competitive route.
We had been hit by trouble after trouble, dropped out of the convoy, and met things nobody expected. But today was different. We were burning to compete.
Along the way the timing staff greeted us with “the Japanese are back!”, and I felt our effort and our refusal to quit being recognised, little by little.
But behind that good start, an ordeal nobody saw coming was waiting.
Out into the Kazakh wilderness — the trap hidden behind a good start
The Kazakh land is enormous, an endless landscape like a line drawn between steppe and desert. There is no road you could call a road and nothing at all to navigate by.
The car bounced hard, rolling and pitching over and over, like sitting on a roller coaster that never ends. Even drinking was impossible; the shaking was too violent to get the bottle to my mouth.
Even following the tulip diagrams in the route book, the track would simply vanish and the route with it.
The moment the ruts took us — the hundred-metre trap where Kazakhstan beat us
By the time I thought “we’ve gone wrong”, it was too late.
A few hundred metres off route, and we fell straight into hell.
The car was stuck in a deep rut, a wheel riding up in mid-air. Never mind going forward —
we needed to dig, and we had no shovel.
We dug the hard earth with our shoes and our bare hands and carried stones to try to get the car moving, but it would not shift an inch.
All we had wanted was to finish cleanly today, and here came the despair again.
The driver said there was nothing for it but to call the support team and wait. But when the support team comes out, they naturally come after the last crew has passed.
That meant roughly three hours before help.
Hours had already gone by under a blazing sun, and nobody was going to find us buried in the thin grass of an empty hillside. All we could hear was the sound of competitors’ engines in the distance.
Fear turns to anger — human psychology and action tested in the wilderness
Fear and anxiety swelled in my chest, and at the moment they hit their limit, they turned into anger.
Left with just the two of us in the scrub on that hillside, beside a car that would not move a millimetre whether pushed or pulled, with nowhere to put any of it, I grew furious with a driver who seemed unhurried and entirely unbothered.
This one you should watch (video)
How can you be so relaxed about it?
If nobody comes after several hours, do we spend the night here? Helpless impatience and anxiety turned further and further into anger.
The driver watched me with a kind of detachment — watched me flap about, unable to settle, with something close to a faint smile — and that calm made me angrier still.
A desperate call for help — the miraculous meeting in Kazakhstan, and support arriving like a god
Unable to bear it, I stopped thinking and ran down the hill towards the sound of rally engines.
Tell somebody, anybody, as fast as possible, and get help.
I was past thinking about language, or who might help.
I fell on the way and rolled down the slope, and reached the road where cars on the stage were passing.
Help! Help! I waved with everything I had.
And they all waved cheerfully back and drove on. What? They had not understood
that we were in trouble. So I changed tactics.
I mimed holding a shovel and digging.
They looked puzzled — and drove hard on down their competitive route.
A miraculous rescue: the moment four-wheel drive got us out of the ruts
On a track where stopping would leave you stuck too, one car stopped.
I pointed up the hill and gestured — ah, we can’t get up there. We’re in the same kind of car,
so we can’t help you. Sorry. That was roughly the sense of it.
And then an ordinary four-wheel drive came past. Local support, no less.
On that track there could not possibly be a civilian vehicle.
A god had arrived.
No rope. And whether they could even reach us —
they conferred, uncertain.
Never mind all that, just come. I led them, running back up the hill. Sweat, sand, dehydration — none of it mattered.
We got out, and held each other, delighted.
The road on, through adversity — the Kazakh challenge continues to the next adventure
A god descended. Another miraculous rescue.
After that I remember nothing.
The exhaustion was such that the moment I shut my eyes I lost consciousness.
In the end, having started first, we finished last yet again.
Aren’t you meant to get one difficulty per day?
With a headwind hitting us again and again in a single day and my head close to bursting, the simple fact that tomorrow comes is what gives us hope for the next challenge.
Whatever difficulty waits, the adventure goes on. Tomorrow is another day.
The next adventure is waiting.
Continued in Day 17.