22 May — the report from Day 5.
The 1929 Buick that set off yesterday is running beautifully,
as though the run of trouble on every test drive had never happened.
We push on down a straight road that goes on for ever, and somehow my heart is light.
Set against those four black days, the tiredness has simply gone.
We are taking nothing for granted, though, stopping again and again at service areas in the middle of the night,
checking everything that has given trouble so far — oil pressure, water temperature,
coolant — as we go.
It is the middle of the night. We have been driving for hours. The nights without sleep and
the mental exhaustion arrive all at once, but whatever it takes we want to be back with the convoytomorrow.
Miss tomorrow’s campsite and the convoy pulls further away, and the border crossing is in doubt.
Nearly ten hours of driving since we left the workshop.
Nowhere to eat, and the night-time service areas have an uneasy feel about them;
I badly wanted to be gone.
We drank off the protein drinks we had brought from Japan and kept going.
Four in the morning: we reached a hotel just short of the campsite. At that hour you wonder why we booked at all,
but for the long adventure ahead it is better to have even a little
sleep.
Only a few hours, but I slept like the dead. It felt like the first proper sleep in a bed for a long time.
Working back from reaching the campsite by evening tomorrow and rejoining the convoy,
we will plan to leave at nine.
The real draw of this Peking to Paris Motor Challenge is camping in the desert.
That is one of the things I have been chasing this dream for.
I want to see with my own eyes a landscape on a scale I have never met in my life.
And we kept driving with the thought of sending that landscape back to everyone cheering for us in Japan.
So — five days behind. Can we get back to the convoy?
Continued in Day 6.