26 May — the report from Day 9.

Today we run flat out across the Gobi towards the campsite.

Enjoy the vastness of the Gobi in the video

I had driven the Sahara before, on the twelve-day Sahara Challenge warm-up, but the Gobi set us a completely different problem.

The Sahara is covered in the soft sand you picture when you hear the word desert.
The Gobi is an enormous basin of mixed gravel, large and small — and not only gravel: countless hard hollows spread across it.

That makes driving very difficult, with a constant shaking rather like being on a roller coaster.

Fortunately we had shipped Recaro rally seats out from Japan beforehand and fitted them.

The Peking to Paris Motor Challenge is a classic car rally with rules about the age and period specification of the cars, but the seats alone were allowed to be modern rally items.

It was only on driving the Gobi that I became certain that choice had been right.
The road surfaces on this rally are punishing throughout, so how the seat performs matters enormously. Even over long hours it put far less strain on the body, and gave us both safety and comfort.

Hours upon hours sitting, and no pain at all in my back or my seat.
But after days of sitting for tens of hours, my legs and back have started to feel weak.

Getting out of the car partway through, my legs are unsteady under me.
Of course they are — hour after hour of sitting. Several times harder than a long flight in economy.

Gobi means “waterless place” in Mongolian, and the landscape is exactly like a picture of the Stone Age, a strange place where you feel a fossilised dinosaur egg might turn up.
Less a desert than a badland of stone and hard ground, and we drove on through it.Several cars were stopped with punctures along the way, but we were lucky, kept out of the ruts, and reached the campsite safely.

What was waiting for us there was a gale.

Even pitching the tent was a struggle, and we had to lash it to the car so it would not blow away in the night.

The local staff had hot food ready, and it felt like an extraordinarily lavish meal.
The warm beer was good as ever. With the weather this bad, beer sells out — and we got some.

The showers and lavatories are of course temporary, and at the campsite there was no time to shower; we went to sleep covered in sand and sweat.
The lavatory is a hole dug in the ground, and with the gale that bad, even getting there is hard work,
so we went beside the car.

There is no lavatory while driving either, so for days it has been out in the open. You get used to it, and there is even a certain freedom in it.

It startled me to notice that I no longer give a thought to baths, or serum, or the face-washing device I use at home. People really do adapt to their surroundings.

The temperature swing at the campsite is severe: against over 40 degrees inside the car by day, the night turns cold, and in the gale I layered a down jacket under waterproofs and got into the sleeping bag.

The wind was so strong that the little tent rocked sideways in the pitch dark, flapping and banging, and fear woke me several times in the night. I finally slept a little at around four in the morning.

Even so, wanting to send something back to everyone cheering for us in Japan, there I was in the dark tent, still making videos.

Let tomorrow’s campsite be all right …

Continued in Day 10.