The warm-up for the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge — the Sahara Challenge!
Day two took us across from Spain into Morocco.
The previous post is here!
It has already been a week since I left Japan, so —
the rally has only just started, but the human body is already tired (ugh).
Even so, faking a smile like this is sometimes exactly what you need.
A week in already, and one day in 45-degree heat had left the T-shirt crusted white with salt.
Needing to wash it and having nothing else to wear, I did the laundry by hand.
No time to let it dry properly, but hung off the back of the car it dried almost instantly in the natural wind!
Today again we drove on, working on the brakes as we went.
The Wi-Fi was in a terrible state today, and my phone stopped working entirely,
so if anything went wrong we could not have called for a rescue. Now what??
Day three’s route ran 464 km! We decided to take a shortcut to make up for our brake trouble
along the way.
We could not stick to the route book exactly, so we navigated using a device called a Garmin instead — but,
look, all it really shows is direction.
The weather was good! With almost no time out of the car except during maintenance stops,
my legs, my hips, my seat all ached. Even the maintenance stops doubled as time to dry the laundry in the sun.
… and then, suddenly — hail! And then!! An incredible view.
Here, watch the footage!
Ah — this genuinely moved me.
A rainbow like nothing I’d ever seen!!
A friend driving with us caught a beautiful shot of us driving beneath it.
The view was spectacular, but by now, with over 400 km in the car, human fatigue was at its peak too.
The two of us that day had nowhere to release the exhaustion and the tension building between us, and it turned
into an argument over something small.
The spark for the argument:
“I can’t get a single photo taken——!”
“There’s nothing I can do about it! It’ll be dark again in no time …”
A silent car, an uneasy atmosphere.
I tried shifting my mood by sketching out designs for our Peking to Paris uniforms.
Even so, that stifling silence hung in the car for hours.
The driver finally noticed and stopped, just for a few seconds, so I could grab one photo.
And that was more or less how day three went.
Even so, we ran into flocks of sheep like this several times along the way.
Rain, then clear skies again — with the long road to the finish still twelve days ahead,
day three ended, once again, arriving in the middle of the night.
Even reaching the lodging, tomorrow’s maintenance still had to be done.
Continued in Day 4 — look forward to it!
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