Peking to Paris Read online

  Peking to

  Paris

  Peking to

  Paris

  Life and Love on a Short Drive Around Half the World

  DINA BENNETT

  Skyhorse Publishing

  Copyright © 2013 by Dina Bennett

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  This book relies on my memory of events leading up to and during my participation in the 2007 Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. As such it is a purely personal recounting, reflecting my opinions and recollections. I did change some names and identifying details of individuals to protect the privacy of those who are now friends.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-62087-800-2

  Printed in China

  “The mere sight of a good map

  fills me with a certain madness.”

  —Freya Stark

  To Bernard—the driving force in my life—with love

  Table of Contents

  Preface: Flirting with Disaster

  Beijing: Take One

  Courthouse Revelations

  Why I Said Yes

  Beijing: Take Two

  Grill That Beaver, Ride That Ditch

  Car Troubles

  What I Learned

  Beijing: Take Three

  In Which I Make Friends

  Finding Roxanne

  Three, Two, One

  Into the Chinese Countryside

  Frozen

  Borders: Take One

  Time Trial

  Sandstorm

  Giving Up Gold

  Ulaanbaatar Pizza

  A Good Day

  The Nature of Things

  Trouble-Free Day, Troubling Evening

  What Women Do

  Circus Elephant

  Morning Rituals

  A New Country

  Our Private Heaven

  Fixers

  Siberian Cartoons

  Police Procedural

  Truckin’

  Ballet

  Going Solo

  Borders: Take Two

  Race Bunny

  Bonds

  Finished?

  Post P2P Blues

  Epilogue: Are We There Yet?

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix 1: Roxanne’s Rebuild

  Appendix 2: Peking to Paris Motor Challenge 2007 Route

  Appendix 3: Peking to Paris Competitor Vehicles

  Appendix 4: What Roxanne Carried with Her

  Appendix 5: Rally Terminology

  Preface: Flirting with Disaster

  I would like to say that I am a brave, adventurous person. But if I did, this would be a work of fiction. In truth, I have always had a love-hate relationship with adventure. My ambivalence goes back to my earliest memory. Actually, it’s not a memory at all, just fondly recounted family lore. It concerns how I took my first steps, holding onto a recording of Artur Rubenstein performing Chopin nocturnes. Apparently, the feel of something solid in my hands offered me just enough illusion of security that I was able to stand and walk. Briefly. It took only two wobbly steps for me to realize the nasty trick that record was playing on me. I was holding it up, not vice versa. Lucky for me that when I pitched forward I had the presence of mind to fling the record out of harm’s way. Otherwise I would have shattered it in the fall—not to mention deprived my mother, a gifted pianist, of a favorite recording. But when I fell and didn’t break the record, my mother and her friends all applauded. And I didn’t cry. I beamed. In that instant I learned a brief but powerful lesson: that imagination could take me further than common sense.

  For every positive there’s a negative, though. Ever since that record’s betrayal I’ve tended to imagine the worst. Always, always, I’m accompanied by worries. If I’m swimming near shore where it’s shallow enough for my feet to touch the bottom, I see myself pummeled by a wave, drowning with my mouth full of salt water and sand. The presence of snow conjures images of an avalanche, and I feel the agonizing claustrophobia of an icy coffin with my arms pinned by snow set as hard as concrete, gasping as I suffocate. My progress through life has been a bizarre cha cha cha, as my desire to experience everything pulls me forward, while my nameless dreads yank me back.

  I have another memory from my childhood. In it I’m lying on the TV room couch under a white comforter printed with sprays of pale pink and green flowers. This was the sick-day comforter, the one I was allowed to snuggle under as I watched daytime shows when home from elementary school with a sore throat or the flu. If I wasn’t so sick that I was confined to bed, I’d establish a beach head on that couch and watch TV all day. I’d start with the strange calisthenics of Jack LaLanne, followed by the shrill silliness of I Love Lucy and the drunken cooking instruction of The Galloping Gourmet, who slurped slivovitz while handling sharp knives. After an appropriately soothing lunch of chicken soup with rice I’d return to the couch with my glass of ginger ale for the best show of all: Let’s Make A Deal. I found Monty Hall’s ritual for choosing contestants fascinating and humiliating. I knew that, even were I old enough to attend a Let’s Make A Deal taping, I would not have had a purse large enough to carry the variety of items Monty might ask for, let alone the foresight to store a pair of underwear, a spatula, fifteen keys, and a hardboiled egg in it on the off-chance he’d request them. But once he yelled his trademark, “Come on dooowwwwn,” to the overjoyed contestant, I was all in, rooting “Pick door number one. No, no, no. Stop. Take door number two!”

  Let’s Make A Deal made a peculiarly lasting impression on me. Which is why, as I do my awkward dance with worry, I’m also on the lookout for an opening, a possibility, a door that may be cracked just a fraction, enough for me to stick a toe through and push it open so I can see what’s on the other side. This is the story of one such door and what occurred when I blindly decided to step through. Had you been in my shoes, I suspect it’s a journey you could have accomplished as well as I did. Probably even better.

  Beijing: Take One

  It never occurred to me that I would spend so much time in a car—any car—and in places a GPS has to think twice about pinpointing. I’m just not suited to this. I get carsick. I live in a perpetual state of anxiety. And I hate not knowing what comes next. I’ve done a lot of things in life because I didn’t think carefully enough beforehand, didn’t know to turn tail and run. When I’m in trouble, I rue this major defect in my character. Once I’m out of trouble, I thank goodness for my ability to use fantasy to pull me into escapades for which I’m utterly unsuited. Without that ability, what follows could never have happened.

  We’ve barely set foot in China, and already I’m feeling the familiar twinge of panic that I might get lost. Knowing how to find my way is a skill of more than ordinary importance to me. In a matter of days, we’ll be idling at the Great Wall in a seventy-year-old vehicle and waiting for a checkered flag to wave downward, releasing us on a 7,800-mile car race to P
lace Vendôme in Paris. My husband Bernard will be driving. And for the next thirty-five days, I’ll be telling him where to go.

  At the moment, I am plowing my way through the crush of people jostling to meet arrivals at Beijing Capital International Airport. I walk as my mother taught me when, as a small girl, I struggled behind her, bucking the rush-hour crowds in New York’s Grand Central Station. “Put your hands on your hips, darling,” she said in her lilting French accent “comme ça,” her manicured hands placing mine properly, so my elbows stuck out. “When people are too close, just poke them,” she told me, tossing her head with laughter at her own daring. The trick worked for her, but I suspect it had nothing to do with arm placement and all to do with her glamour and perfume. I was five years old. My head barely reached the average commuter’s waist. No one gave way for me, leaving me struggling to keep up, face reddening with panic, rubbing my bruised elbows.

  Here in Beijing, my mother’s crowd-tamer trick is once again deficient. Buffeted by hordes of happy greeters, I watch Bernard swiveling his hips through the mass of people like a retreating rumba dancer. So sure is he that he’s breaking trail for me, helping me along, that he doesn’t even glance back to see I’m falling further and further behind.

  To keep my carry-on bag from sliding off my shoulder, I scrunch my neck to keep the strap in place. But my neck, already cocked at an odd angle from eighteen hours in a plane, refuses to maintain the position. The bag, loaded with maps, chargers, a handful of my favorite lemon Luna bars, and a Radio Shack-worth of spare batteries, slams to the floor. I stop to readjust, looking up just in time to make out Bernard as he dodges into a small taxi. By the time I duck in beside him, I’m a sweaty mess. I’m also a happy mess, ready for the relief offered by this safe, though sadly too temporary, mobile haven.

  Despite being jet-lagged, with eyes shriveled to hard little raisins from too many hours on a plane, there’s one thing I do notice: there are a lot of people here, more people in one square block than in the entire 2,400 square miles of my Colorado county, where the resident population barely breaks 1,400 souls on a day when everybody gets out of bed. Millions are going about their business as our taxi driver wends his way through traffic, stopping now and then to let a flood of pedestrians flow across the clogged streets. When a gap appears at the curb, new pedestrians swarm to fill it, backed by countless more. Peering through the window, I alternate between stunned gratitude that I’m here and a fretful anxiety at what this implies. Everywhere are street signs in Mandarin, a language I’ve been unable to learn. Since I’m stupefied with lack of sleep, I actually believe if I stare hard enough at them I’ll learn the language by osmosis. If I don’t, how will I ever understand signposts to get us out of the country once the race begins?

  Our driver swerves around pedestrian obstacles in a marvel of brakeless daring, his body a universal symbol of diligence with hands clenching the steering wheel, back ramrod straight. As for me, normally so impatient I’d like to personally press a cab driver’s foot on the gas pedal, I feel a distinct yearning for him to slow down. I’d be delighted to live in this cab forever, if it meant avoiding the moment when I have to don the mantle of navigator-in-chief to Bernard’s role as driver. If someone were here to listen, I’d say, “This is all a big mistake.” Yes, I know Bernard is next to me, but he’s not in any position to understand my longing to flee. He’s a man with limitless faith in himself. I don’t mind a risk or two, but only if I can control the outcome. As surely as I know my long hair and deep-set eyes are brown, and that while I’m not plump I will never be skinny, I know the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge is a runaway horse charging downhill with the bit in its teeth. I’ve ridden such a horse so I can tell you: control is not one of the things you feel in that situation.

  What perplexes me is how in the past 700-odd days I never found the courage to tell Bernard I don’t really want to do this. Of course, that would have meant bucking the trend of our marriage. We’re a couple who generally does everything together, accommodating each other’s foibles in a way many people never manage. We created a successful software company together, built our dream home, turned our backs on it all, and took on the ranching life. Any one of those would have shredded a relationship more fragile than ours. Yet here we are, still married.

  Let’s be clear, though. This race is Bernard’s dream, not mine. Cars for me are purely a functional means to reach a pleasant end, like a friend’s house, a good restaurant, or my favorite nail salon. And then there’s that other issue, that small matter of getting carsick. The nausea wells up as soon as I try to read in the car and it lasts for hours after I again set my feet on terra firma. Equally dire for any car-related enterprise, I can barely tell a car jack from a jackass. How could I have been so spineless as to agree to this enterprise or so deluded as to think it would go away on its own?

  Giving up on learning Mandarin from the back of a cab, I rest my head on the nubby fabric of the back seat, a spot marked by so many resting heads that the gray upholstery is darkly stained with hair grease and scalp sweat. When I close my eyes, the lids become a screen for a movie trailer, an endless loop I’ve been rerunning for months now. It starts with clonking Chinese percussion, shrill violins, trilling flutes, then the booming bass voiceover: “When their car collapses, stranding them in the Gobi, fun and fireworks erupt. Will they make it? Or will one of them walk home alone? Follow this manic duo as they feud their way through Siberia and beyond . . . .” We’re in the starring roles, and this sounds like a comedy preview, only none of it strikes me as humorous.

  The whining din of those devil violins fades away as I drift back to a warm September afternoon on the courthouse lawn of my tiny ranching town. Sizzling elk burgers spatter their juices onto charcoal. Tantalizing riffles of meat- and fat-scented smoke drift into the heavy branches overhead, where robins twitter their fervent hope that they will not become bird-kebabs on that grill.

  As days go, that one was benign and rustic in its charms. I saw no sign saying “Caution! Anguish and marital discord ahead,” had no inkling I was about to descend into a realm of merciless travails with the swiftness of a barrel over Niagara Falls. All for one thing: to drive the Silk Route taken by Genghis Khan and race against 125 other teams, using a classic car most people would have left in their granddad’s garden shed.

  It’s a day I’d reviewed in my mind countless times, wondering if that afternoon could have had a different ending.

  Courthouse Revelations

  Picture this: fifty exquisite classic cars parked haphazardly under the flickering shade of tall cottonwoods. They’re the crème de la crème, the sort that make you gasp with admiration. I’m talking Shelby Cobra, Bentley, Lagonda, Aston Martin. Drivers and their navigators wander among plastic-clothed tables. They’re sniffing, salivating, and waiting with good-natured impatience for the local Lion’s Club to declare lunch ready.

  This is the Colorado Grand classic car tour, a week in which the most beautiful old automobiles in the world are invited to drive through our state’s small towns and breathtaking scenery. On this route, my beloved county is the smallest and poorest of all, a mere splash on the map, with only one town. That town is a ramshackle collection of buildings straddling the state highway, itself just a two-lane blacktop connecting Wyoming with ski resorts to the West and South. It’s a place you’d drive through and wonder aloud who could possibly live in this cluster of lackluster clapboard houses. Look past those boarded-up buildings, and it all becomes clear. Our valley has wilderness areas on three sides as well as gold medal trout streams. Soaring over it all is that cerulean sky for which Colorado is famous. This is the place to drive through if you have an old car and want to use it. As these people do.

  I wend my way through the crowd, pausing now and then to inspect a vehicle. I know even less about old cars than I do about new ones. Even if I had an iota of connoisseurship, I’d hardly dare touch the gleaming paint on any of these. Far be it from me to blemish a six-figure
vehicle with a finger smudge.

  When I finally spy Bernard, he’s unconsciously bouncing up on his toes. His strong, five foot six frame is like a hot air balloon barely tethered to the ground. I grab his arm to prevent liftoff. Bernard’s an effervescent man anyway, but now he’s bubbling in a way I haven’t seen in years. His green-blue eyes are framed by a mass of crinkles, his eyebrows are waggling, and his French accent is getting stronger, as it does when he’s truly excited. “This is Matthieu and Amélie,” he says, gesturing to a slender, sandy-haired gentleman with piercing blue eyes, his arm sweep including the classically groomed woman at the man’s side. I take in their studied casualness, their creased khakis, no brand name visible. Around here the only time pants are pressed is when you wear them out of the store, the name Carrhart or Wrangler prominently displayed on your back pocket. With barely a pause for me to say, “Pleased to meet you,” Bernard launches into the cause of his excitement. “Remember the book I have about the Croisière Jaune? Well, they’ve done something just like it, following the old Silk Route. It’s a rally. For old cars.” He spears me with a passionate stare. “There’s another one in 2007.”

  Bernard takes barely a moment to swallow and catch his breath, but it’s enough to give Matthieu an opening. This he fills with the most extraordinary information. “It’s called the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge,” he says in faintly accented, slightly off-kilter English, though whether his origins were Swiss, Dutch, or German I couldn’t have said. He studies me in a professorial way, interested in me perhaps, but more interested in what he’s about to tell us. “You know, this is a redoing of a car race organized by Italy’s Prince Borghese a hundred years ago. So 2007 will be the centenary.”

  As he now recounts, in May 1907 five cars set out from Peking—as it was called then—to prove that man and machine could indeed go anywhere, that borders between countries were irrelevant. They left Peking with no passports; these had been confiscated by Chinese authorities on the pretext that the drivers were spies. The Chinese had no interest in seeing the success of the motorcar, having just invested in shares in the Trans-Siberian railway. On this first-ever endurance rally, there were no marshals or officials. Fuel was transported by camel. The person who went to Peking to drop the flag at the beginning of the race caught the ship back to Paris and arrived just in time to flag drivers across the finish line sixteen weeks later. Of the intrepid five, four made it to Paris, arriving to a tumultuous welcome and worldwide fame. The fifth, maneuvering an awkward motorcycle-automobile hybrid called a Contal cyclecar, bogged down in the Gobi desert. “The crew was lucky to be found alive by locals,” Matthieu informs us. Arching an eyebrow, he continues ominously, “Their car was never found.”