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  Praise for Dina Bennett’s Peking to Paris

  “Like Tim Cahill before her, Dina Bennett brings adventure car travel to a new level. Written by an unlikely (and often reluctant) navigator, Dina’s flair for self deprecating humor and insight left me literally laughing out loud.”

  —Beth Whitman, Founder, Wanderlust and Lipstick

  “A couples’ willingness to take a stable relationship into unstable lands for a road-trip on map-challenged routes makes for compelling stories. Her tale is rendered with just the right words to make you want to be along on the journey, and all the right words to keep you safely at home instead.”

  —Rick Antonson, author of To Timbuktu for a Haircut and Route 66 Still Kicks

  “Bennett writes fearlessly on the disregarded aspects of travel: the uncertainties, hesitation, self-doubt. In so doing, she reminds us that travel isn’t reserved for the heroic; it’s open to all who seek it.”

  —Hal Amen, Managing Editor, MatadorNetwork.com

  Peking to Paris is “a road-trip memoir from an author who has ‘a love–hate relationship with adventure.’ [Bennett’s] writing captures the beauty of the austere landscape, changing social dynamics with other teams, and the nuances of her shifting relationship with her husband. A fun ride, worth the trip.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Where travel memoirists tend toward the intrepid adventurer, Bennett is another sort altogether. [Peking to Paris proves] it’s all about the journey, not the destination.”

  —Booklist

  “[Dina] Bennett agrees to the rally despite having no mechanical aptitude and a propensity for carsickness. When it’s all over, she misses the cramped quarters of their beloved Cadillac (nicknamed Roxanne) so much that they take to the road again—this time in a rental car. The camaraderie between participants in the race is a secondary character: ‘I look around the table and note Americans, Swiss, French, Dutch, Greek. And the one nationality we now have in common: Rally.’ Tip: Start at the end. The book’s glossary and numerous appendices spoil nothing, but give you a clear sense of what goes into a project like this, which only enhances the fun once you actually hit the road.”

  —Heather Seggel, BookPage

  Dina Bennett is “… an adventurous woman, willing herself to … push up against the outer boundaries of her comfort zone…. many comedic observations.”

  —Michael Milne, New York Journal of Books

  Copyright © 2018 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.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

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  Cover design: Mona Lin

  Cover photo: iStockphoto

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2752-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2755-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Vivienne

  The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.

  —G. K. Chesterton

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Introduction: How It All Began

  BLASTOFF

  Preamble

  Blessings: Cochin, India, 2009

  Drive, She Said: Western Sahara, Morocco, 2004

  Solutions: Kerala, India, 2009

  Unsinkable: Chindwin River, Myanmar, 2012

  EATING

  Preamble

  Sacrificial Lamb: Río Gallegos, Argentina, 2008

  Pads: Dunhuang, China, 2011

  Bottomless Pits: Zaouia Ahanesi, Morocco, 2004

  Food Fair: Gran Isla Chiloé, Chile, 2008

  Mare’s Milk: Naryn, Kyrgyzstan, 2011

  INSIDERS

  Preamble

  Omo Beauty Queens: Omo River Valley, Ethiopia, 2011

  Divine Intervention: Pemayangste Monastery, Sikkim, India, 2009

  Garbage and Dogs: Ushuaia, Argentina, 2008

  Finding Dereka: Axum, Ethiopia, 2011

  Getting Down with the Locals: Cabo Virgenes, Argentina, 2008

  ETIQUETTE

  Preamble

  Carma: Orchha, India, 2009

  Bush Spa: Dimeka, Ethiopia, 2011

  If It Floats: Puerto Montt, Chile, 2008

  Kindness of Strangers: Ghalat, Iran, 2016

  AFFLICTION

  Preamble

  Toes: Pucón, Chile, 2008

  Shoulders: Mysore, India, 2009

  Knees: El Chaltén, Chile, 2008

  Body: Völs, Italy, 2012

  OUTSIDERS

  Preamble

  Camel Carts: Kesroli, India, 2013

  Hidden: Mashhad, Iran, 2011

  Huaso Initiation: Torres del Paine, Chile, 2008

  Hyena Bait: Harar, Ethiopia, 2011

  BORDERS

  Preamble

  Isolation: Paso Roballos, Argentina to Chile, 2008

  Gated Community: Karakul, Tajikistan to Kyrgyzstan, 2011

  Checkpoint: Kapikoy, Turkey to Iran, 2011

  River Boundaries: Khorog, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, 2011

  Missed It: Gauriganj, Nepal to India, 2012

  HERE AND GONE

  Preamble

  Tailored: Kolkata, India, 2013

  Red Carpet: Alodaw Pauk Pagoda, Myanmar, 2012

  The Tired Deva: Kolkata, India, 2013

  Come Back!: Puerto Cisnes, Chile, 2008

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Photos

  Preface

  Have you heard of Lost Glove Syndrome? I hadn’t either, until I thought for a long time about my life, why I travel the way I do, and made up a philosophy for it. Everyone knows what I’m talking about when it comes to a missing glove (just substitute “sock” if “glove” doesn’t work for you). Whether they shield you from frigid weather or add retro personality to an outfit, when one glove is missing you’re incomplete. Having one remaining glove isn’t bad, but it’s not great either. As you search for the missing glove you have time to think … about what it means to you and why you want it so badly. So when you do finally find it you understand something profound: you have so much more than two gloves. You have a matched pair.

  As applied to life, the quest epitomized by Lost Glove Syndrome is why I’ve been willing to humble myself during the journeys that follow. Like that perfect pair of gloves, I suspect there are elements of me out there, somewhere, which, when encountered, will make me better, in a so-much-more-than-whole way. It’s why, for me, travel isn’t a quest to see. It’s a quest to be.

  Because I have Lost Glove Syndrome in a serious way, travel has become more than just passing time or an activity. It’s a process by turns uncertain, monotone, exhausting, and sometimes embarrassing, spiked by revelations and encounters so intense they’re like a miracle. People talk about travel taking me out of my comfort zone. That’s never been my goal. Why would I put myself into discomfort for days on end just to say I was uncomfortable? Besides, eventually the outside of that zone becomes comfortable enough that the whole term loses its meaning. And then what?

&nbs
p; No, the reason I repeatedly am willing to open the door to a car and set off on the sort of road trips that populate this book, is my search for the proverbial missing glove, that element of my character I know is there and without which I feel unfinished. When I travel to likely places in likely ways, I find only a mirror cheerfully reflecting everything I enjoy about myself. It’s easy, comfortable—and I’m happy. When I’m in less likely places, though still on a normal trip, that mirror may show me an unflattering reflection of myself, but in ways familiar enough that I can remain unchanged. It’s only the radically different methods and environments of these road trips that challenge me to search for an aspect of me which, if I can find it, try it on, wear it for a bit, will enhance me with that laughing “ah-ha” moment of discovery melded with recognition.

  The trip that started it all was the 7,800-mile Peking to Paris car rally (which I now call the P2P) I did with my husband Bernard in 2007. Before that year, all I knew about cars as a mode of travel was to stay out of them, because I get carsick. Following that trip, I still knew that cars and I didn’t get along particularly well. But I also knew that a specific magic took place when Bernard and I set out on the road together, passports stamped with illegible visas, closed in a car for weeks at a time, seeking the rutted tracks and backcountry hamlets where outsiders rarely go.

  The tales in this book are gleaned from ten years of extraordinary and difficult road trips in the world’s out-of-the-way places, trips we embarked on after that shattering thirty-five days of the P2P race. The near-calamity of the P2P yielded something surprising—that when concentrating I no longer got queasy—and something very personal as well: that by putting myself through the fire I could come out the other side a little different. And I wanted more.

  I confess that, despite the passage of time, a road trip still is a mode of travel for which I remain generally unsuited. I’m like a rat ejected from a grain bin, ripped from the comfortable predictability I crave. In the early days, I clung to the lip of that bin, longing to stay home, mightily resisting the next road trip. Now, while I don’t exactly leap from the edge of that bin, I’m genuinely happy to get on the road, even relishing that vague dread about what comes next.

  I try in these stories to reveal what happens when you travel not in search of statistics and data, but for whatever happens right around you. You’ll see what I see, and I don’t hide how, like any friend, I struggle. Sometimes there’s an obvious point, but sometimes you’ll find yourself getting it, just like I did, because of the truth of the moment.

  The stories themselves are organized by subject rather than date. I made this organizational leap of faith without knowing that Mark Twain had already come up with the idea. “Ideally a book would have no order to it,” he said, “and the reader would have to discover his own.” I don’t mean to be obscure in presenting things in this unstructured fashion. It just strikes me as an honest reflection of how discovery happens when traveling and how friendships develop between people who at the start know little about each other.

  The travel dream we all have is for something elemental to materialize when we’re away from home, something that connects us indelibly to the life around us. Obviously, each story you’re about to read took place at a particular time, but more importantly they all are timeless in their human connection. The bewitchment of these tales is that they permit you to suspend the judgment promoted by our time-sensitive society, in which how fast you get things done is better rewarded than the quality of result. I hope that you, too, in dispensing with when and in focusing on why and who and how, will find yourself with a fresh perspective.

  Mary Oliver, our great American poet, wrote an essay that starts like this: “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” This applies to us all, regardless of age, experience, or opportunity. Through my travels, I’ve learned to find opportunity for connection where others see only strangeness, to feel myself lucky where others see missteps, to know that the grass is greener right where I’m standing, to come back a different me from when I left. I invite you to ride with me in a world without a roadmap, to become, as I have, a travel junkie.

  INTRODUCTION

  HOW IT ALL BEGAN

  Bernard ran over the sleeping policeman at full speed. I didn’t even flinch.

  This was our third rough road trip through India. I already knew driving these village back roads after dark was a dangerous venture, not just because of people and livestock walking home from a far grazing plot in a darkness so dense it felt like velvet, but because Indian drivers refuse to use their headlights. Neither of us could fathom what karmic rationale could justify the necessity of keeping off the very lights that would enable one to avoid dying and taking a handful of blameless villagers with you in the process. Not to mention the sacred cows. In truth, a speed bump—which I grew up calling a “sleeping policeman” for the obvious work it did slowing down cars—such as the one we’d just jolted over was a minor annoyance compared to other obstacles. For when driving the little-traveled village roads of a country, as we choose to do on our long-distance road trips, our goal is not to challenge the local habit but to survive it.

  The jolt sent our luggage, cases of tools, and car parts to the ceiling. They slammed back down like an earthquake aftershock. All the while I stared resolutely ahead. There was a time when such thoughtlessness on Bernard’s part would have extracted from me at minimum a shout, more likely a flood of stern words about at least having the consideration to slow down a bit. The truth is, given the tens of thousands of miles that we have chosen to drive, in the backcountry of India, China, Iran, Siberia, Tibet, Mongolia, the former Soviet republics, and more, I’ve become inured to such bad behavior. Or rather, I’ve become achingly aware that where there’s one speed bump in an Indian village, ten more will likely follow. Just at the village entrance. With ten more at the exit as well.

  When it comes to long-distance road trips, I am not to the manner born. I am the one who used to enter a car already counting the minutes before I’d reach my destination. And that was as the driver. As the passenger, road trips were a one-note tune centered on my intense, unrelenting, and unforgiving motion sickness. That is, until one brash, ill-considered but highly imaginative decision changed everything.

  It was 2005, five years into our adventure of living on and operating a cattle ranch in the high mountains of northern Colorado. One morning to my delight—and eventual dismay—we received a notice that the entry Bernard and I had submitted to participate in a classic car rally had been accepted. It was the 2007 Peking to Paris Motor Challenge, and we’d be driving a set route from Beijing to Paris in a 1940 LaSalle. This was a competitive rally over open roads, not on a racetrack, in cars built as long ago as 1903. Bernard would drive, something he adores as only a man who rebuilt his first car at age three (well, okay, at sixteen) could. I would navigate, using the provided route book, which prescribed every single turn we had to make the entire way. And don’t let me forget to mention that we were timed every day from start to finish, because if fourteen hours a day in a car wasn’t stressful enough, knowing that we were perpetually late added to the fun. At my disposal as navigatrix were various gadgets, like a Tripmeter showing how far we’d driven to the millimeter. That I knew nothing about GPS devices, would be considered feeble in matters of technology, and could not look at a screen or page for more than five minutes while in a car without being overwhelmed by nausea, should have fazed me but did not. After all, who wouldn’t leap at the opportunity to tell their husband of thirty years exactly where he could go, with him allowed only to nod and say thank you in reply?

  Like the other competitors of what I quickly learned was a rather “in” club, I took to calling our epic endurance rally by a short acronym: P2P. The quicker I could say it, the quicker I could add, “I want to go home.” As
someone whose every fiber disagreed with cars and driving, I was clearly about to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for a very long time. You can see why the odds did not look to be in my favor on this one. The story of that race would fill a book. In fact, I’ve written it (Peking to Paris: Life and Love on a Short Drive Around Half the World, Skyhorse Publishing 2013).

  It’s not a secret that we got to Paris. What isn’t widely known is that instead of leaping on the first jumbo jet home, I did a surprising thing. There I was in the City of Lights, emotionally and physically shattered beyond any exhaustion I’d ever experienced, yet somehow unable to conceive of any life other than one that kept me in a car with Bernard. Sorting through problems side by side, all day every day, had turned out to be wondrous, in its peculiar way, filling me with a sense of collaboration I missed at home, where we each had our own ranching chores to tend to. I wanted to feel again that frisson of excitement that coursed through me when we left for China at the start of the P2P in May 2007, to revel once more in waves of intense anticipation as we entered a new country. I’d lived what Sir Richard Burton put so well a century ago when he observed: “The gladdest moment in human life … is a departure into unknown lands.” The speed of car travel also suited me. Under our own power, we could wander at will, a method of travel with innuendos of early explorers for whom the getting there was as much the point of an expedition as the ultimate discovery they sought.

  Like any new addict, I was desperate for more. What to do? I’d just spent thirty-five days on the P2P sunk in a bog of cranky jitters, my shyness challenged by two hundred fifty strangers, my talent for fretting summiting new heights thanks to the old car we had to repair ourselves, not to mention the days sweating through a desert with only the old-fashioned kind of air conditioning—open windows. The logical next step seemed to be to create the antithesis of the P2P: find a place we’d like to explore on our own, devise our own route, and use a rental car. Why a rental? Because then any problems that occurred would be someone else’s to fix.