Peking to Paris Page 13

  Ulaanbaatar Pizza

  ULAANBAATAR

  It’s deepening dusk when we exit the desert. Even before we reach the shack-lined outskirts of UB, I know we’re near because of one clue: asphalt. After hours of potholed tracks and sand, I find the existence of pavement and road signs not only deeply meaningful, but cause for pure joy. Even the traffic jam we get stuck in not far from our hotel is a relief: if we break down now there’ll be plenty of people to help us. The image of Roxanne’s dragging trunk can’t stifle my ecstasy when I step under a stream of hot water in our hotel bathroom. It swirls the sand and dust out of my hair, turning gritty and brown before it’s sucked down the drain, taking my bad mood of that long day with it. I chant, “Rest day, rest day. Rest! Day!” as the water pounds down. Right now I’m all for reveling in my deep pleasure that we will stay in one place for two nights, and ignoring the big stinking bull in my china shop: that when we drive out of UB, we’ll still need six more days to cross Mongolia.

  Feeling bright, polished, and ridiculously optimistic, we go down to the hotel lobby. In a routine already firmly established in China, the lobby is where everyone in the Rally mills about, chatting with the organizers who staff the information desk, looking at the day’s results and the next day’s start times posted on a red velvet bulletin board, glancing out the glass lobby doors to see who is repairing a car in the parking lot. In a departure from that past few days, though, the Rally is now split in two, with many of the participants lodged in a different hotel from ours. UB doesn’t have a hotel big enough to house all of us.

  I look around for Maddy, Sybil, and the rest of our small group of friends. My need to share stories with them has become like an addiction, so intensely do I look forward to it. It seems whatever I’ve suffered during the day will be put to rights simply by telling them about it. My hopes for a fun evening are dashed when a staff member tells me they are in the other hotel. Of course we do all have cars, and there are taxis on the street. But the notion of getting into a car again, even one driven by someone else, is too off-putting. We look around for anyone we know and notice Matthieu by himself.

  “Bernard,” he says when we circle into view. “How is your car?” and he gives Bernard a hearty slap on the back and me a warm hug. I’m learning that in Rallyworld, if you want to show you’re glad to see someone, you inquire about their car, not about them. The answer to the former is crucial; the answer to the latter, immaterial. We’re only a few days into the Rally, but already I have the impression that many, Bernard included, would keep driving their car even if blind and with a broken leg, viewing physical issues merely as a minor inconvenience. So although I would have preferred a greeting from Matthieu along the lines of “So glad to see you” or “How are you both?” I’ll take what I can get.

  Bernard fills Matthieu in on Roxanne’s suspension issues while I stand by, half-distracted as I look around to see if others I know who were stuck in the desert have by now arrived. Matthieu listens with his head bent, in serious contemplation of what Bernard is describing. He smiles that smile that I was so charmed by two years ago, but then rubs his hand over his face as if trying to rid it of clingy cobwebs. The expression that emerges is haunted with concern. “I have some terrible problems with my radiator,” he tells us, then rubs his face some more. “I’m afraid it’s cracked. Aaachh! I will have to work on it tomorrow. I think I know what to do, but I need special equipment. We’ll be at UB’s Mercedes dealership. They’re expecting us.”

  “You mean it’s allowed to take your car to a dealership?” I ask, jarred back to the conversation by this unexpected announcement. Bernard, too, looks puzzled, but then smiles as he divines what they’ve done.

  “You arranged this all from home,” he says to a nodding Matthieu.

  “Right!” Matthieu says. ‘Every place where there’s a rest day we called the Mercedes dealership and had them reserve three service bays, one for each of our cars.” I’m seriously fussed about this. It strikes me as akin to getting a bootleg copy of the route book and driving it ahead of time. I gather words to scold Matthieu with my recently discovered notions of fair play, such as not sequestering the best services for yourself before you know whether you’ll even need them. Then he looks at both of us with those piercing blue eyes, and I’m under his spell before he even says, “Bernard, we’ll be there at 7:00 tomorrow morning. Meet us there so you can use their hoist to get under your car. If you get there ahead of us, just use my name.” The route book urges “Enjoy your day off !” Thanks to Matthieu, we have something that, given our circumstances, promises more potent miracles than a visit to the local holy sites. Dealerships. What a fine idea.

  It’s like homecoming to walk into the oily bowels of the dark repair bays, shake hands with an overall’d mechanic, set about cleaning out the car while Bernard delves into repairs. Naturally, we expect to find replacement shocks here, so why not believe as well that somewhere in UB there is a windshield the exact size and shape to replace our cracked one?

  Keeping us company are three cars from the 1920s belonging to Matthieu and his teammate James. Rumors began swirling about James even in Beijing. From what I’ve been told, he’s probably the wealthiest man on the Rally, and even I can tell he’s driving an extraordinary car. Everyone seems to want to claim at least a moment’s camaraderie with him, but few have managed. It seems to me he keeps himself to himself, hence the rumors. Sybil pointed him out to me a few days back, which is how I discovered that this famous guy, whom I’d never heard of, was part of Matthieu’s coterie of friends. At the time, Sybil and I stood there trying not to stare, much like two teenagers in awe of the football team’s quarterback, both too star-struck to approach him, let alone say anything. Word has it that James’s copilot is, in truth, his mechanic, and in fact is chief of mechanics for his entire car collection.

  Searching the dealership for a reasonably clean rag, I wander near their car and learn something I shouldn’t have. Bernard has always chastised me for eavesdropping on people’s conversations, but I’m helpless to control the acuity of my hearing. Besides, I love hearing other people’s stories. Now my finely tuned ears come in handy. I overhear James talking about organizing his plane to fly in more spare parts to Novosibirsk, to have on hand for the next rest day, seven days away.

  Part of me is outraged. The Rally rules say you have to carry your spares with you or fix your car with what you can find on the road. That’s why Roxanne is so heavily laden. Anything other than that is cheating and grounds for disqualification. Another part of me feels sick with envy at how lucky James is to employ someone to keep his car running and to have such wealth that he can get the parts he needs flown in for him. A not insubstantial segment of me wants to make friends with him immediately, hoping that if it comes to it, he can bring some spare parts in for us. Discussions about private planes and Bentleys are not what I’m accustomed to. We have one, modest, but beloved old car and just getting that one was a stretch. I feel so out of my league that, even though I want to use this day to at least say something to James so I can consider us acquainted, even if not plane-mates, I can’t think of a topic of conversation.

  “Bernard, guess what I heard,” I whisper as I’m wiping the dashboard for the third time and he’s sorting through bolts. I recount to him the bit about the plane. “What do you think we should do? Should we tell the organizers? Ignore it? But that wouldn’t be fair would it?” Bernard only smiles, acknowledging what to him is another competitor’s chutzpah, doing whatever he needs to do to keep his car moving.

  The fact that I’m tongue tied in front of James is irrelevant. There’s not much chatting going on, as each crew is deep in the guts of their vehicle, repairing much worse problems than ours. There’s a standoffish feeling for the first couple of hours, as if each team doesn’t want anyone else to know just how badly damaged their car is. Then we all realize we have to make the most of this opportunity. Tools are shared, a spare part offered to someone who needs it, the s
hop vac trundled from one bay to the next.

  Hours of concentrated work are broken by the arrival of eight boxes of UB’s finest pizza. As the only woman there, it seems to fall to me to distribute the food. “James, do you want some pizza?” I ask, and I’m so nervous that I’m speaking to this august personage that just this simple sentence makes me quail. “Oh sure, thanks Dina,” he says. He knows my name? That means we’ve been introduced in absentia by Matthieu. Which means Matthieu hasn’t truly been ignoring us after all.

  Feeling a happy esprit de corps, I open our box of pizza and find a dreary facsimile of the real thing: damp cardboard crust smeared with sludgy tomato paste, oozing orange globules from rubbery cheese melted on top of a Mongolian’s idea of Italian pepperoni. Everyone else, too, is looking in their pizza boxes in horrified silence, as if they’d found cockroaches in the box instead of just bad pizza. Then, as if choreographed, we delve in. Frowning faces relax as hands stained with hydraulic oil and axle grease lift soggy slices for another bite. Those pizzas disappear in minutes. We all agree they’re delicious.

  A Good Day

  ULAANBAATAR-KHARKORIN

  The next morning starts poorly. I’m in the lobby of our hotel extracting millions of Mongolian tugrugs from a willing ATM machine, when Franklin shambles over. He puts his arms around me in a droopy hug. “This is goodbye,” he says. He and Eduardo have retired from the Rally, their middle-aged Ford too rusty and leaky to continue. A Dutch couple, too, have retired, the entire chassis of their Bentley having cracked in half. All I have time for is a promise to keep in touch. We’ve fixed Roxanne, though not her windshield, and Bernard’s already waiting for me outside. As I carry our bags out I feel morose. I can’t help but think it should have been me leaving, not two crews who are more experienced than us. Yet here we are, ready to head back to the desert and six more nights of hard driving and camping.

  As has happened on previous mornings, my services as navigator are not particularly necessary. That’s because the MTC is in UB’s Sukhbaatar Square, an immense gray quadrangle rimmed by austere, colonnaded Soviet-era buildings. The city elders have organized a major welcoming and bon voyage ceremony for us. It seems half of UB is streaming in that direction, so I close the route book and instruct Bernard to follow them. The morning is warm, and with the window open I can hear the ceremonial band playing syncopated versions of Beatles classics and an occasional Souza march from many blocks away. When we round the corner to the square, we see a parade ground so vast that the triple row of Rally cars parked on one side look like tinker toys. Across from them is a juryrigged bandstand draped with red polyester skirting. It’s replete with a full swing band of horns and percussion, and a mike at which stands a significant person declaiming good wishes to the assembled multitudes. At least, that’s what I assume he’s saying, since not only is the mike weak and the sound system crackling with static, but the official is speaking Mongolian. Townsfolk mill about, some in city clothes, others in embroidered silk tunics and brocaded caps. I open Roxanne’s door so a child can be placed on her seat and a photo taken. This time, though, I’m not invited to participate.

  We’re only two days into Mongolia, and the struggle to get just to here has taken its toll. By now more than half of the cars that started the race have suffered one or more calamities. Many sank over their hubs in deep sand, where they wallowed like floundering mastodons till a faster, sturdier car arrived to pull them out. Some disintegrated, fenders and bolts launching themselves suicidally onto the dirt road, doors hanging crookedly off hinges, springs wheezing as the cars groaned over miles of washedout track. It’s not just vehicles that are in dire straits. Three crews broke up as well, driver and navigator brandishing one-way tickets home, fuming about how miserable the Rally turned out to be. One navigator simply abandoned his driver, leaving him to complete the remaining 7,000 or so miles alone. Everyone grumbles about how Mongolia is not what they expected. No one seems able to fathom how we’re going to make it to Russia, much less Paris.

  If not totally cheery, I am basking in a pleasant sense of relief. Roxanne’s shock problems are fixed, and she again handles like a champ. When we leave UB, though, the initially alluring asphalt turns into a patchwork of potholes connected by fragments of tarmac, the damage done by a continuous flow of cargo trucks going to and from Russia. We try the dirt tracks next to it and find them smooth enough. Roxanne’s rugged off-road tires grip the loose gravel like suction cups, and as we surmount a low hill and plunge back down to the short-grass prairie, it feels like I’m on a sailing ship. Even the unremitting brownness can’t dampen my spirits. Though there’s still no place to stop for lunch, there are things to see besides rocks and dead grass. Herds of shaggy, brown and black cashmere goats browse by the roadside, shepherds on motorcycles moving them along toward the hills. Whirling dervishes of local sandstorms, which seem to twist up out of nowhere, whip across the road and hightail it for the horizon. I haven’t yet seen a Mongolian pony, but I’m hopeful. After all, if it’s true they outnumber people here thirteen to one, they must be somewhere.

  We make quick work of a short time trial. Directions spew from my mouth like bullets from a machine gun. Bernard manhandles Roxanne’s bulk, swinging her left, right, charging forward, braking a split second before we have to make a hairpin turn, using centrifugal force to pull us around the badly banked, gravelly curve.

  At camp that night, after dutifully signing in, I check the time trial rankings, set up on that red velvet bulletin board, which now stands in the organizer’s headquarters tent. What I see astonishes me. “Bernard,” I call as I run back to where Roxanne’s parked. “Guess how we did in the time trial.”

  “We did well?”

  “Better than well. We got in the top ten!”

  He stands up and brushes his pants off. A big smile, the biggest I’ve seen in days, spreads across his tired face. “Ha!” he says. He’s never one to gloat, but the good news makes me feel talkative. I’m eager to find Robert and Maddy and Nick and Sybil, to see how they did and, yes, if the occasion arises, to share this tidbit of information about our accomplishment. A little gloating would do me good. After Bernard has finished with Roxanne and I’ve popped open our tent, we head for the dining pavilion, weaving through the colony of small tents that has sprouted, each one like a colorful mushroom growing next to a dusty car. People look up as we walk by, some wave, others nod hello. The camp has an aura to it. I think it’s shared pride, partly an unspoken acknowledgement that we are a select group doing a difficult thing, and partly silent relief that we are not among those crippled or broken down beyond repair. I still don’t know most of the competitors by name, which would have bothered me to no end before the race. Now, though, I feel I have my own small family. We gravitate to each other each evening, sharing stories and going over the next day’s route. We find each other in the dining tent, or, if not, look for each other strolling around the camp after dinner. There’s a double-helix binding all of us together, one strand joining people into groups, the other joining the groups into a whole. There’s no doubt that I’m part of a great enterprise, and even though when we’re driving during the day I feel as close to what I know of despair as I’ve ever gotten, in the evening the camaraderie in camp heals me.

  The Nature of Things

  Learning from experience and gleaning tips from Maddy when I need them, I am now an ardent convert to the route book. It has become my bible, and though I haven’t donned robes, I am its slavish devotee. I ferry it lovingly to our tent each evening, pore over its pages with rapt interest, mark important landmarks with pink and blue highlighters, and then zip it into its very own red plastic P2P-embossed case when I go to sleep. I understand the book’s directional symbols without having to think about it. My eyes instinctively swivel from the route book up to the Tripmeter and back to the page’s mileage a hundred times a day, double and triple checking that we are where I think we are.

  The route book can’t always save me, thou
gh. It hasn’t taken me long to learn that, when it comes to roads, nature is more capricious than any village council budget. Each morning we get pages of revisions to review. The further into Mongolia we go the more copious the changes. Sand covers a previously obvious road, floods wash out a bridge, someone’s ruts create a new track in the wrong direction, a river is too high to ford, the deep winter snows have eradicated a track altogether. All of this needs to be explained, and an alternate route provided. With all the other navigators, I line up early to get the change pages then annotate my route book so I’ll know when the original instructions are no longer valid as well as when to resume following them.

  None of this would matter if we didn’t have so far to go. Somehow, in my in-depth reading of the pre-Rally advisories, I had failed to notice that the 35 mph average speed was the proverbial brass ring, something to aspire to but rarely achieve. After less than a week on the road, I have to throw my expectation of seven-hour days out the window, where it can bite the dust alongside my fantasy of eating tasty local cuisine at a charming cafe each day. We’re doing ten plus hours of driving a day. That’s without even stopping for anything other than fuel, as the only place to get gas is from fuel trucks parked near the outskirts of camp each evening. In a city as modest as Ulaanbaatar, the day ends with a further hour of bumper-to-bumper traffic. I’m already continuously tired. Having thousands of miles more to go is so daunting I can’t begin to imagine how I’m going to make it.