We continue, but the suspension problems get worse. We are literally breaking the metal eye on the shock absorbers that holds them to the Jeep. The added weight and rough course overwhelm the basically stock suspension system. We envy the suspensions that have two shock absorbers for each wheel. Night after night this problem keeps Hibbs busy working miracles. He never seems to tire and refuses to give up. He tries everything. Welding the shock’s eyes shut. Cannibalizing old shocks by cutting the eyes off and welding them to our shocks. He keeps us going.
As we go further south and west, there are fewer and fewer spectators and more and more camels. Often on the road. But one afternoon we crest a small hill, and come upon a lone horseman. He sees up and makes his horse rear up and waves. We wave back. There are no homes around, and we wonder, “How did he know about the rally, and how far did he ride to watch us pass?”
It’s the same later in Inner Mongolia. In the middle of nowhere, a small group of people appears, shaggy ponies at their sides, silently watching us pass. Do they wonder, as we do, at the unfairness of life? Why are we racing halfway around the world for entertainment while they work so hard for a living?
The rally organizers provide the meals. Dinner, which is surprisingly good, is usually served around 7:30 or 8 p.m. under a huge circus tent to a deeply appreciative crowd. The food and supplies are carried by huge trucks that use the main roads. A typical meal includes freshly baked French bread, cheese, an apple, steak and French fries. Beverages include red wine in juice boxes, warm (if not hot) beer and bottled water.
Later during the night, the circus tent is taken down, and the kitchen heads for the next bivouac, leaving behind a basic breakfast operation. Hours before dawn, groggy and often dirty characters nod greetings and jostle each other in lines for a piece of French bread, jam, instant cafe au lait and perhaps a little sausage.
With all the things that need to be done, we get as little as four or five hours sleep each night. The sad thing is that we are grateful for it. It’s strange to find yourself setting the alarm and thinking “Great, I’ll get four hours tonight.” It is part of the human recalibration process that takes place. New norms. New standards.
The bivouac is amazingly noisy. Generators run through the night. Mechanics constantly bang and pound on vehicles. Citroen, for example, has 90 people supporting its five vehicles. They work all night and literally rebuild their rally cars, replacing the transmissions on a regular basis.
Not surprisingly, as a result of the sleep deprivation, there are days when we operate in less-than-lucid condition. We anticipated this. Assuming that there would be no limit to our fatigue-compounded stupidity, we have taken appropriate steps. We have even used Magic Markers to show which way the doors lock and to remind us that the spare tire must be put in upside down.
As the rally goes on, we discover an interesting sense of camaraderie. The Mitsubishis and Citroens may be involved in a killer battle, wishing disaster on each other at every turn. But on our level, there is a feeling that we are competing, not against one another, but against Rene Metge’s course. We share information and parts and help one another. There is also no joy when a competitor is forced out of the rally by a crash or human or mechanical frailty. The sentiment is, “There but for the grace of God . . . .”
Deep in the Central Asian Republics, we lose the clutch. The pedal will not depress. Hibbs knows exactly what has happened. After hundreds and hundreds of miles, this godawful dust has seeped in through ventilation holes and packed inside the clutch.
We drive for several days shifting without the clutch, trying to time the engine speed just right before changing gears. Sometimes it works. Mostly it makes nasty noises. We have a spare clutch, though, and we just need time to change it.
Run away. Run away. -“Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail”
The firing squad finally gets its aim right deep in Turkmenistan, about halfway to Beijing. We get it right between the eyes. We hate it when it happens. On a special section, we break a right rear shock that has gone through its nine lives plus several reincarnations. We continue to limp along, but several hours later the left rear breaks too. They cannot be repaired, and we have no more replacements.
The problem is that without rear shocks on a rough surface, the Jeep takes on the driving characteristics of a diving board. Its rear end springs and bounces, the Goodyears having little chance of staying in contact with the ground. Touching the brake a bit too hard causes the tail to slide around or the spring to shoot out of its perch.
It is 5:20 p.m., and slowly we are facing our greatest fear-being forced out of the rally. It seems unreal. We always knew that as amateurs in a largely stock vehicle, there was a huge chance we would not finish. It is normal for 40 or 50 percent of the field not to finish a raid. But we still can’t believe it is happening. Not to us. The chance to be the first American team to finish a raid is gone. We have let America down.
The tragedy is that the rest of the Grand Cherokee is still working so well: engine, four-wheel drive, brakes. Even the transmission is surviving our clutchless shifts. It seems so unfair to go out with such a silly problem.
But first we must reach the bivouac, and that is roughly 200 miles away. Quickly, it is night. A full moon comes out. In the dark, the route book makes less sense because it is harder to see important landmarks. The Magellan and KVH let us know where we are and the location of the bivouac. But finding the exact course to it is hard.
For a while, we drive up and down. Lost. Then Berg figures it out, and suddenly we are on course. We are weaving through a narrow, deep canyon. The walls are blue-white, lit by the Moon. We are alone.
Six hours later, we arrive at the bivouac. It is dawn, and the competitors still in the race are lining up to start the day. Other competitors, who have also spent the night roaming the countryside, trickle in behind us. Technically, we could still continue. However, there is no chance we would finish another day without a rear suspension and a great chance we would badly damage the Jeep and force it to be towed to the finish.
So we join the rest of the rolling wounded: competitors who cannot continue on the race course but are still moving. Those whose vehicles are fatally damaged watch their machines being towed out to be shipped by train back to Moscow. We grab lunches, more water and immediately start on the assistance roads towards Beijing.
The early trade in silk was carried on against incredible odds by great caravans of merchants and animals traveling at a snail’s pace. Over some of the most inhospitable territory on the face of the Earth-searing, waterless deserts and snowbound mountain passes . . . Death followed the heels of every caravan. -Judy Bonavia, “The Silk Road”
The assistance routes we will follow are used by some 23 supply trucks and several press vehicles. But that does not mean they are good roads. Even the paved sections can be rough, and there are many, long unpaved sections. In some places bridges are out.
The assistance route is also the most dangerous part of the raid; that is where the rally’s three fatalities take place. One person, who’s not wearing his racing harness, is killed when his huge truck rolls over. A Chinese motor sports official traveling with the rally dies in a crash of the MAPS vehicle in which he’s riding. The third fatality is a Chinese civilian driving a truck at night without headlights or taillights; he is hit by a MAPS truck.
In contrast, the competitors on the course suffer many broken bones and other injuries but no fatalities. The most serious injury is a broken neck, which results in paralysis for an Italian competitor who is thrown out of his vehicle when it rolls over several times.
In one Moslem village sitting across the mountain range from Iran on the right, we stop for a lunch break. We give the kids some candy, and the adults quickly invite us into their home.
It is a treat. We remove our shoes, sit on the rugs on the floor, and those who aren’t driving have a small shot of vodka, some bread and watermelon. A television playing a martial arts movie dominates the room.
Rolling through Kirghizstan on Sept. 17 almost to the Chinese border, we approach the snow-topped Tien Shan Mountains, passing through country that looks amazingly like southern Utah. At 1:15 p.m. we begin to see the barbed wire marking the Chinese border to our right.
We cross into China through the Torugart Pass, climbing to 10,000 feet. It has been called probably the most exciting and certainly the most beautiful USSR-China crossing. This is where one of the main branches of the Silk Road crossed the Tien Shan. It is normally not open, but special arrangements have been made for the rally.
After brief formalities at the border, we pass a series of Chinese bunkers. Fighting positions. The modern Great Wall.
The Chinese have sternly warned us not to take photographs between the border and the town of Kashi (Kashgar), about 100 miles away. We later hear talk that the Chinese are worried, not about the border fortifications, but the chain gangs we pass: men and woman building a road by hand, living in battered, shabbylooking tent-huts along the road. They are prisoners, and we are told the Chinese do not want anyone to see the faces of those people.
We imagine China to be a lush, green land of rice paddies. Wrong. This Xinjiang area has been called one of the most physically hostile places on Earth. For days we cross the unbelievably harsh, sometimes almost lunar landscape of the almost 309,000 square miles that form the Taklamakan Desert, which, with shifting sand dunes more than 60 feet high, translates into something like “Once you go in, you never come out.” After crossing the Taklamakan, that translation seems a bit mild. It was like being on the edge of the world, says one competitor.
Later, we pass through the Gobi Desert, which is unremarkable and boring-flat and covered with small rocks.
Occasionally, we hit small oasis towns where water has somehow bubbled to the surface, allowing people to live there. We are so accustomed to hundreds and hundreds of miles of dead, brown-and-gray nothingness that green is actually a curiosity, almost a shock.
We continue eastward through Gansu Province along the Hexi Corridor. Some 20 minutes outside the town of Jiayuguan, we finally see the westernmost part of the Great Wall.
It includes a touristy restored Ming fortress, from which the quaint eastern view is of chimneys of the town’s fertilizer, coke and iron factories polluting the air with smoke. This fortress was originally built in 1372 to guard the pass between the snow-covered peaks of the Qilian Mountains to the south and the black Mazong (Horse’s Mane) Mountains to the north.
Jiayuguan lies at the traditional boundary that separated China from the western region that led to the desert and was dominated by barbarians.
Our route begins to follow the Great Wall. For hundreds of miles, we skirt unrestored portions of the wall, which is often punctuated by huge watch towers. We are stunned by the idea that it was built so long ago-and all of it by hand.
As we get further east, the land becomes greener, and the crowds increase. Their enthusiasm actually becomes a major problem. In the city of Yinchuan, it takes us one hour to travel 15 miles because of the huge crowds that filled the entire distance. In many places the people blocking the road refuse to move aside until the vehicles actually move ahead and touch them.
Many are throwing flowers, clapping or waving blue, red, yellow and green flags. Little children jump and wave with their entire bodies. Others just watch the odd-looking Westerners.
The scariest thing is to have a small child or someone dart unexpectedly from the crowd into the path of the Jeep. Even at 5 or 10 miles an hour and with warning blasts from an air horn we use so much that we blow a fuse, we may not be able to stop in time. Happily that never happens.
Because we are not on the race course, we are able to stop and look around in villages. A Chinese journalist tells us that many of these people in western China have never seen Caucasians before. During one stop, an old man approaches me and tugs at the hair on my legs and arms. Using pantomime, I try to explain that all that hair keeps me warm in the winter.
There are advantages in rallying in an authoritarian country. In China, they simply close the roads to civilian traffic so that the rally vehicles can race unhampered. Even in a city as large as Beijing, everything stops as soon as the rally approaches. We regularly pass long lines of cars and trucks waiting for hours and hours for us to go through. Surprisingly, instead of taking offense, their drivers and passengers wave at us enthusiastically.
With minor exceptions, the Chinese police and army exert every effort to limit contact between the rallyists and the local people. This is often accomplished with nothing more than white chalk lines. Generally few police and no weapons are in sight. People are simply told not to cross the lines, and they don’t.
At first we think it’s all meant to protect us from the locals, providing security that was often lacking in the former Soviet Union, where rally bivouacs were often overrun with local visitors, some of whom would “borrow” items. But at one camp in China, we realize it was also to keep us from the locals. We try to cross over a chalk line to give some to some children, but a guard won’t allow it.
From the beginning, the rally organizers and the Chinese have worried about the racers’ arrival in Beijing. After the crowds at Yinchuan, so have we. But our entry into Beijing is actually anticlimactic. The police keep what you can hardly call crowds way back. We conclude that Beijing is a more sophisticated city where Westerners are not an uncommon sight. We’re not sure if we are happy or disappointed. Maybe a bit of both.
Only 50 of the 115 cars and trucks that started roll into Beijing to complete the entire rally course. Only six of the 15 motorcycles make it. Perhaps two dozen other vehicles, including our Jeep, trundle in under their own power.
The overall winner in cars and trucks was Pierre Lartigue and Michel Perin, both of France, in a Citroen ZX Rallye Raid, one hour and eight minutes ahead of a factory Mitsubishi Pajero driven by Erwin Weber and Manfred Hiemer, both of Germany.
Stephane Peterhansel, of France, on a Yamaha XTZ 850 Prototype, finished first among the motorcycles.
Bruno Saby, in a factory Pajero, finished third, not what he wanted. We know the feeling. Saby also speaks for many of us when he says being there was better than staying home.
“We are content to have participated in the first edition of this event,” he says, “and I admire Rene Metge very much for having brought us into these forbidden lands.”
Editor’s note: Cheryl Jensen traveled with the rally and contributed to this story.
