Peking to Paris by Dina Bennett

Author:Dina Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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, though. 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I line up early to get the change pages then annotate my route book so I’ll know when the original instructions are no longer valid as well as when to resume following them.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.

Also in the category of mistaken assumptions is that I know absolutely there are areas of tremendous natural beauty in Mongolia. Somewhere. What I know haunts me. Those photos I looked at with the Mongolian naturalists are still branded in my mind’s eye. I want to feel the cool shade of those deep forests, hear the babbling roll of rushing rivers, and feast my eyes on the rainbow colors of alpine wildflowers.

Our part of Mongolia is desert, plain and simple.

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