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Nick
receives a round of applause. After passing a brief driver test he is
awarded a temporary Chinese drivers license by Mr. Zhang Jian-Ping of
China International Sports Travel (CIST)
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October
20, 1999
This is Nick
C. Baggarly and I'll start today's journal with a question from twelve year
old Russell Ramirez from Lake Geneva Wisconsin. Russell asks, "How did
you plan your expedition?"
We'll that's
a pretty big question. There were a lot of details to manage. While
planning AroundTheWorld1999 I felt like one of those circus performers who
spins plates on sticks. You set something in motion and every now and then,
check on it to make sure it's still spinning. Quite often there are let
downs as plates drop but you press on and start over when you have to.
In planning
AroundTheWorld1999 I did a lot of research. I read about other vehicle
overland expeditions for ideas on vehicle preparation, gear, team
selection, and driving practices in challenging environments. I subscribed
to two email lists which discuss this subject, read a few books, including
Tom Shepphard's Vehicle Dependent Expedition Guide (or VDE for short) which
is a fantastic book to help you prepare for a journey like this. I also
read the reports and journals of teams that completed the Peking to Paris
Motor Challenge and Todd and I even spoke with several team members from
the Motor Challenge. I'm referring to a vehicle rally that occurred in 1997
consisting of, I believe 92 old vehicles, the newest of which was 30 years
old and the oldest was a 1907 chain driven La France Hooper Sports, driven
by Hermann Layher and John Dick of Germany. They were in the Vintage class
of the rally.
Two of the
participants, Don Jones and Carl Schneider or Fort DuLac, Wisconsin and
Eureka, California respectively were a great help and inspiration for us.
Having done this before, they generously offered their sage advice. Don and
Carl were the drivers of car #65, a 1954 red Packard Straight 8. I'll share
a story which some of you may think is coincidence but I think it's fate.
About five weeks before we began this expedition I was awaken by a
telephone from Carl Schneider. The answering machine picked up and when the
guy announced himself as Carl Schneider I bolted out of bed and ran into
the computer room to grab the phone. Carl had been in Monterey for a big
auto show and he wanted to let us about a book signing event at the Black
Hawk Auto Museum in Dublin California.
Later this
same day, Carl and about ten other team members from the 1997 rally were
meeting in Dublin to support Genevive Obert's book entitled Prince Borghese's Trail.
In the '97 rally Genevive and Linda Dodwell were the drivers of Car #51, a
1968 Hillman Hunter entered in the Classics class. Once the teams learned
what we were doing they immediately began giving us advice and they
answered a myriad of questions that Todd and I had batched up for them. It
was kind of funny actually because we had watched their videos and read
their journals so we were able to keep up with their conversations and even
contribute a bit as they reminisced about their amazing Peking to Paris
rally experience. Oh, by the way, Gena's book is great and it's required
reading for anyone considering this sort of thing. Our entire group has
read it - at one time three of us were reading it at the same time and we
were stealing it from one another. It has become known as, "the
book." This meeting at the Black Hawk couldn't have come at a better
time for us and we thank Don Jones and Carl Schneider for their assistance
and support.
What else did
we do to prepare? Well there's the obvious stuff like pre-paying bills,
arranging finances, finding someone to feed our pet cockatoo Chiquita,
making hotel reservations for every night in every city. Then there's the
not so obvious tasks like obtaining vehicle permission for each country using
a set of forms called Carnet de Passage also known as Carnet du En Duan.
Carnets are a type of bond, setup by the Council for International
Business, to allow temporary import and export of personal property for
exhibitions and fairs. Vehicle shipping was a foreign subject for me but we
research it and found people who had done it before and asked a lot of
questions. When it comes to shipping your vehicle somewhere my advice is to
ask a lot of different people the same questions and average the results.
When you ship
cargo (that's a pun in our case) a lot of people choose to have a service
company called a Freight Forwarder handle all the details of getting your
freight from A to B. We went this route and, while I 'm certain a Freight
Forwarder is the way to go, we ended up with a unprofessional joint out of
Oakland, CA called Sea Shipping and they screwed things up in a big way. I
won't go into all the details but despite countless phone calls (I imagine
I called them fifty times over a two month period) and countless questions
to ensure that things would go smoothly, I learned a hard lesson working
with them. Sometimes no matter how pre-emptive you try to be, if the other
guy isn't doing his job, you will fail. Bottom line, our vehicles arrived
near Beijing the day before we arrived, as planned, but our Forwarder
decided to pull an unorthodox maneuver. They faxed the Beijing port
notifying them to not release the Land Rovers. Their fax did not contain
any reason and, by the time we learned of this, the western weekend had
begun. It took four days to obtain the Land Rovers once clearance was
given.
Other things
we did to prepare. Part of this sort of travel involves letting government
agencies know who you are, why your in their country, and when you will
arrive. A month before we left we divided up country research among the
team. I had China. Doug, Tibet and Nepal, Jeff took India and Todd took
Pakistan. Earle researched Iran and made arrangements for a government
official tour to get us through this country safely, and Chanda has Turkey.
We hope to be in Turkey on Thanksgiving but our new schedule might miss
that. We made an Excel spreadsheet matrix to track notification of the
various governments with our travel plans. In one column the worksheet contains
each country. The rows listed the American Embassy and Consulate, Canadian
Embassy and Consulate, as well as the travel offices of the country itself.
We obtained contact information for each of these offices in every country
and sent a form letter with all of our trip details. Whenever possible we
would contact using four communication methods. Email (which is definitely
preferred), fax, voice, and of course snail mail.
In most cases
we received responses quickly and when we were finished we had a pretty
nice list of contact information for each country. In some cases like
Pakistan (fortunately) we are on a first name basis with the American
embassy representatives. They have arranged armed police escorts for our
travel through this country. We also obtained people permission for each
country by submitting Visa Applications. A word about visas. We used a
service called Travisa for this. We worked with Pete and John in the San
Francisco office but they have offices elsewhere and in Washing D.C. too
since that's where a lot of foreign embassies and consulate offices are.
Travisa is a
visa expediting service. We needed visas for six countries and we need them
fast. They were able to arrange five visas in under two weeks and they
moved our passports from embassy to embassy fast. They were never sitting
on someone's desk for long because Pete and John would call several times
daily to micro-manage the entire process. We got all but Iran and we picked
them up from the last embassy, India's embassy, the morning we departed on
the flight to Beijing. Once in Beijing we obtained our Iranian visas from
the Iranian embassy in Beijing. Even though we had a confirmation number
and they were expecting us, they charged us double for 24 hour processing.
If we had given Travisa more time they would have gotten us a much better
deal.
And, of
course, a major part of preparation surrounded our work on two vehicles,
age 30 and 37, to ensure they can travel 15,000 miles without major
failures. I'll have to go into vehicle preparations at a later time.
Well, we are
in Lanzhou. We had planned a rest day here in Lanzhou
but decided to forego it having had yesterday afternoon and evening free
due to our mid-afternoon arrival on October 19th. This puts us back on
schedule not in terms of our itinerary but we are back in line with the
distance we hope to cover each day.
We said
goodbye to Jeff as he left on a two hour bus ride to the Lanzhou airport to
catch a flight to Chengdu City. Because Jeff was a late addition to our
team he is unable to accompany us the entire distance through Tibet. Only a
limited amount of foreigners are allowed to travel this route each year and
as the CIST tour company explained to me, it takes several weeks of
preparations to get foreigners through this region. We didn't give them
enough time to make the arrangements for Jeff however but they did arrange
for Jeff to fly from Lanzhou to Chengdu which is apparently a beautiful
city in China's south central Sichuang province. He will spend a few days
there and then fly to Lhasa to meet up with us. Unfortunately he will be
unable to leave Lhasa with us. Jeff will fly from Lhasa to Katmandu and
continue driving with us from there.
If we were on
a vehicle rally like the '97 Motor Challenge we would probably be in last
place. We got a real late start out of Lanzhou. I think we left at 4:00pm.
About ten minutes out of the city we encountered our third vehicle problem
(for those of you who are counting). During our afternoon of vehicle
maintenance yesterday, we noticed a leak at the oil filter cannister and
tightened it. The field repair attempt compressed the O-ring and made the
oil leak even worse so we stopped and spent an hour replacing the 0-ring
from our spare parts supply.
Again we did
something we don't like to do and that is driving at night. We only drive
at night when the group is in full agreement that it is either safe or
necessary and, since everyone wanted to make our evening destination we
pressed on carefully through the night. Today we experienced our first rain
which was only a drizzle actually. Thus far we have had really nice mild
weather with the exception of day 2 when we drove from Badaling and The
Great Wall to Zhang Jiakou when it was quite cold (1c) and windy.
We estimate
that Earle has consumed a dozen hard boiled eggs since we arrived. The hard
boiled egg is a staple in every Chinese breakfast buffet and Earle has
taken quite a liking to them.
Obligatory
Northern Cal Rover Club content for the day. I have been taking pictures of
all of the four wheel drive vehicles we have been seeing . Here we see a
lot of Jeep Grand Cherokees, most of which are made here in China and known
as Chinese Cherokees. So far I have seen only one other land rover. It was
painted what I call Beijing blue and if you spend any time here you'll know
the color I'm referring to.practically every truck in the country is
painted this color. It went around a corner quickly, which is unusual for a
Land Rover so I didn't have a chance to snap a photo.
When I look
around I see a society of hard working individuals-no matter what the class
be it farmer or manager, street cleaner or business man everyone here seems
very determined to work hard. People pretty much keep to themselves. When
the vehicles break down a crowd will gather within minutes. We're a
spectacle! But other than that, say you' re walking down the street-it's
obvious we're foreigners but the local Chinese don't seem to care one way
or another-which is nice. It's nice to keep a low profile while you travel
and the Chinese make this very easy for us.
I grew up
knowing China as only three words. Made In China. Now I have had a chance
to see the country behind the label and I see it as a hard working product
producing country. Not only is their production enough to support a huge
society of 1.2 billion people but they produce so much for the rest of the
world. As a fringe benefit perhaps, everyone here dresses quite nicely. Suits,
ties, sport coats, slacks, nice shoes and hats can be seen on most anyone
walking downtown.
We arrived in
Xining City at 9:30pm.
You need four
things to travel. Time, money, energy, and desire. We are fortunate to have
a team of six who have these qualifications. The team morale is very high
and I am impressed by their motivation and energy. Each morning we waste no
time getting our gear and the vehicles packed up, and vehicle checklists
completed.
Well that's
all for today, October 20th. This is Nick Baggarly saying Zhai Jian!
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