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 Borgazies 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!