Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  'That's neat,' Phil kindly approved of this small piece of housekeeping.

  I had begun to mind more acutely about my ignorance in relation to the car and its workings. Phil understood and controlled all the essential oily intricacies under the bonnet, and I fiddled about with navigator's accessories. Of course I could have gone down to Stamford Brook day after day and insisted on being taught how to recondition the prop-shaft myself – but that hadn't been our deal. Now that we were finally on the road together, I would just have to see how the deal actually worked out. I was remembering, rather belatedly, that to confine a man and a woman in a car together is one of the quickest ways of drawing up the gender battle lines.

  After thinking about it some more, I decided that my sudden defensiveness was probably only related to uncertainty about whether I was going to be any use as a navigator. Phil had equipped himself to be a mechanic and now he was ensconced behind the wheel, and I was shortly going to have to demonstrate that I could handle the Terratrip and the road book with matching confidence.

  Our practice day out with Colin Bryce in Somerset had been good fun but it hadn't taught us to be real rally navigators, and most of the people I had chatted with casually in the last couple of days had already importantly done classic rallies like the Monte Carlo, or the Land's End–John o'Groat's, or the Targa Espana. As Maurizio had said back in the farmyard in England, we had picked a big one for starters.

  I opened the route notes and put on my specs to study them. The first instructions on the first page read:

  (. . . and so on, for the full 16,000 kilometres . . .)

  Having already worked out that S/O meant straight on and T/L traffic lights, all this should have been easy except that we hadn't started from the hotel, the route we were now following bore no relation to the instructions, and I hadn't the faintest idea where in eastern China we might be. On the positive side, every other crew was in the same boat and so were the organisers. The police had changed the planned route to suit themselves, and we would be travelling in a convoy with them for at least two days. This wasn't a rally yet – just a police procession, and even I couldn't lose my way with a cop on a bike nudging up each bumper. Two days would give me plenty of time to play with the rally trip, read and re-read the route notes, unfold the marked-up maps and convince Phil that I knew what I was doing. His capabilities impressed me, and I wanted to offer him the same level of efficiency in return.

  'Look,' he said.

  We were pulling into the centre lane to let a big black car go by. It was a chauffeured Rolls, with Union flag pennants merrily fluttering. There were two passengers in sombre black clothes in the back: the British Ambassador and his wife, bound for the Great Wall just like us, to give the rally a proper send-off.

  Out at the Great Wall there was . . . another car park.

  It was still only nine in the morning, and the cars were lined up in great snaking columns, besieged by camera crews and journalists and hundreds of Chinese well-wishers, and tiny children in Peking to Paris baseball caps, and the entire staff of the Great Wall Kentucky Fried Chicken who had come out to rubberneck. There was a multi-legged Chinese dragon winding in and out of the crowds, and a Chinese band very approximately playing Strauss waltzes. And there was also the Wall itself.

  I had been warned that this piece of it was tourist central; an over-restored and over-visited urban stretch which wouldn't give an impression of the magnificence of the more remote sections. The warnings were justified, particularly given the setting of fast-food restaurants and tatty souvenir shops, but even so it was a startling spectacle. The Wall was a pristine and unwavering brown brush-stroke, impeccably crenellated, that switchbacked up and down the little pine-covered willow-pattern hills into the remote blue distance, and way beyond. I took a couple of photographs and promised myself that I would come back when I had less on my mind.

  Down at car park level no one seemed to have much idea what the Official Start would actually consist of. The ambassador and his lady were making their dignified black-clad way along the files of cars. At one point I heard some distant babbling through a microphone that might conceivably have been speeches, but the amplification was lousy, and the band played on. The sky had turned a fragile pale blue, promising intense heat later in the day. Cars began to move off from the front, but reckoning on from this morning's tedious wait, I thought I had plenty of time to investigate the rumoured awfulness of Chinese public lavatories. I wandered off, and was duly convinced. When I came back Phil and the car had disappeared.

  I ran up and down for a minute like a rat in a maze, and then heard a furious hooting behind me. They rematerialised and I dived into my seat.

  'We had to start,' Phil frothed. 'What were you doing?'

  'Peeing.'

  'Now we'll have to go round again.'

  'Sorry.'

  Marvellous. After eight months of non-stop preparation I had actually missed the off.

  Belatedly I saw that the actual start consisted of a giant red inflatable rubber arch, easily kitsch enough to compete with the souvenir shop merchandise. We sailed through it, apparently for the second time, to the accompaniment of applause, a trumpet fanfare and a row of puzzled stares from the officials. We heard later that the Chief of Police was incensed at our effrontery in starting twice over. Maybe, Phil said, we'll get a chance to finish twice as well.

  And then we drove. The cars streamed away at their various speeds and the field was soon widely spaced, although the police did their best to push us closer together and the marshals and support crews drove up and down in their official Vauxhall Fronteras to chivvy the laggards and help out the cars who were having problems at the roadside. Industrialised eastern China featured massively hideous concrete architecture, giant heaps of coal at the roadside, and heavy traffic. All along the way were little open-fronted mechanical repair shops with forecourts heaped with dismantled machinery. The pollution was even worse than in Beijing; to wind down the window for a breath of air was to let in a gust of eye-burning filth and choking dust.

  The midday heat was cruel. I sweated in my black clothes, and wished we had brought a proper supply of bottled water. The convoy rolled on, with no suggestion of a lunch stop or even a comfort break – I smiled to think how much Caradoc would have hated it. My guilt at having taken off on this great adventure and left him behind subsided a little. He was safely in London beckoning over the sommelier and debating the clarets, which was what he liked to do, and in turn I was trying to pinpoint exactly what it was that I liked about extreme heat, dirt and discomfort.

  There was no navigating to do. For part of the way we seemed to be following the route set out in the notes, and I zeroed the intermediate trip each time we passed an instruction point. The kilometre distances from point to point seemed more or less to correspond with those in the notes, so it was safe to assume that the trips were working properly. I also checked off each instruction as we passed it, neatly striking it through in the book with a fluorescent green marker pen (keeping the pink one for Phil to use when he took over the navigation). This, I knew, was what real rally navigators did.

  The properly anal ones, at any rate.

  When the police route diverged from the notes once again there was nothing to do but play music and wave at the other cars as we overtook them, and then wave and smile again as they overtook us 10 kilometres further down the road.

  The distance from the Great Wall to our night's stopover at Zhangjiakou was only about 160 kilometres, but it seemed much further. Ten kilometres out of the town we were pulled over into a huge queue of rally cars waiting to be refuelled. Petrol was free all the way across China, but the drawback was that it was only available at the designated filling station, which most of the cars reached at more or less the same time. The pumps worked very, very slowly.

  But on this first evening we were all high on the day's progress and happy to be moving at all, even in the boring and irksome convoy. The hour or two that it took t
o refuel was passed in gossip, which ran up and down the queue like wildfire. Most of us had seen Lord Montagu standing arms akimbo at the roadside, in his pukka-Englishman-abroad outfit of khaki shorts and ribbed knee-socks, while poor Doug Hill the mechanic wrestled under the open bonnet of the Vauxhall. Serious overheating was the problem, we now heard. An American Ford Model A had dropped a valve and was unlikely to reappear, and the Jag Mark VII and the handsome Stutz coupe were also having trouble. Those of us who had survived the first day apparently intact exchanged our impressions.

  'Not bad,' Dan said. We bought bottles of water from coolie-hatted women with cool boxes mounted on the backs of their bicycles. The water looked dubious but we were so thirsty we drank it anyway. 'How's your car going?'

  Team Amazon in action.

  'Seems OK.'

  We pushed it closer to the pump, to save the starter motor.

  When we reached Zhangjiakou the entire town seemed to have turned out to greet us. They watched each arrival with amazed enthusiasm, clapping and shouting Hello! and Welcome! as we turned into the parking lot. And as we were coming to expect, there were dozens of police to monitor the crowds, and us.

  As soon as we were stationary Phil had the bonnet up.

  'Look at this,' he said. He pulled the corners of his mouth down towards the points of his jaw, exposing his lower teeth. It was an expression I was to come to know, and to dread.

  'What's that?'

  He was holding up a small blue cylinder about the same shape and size as a rather unexciting mid-range firework.

  'The coil. Ignition coil.'

  It was oozing some treacly brown substance from the metalwork at the top. It didn't, admittedly, look very healthy.

  'It's overheating,' he groaned.

  'It was a very hot day.'

  'I think it's where it's positioned, right on the heater there. Tony insisted it would be fine. He didn't reckon on how hot it would be out here.'

  Dan and JD came over to give the benefit of their advice. Between them they decided that Phil should temporarily remount the coil bracket and leads well away from the heater, fit our spare, and monitor it very closely tomorrow. I wandered away to look at some of the other cars. A few metres away a pleasant Dutch couple, the Gulikers, were sitting in folding canvas chairs at the back of their '56 Chevy pick-up. The tail was folded down to reveal a complete and immaculately fitted kitchen, with a couple of pans merrily simmering on the gas burners. A proper meal was in preparation. The organisation of it all was a poem, a work of art. There were tupperware boxes of tea and sugar and supplies of food, symmetrically stacked, braced with shelving. It looked to be better equipped than my kitchen at home. Somehow Mrs Guliker had been allowed, possibly even encouraged, to bring a colander.

  I expressed my admiration, and they gave me a cup of tea.

  The hotel was the opening line of what was to become a very long and tedious joke. By the time we reached Iran I didn't even want to hear the punchline. The lobby was a dingy cave with a tiny shop – already sold out of bottled water – in one corner. Reception would have been better named Rejection.

  At length we achieved a key, and a room to go with it, immediately off the lobby. The dark green paper was hanging in damp festoons off the wall, everything else was dark brown. In the bathroom someone had left a large deposit in the lavatory pan. I tried the handle but no water ensued. I marched straight back to Rejection. Phil Colley, our interpreter, was elsewhere – no doubt interpreting in a much bigger crisis. The boot-faced woman behind the desk stared sullenly while I tried to explain what was the matter. At last I drew a picture of a bog, tastefully omitting the turd, and crossed it out. She condescended to nod so I went back, put down the lid, ran a bath and got into it. Naturally the maintenance man came while I was lying back trying to read the weighty Vogue I kept hidden from Phil in my kitbag. When the time came to pull out the plug there was a subterranean gurgle and the water spouted out of a pipe in the bath side. At least it sluiced the floor somewhat.

  Over what passed for dinner I met Carolyn Ward, who was driving a Land Rover Series IIA with a South African called David Tremain. The Land Rover was painted pale blue to match, Carolyn told me, the colour of her favourite evening dress.

  'I have just run a bath,' she announced now, 'that I wouldn't put my dog in.'

  Afterwards, in the velvety twilight, I sat on the outside steps of the dining-room with Phil and JD and Dan and the Bentley boys, drinking Chinese beer to offset the minimal calorie intake at dinner, and laughing too much. This was more like my imaginings. Next thing there might even be a guitar and some exotic cigarettes.

  Immediately in front of us Lord Montagu's Vauxhall was parked in the middle of the hotel courtyard. It was hemmed in by an immense circle of Chinese onlookers, all of them watching his mechanic Doug Hill, who was working by the light of a ring of torches. Overheating had caused the fan to work loose, and the fan blades had smashed through the radiator. Doug was now trying to solder the radiator fins one by one.

  'Poor sod,' someone said.

  After several more beers it was time to go to bed – but, as it turned out, not to sleep.

  'Night,' Phil said, pulling his covers over his head and falling instantly into a coma. At the same minute, out in the lobby on the other side of our door, a quartet of Chinese madwomen arrived armed with tin buckets, twenty aluminium saucepans and what sounded like a football rattle apiece. They settled to the business of throwing these at each other and seeing if they could shout loudly enough to drown the clatter. This continued without stopping until 4.30 a.m., when our alarm call came. Breakfast was the leftover cold shellfish from dinner, and some rice gruel, and then at six o'clock we were driving again.

  We had a little over 500 kilometres to cover, with the police nudging us along all the way. In the morning their route changes took in some off-road sections around the back of villages, twisty and sandy tracks through fields of tall sweetcorn that made Phil frown in concentration as he drove.

  'She's good,' he announced when we hit tarmac again. 'Handles well. But we could still do with improving the clearance. We might have to lose some weight.'

  No problem, given a few more dinners like last night's.

  In the afternoon we came to a brand-new motorway that the police had closed to all other traffic. I drove, watching the red speedo line creeping to the right. One-forty, 150, 160 kph. We ate up the kilometres, overtaking everything we saw, and I ignored Phil's left foot pressing vainly against the floor until we came very suddenly to a row of cones that marked the end of the motorway and a right-angle turn. I slammed my foot down and wrenched the wheel, feeling the chassis lurch sideways.

  'Cadence!' Phil screamed.

  Frantically I pumped the brake up and down and somehow we made the turn and left the cones intact, a bit of an improvement on Silverstone. Things went quiet in the car after that.

  There was another two-hour wait for fuel outside West Baotou, where we would be staying the night. This was the first stop since leaving Zhangjiakou. The unmarked black-windowed four-wheel-drive vehicles had doubled up and down the field all day, keeping us together and keeping us going. I asked one of the organisers who or what was inside and he answered, 'Don't ask.' But at the same time he made a gesture as if cradling an automatic weapon across his hips. On every bend and bridge and junction, too, there had been a policeman to watch us.

  In the morning I had put four bottles of mineral water and some raisins and a couple of oranges in the car, that was all, imagining that we would be able to buy food and drink at a roadside bar or café. By the time we reached the head of the queue for fuel Phil and I were both tired and dehydrated and ravenously hungry. There was no water for sale at the filling station. We pulled away from the pumps at last only to discover that we were the first car in the last police convoy to the hotel, which meant that we had to wait for every car behind us to be fuelled before we could move. Another hour at least, filthy and thirsty and exhausted, in a temperat
ure of over ninety degrees.

  I went to retrieve something from the boot, and carelessly banged the lid.

  'If you slam that boot lid again I'll put you in and lock you inside.'

  'Oh, fuck off.'

  We stared at each other in surprise, and then sat out the rest of the wait in silence.

  At last we reached the hotel. Phil yanked the bonnet up and did the face again. He raked his hair back too, a two-handed sweep, so that it stood up in a dust-thickened quiff.

  'What's up?'

  'Coil.'

  Even though he had resited it, our spare was also oozing a drop of brown goo. Not as bad as yesterday's, but definitely not right either.

  In the end Phil decided that we had just bought coils that were too cheap and unreliable. 'Only seven quid each from Halfords,' he recalled. Invoking Team Amazon, he borrowed a more robust and expensive-looking firework from Dan and fitted it, praying that it would solve the problem. It was 8 p.m. when we finally got into the hotel and in the morning, the rally bulletin-board in the lobby announced, there would be a 4.15 wake-up call. I hadn't slept at all the previous night, and I felt too tired and dispirited to eat any dinner.

  On the way up to bed I met a woman I was to come to know as Jill Dangerfield, who was driving a Holden saloon with her husband Richard.

  Jill asked what car I was in, and I told her.

  'Oh,' she said. 'You're the people in the hot Volvo who keep overtaking us.'

  Marvellous. My spirits soared. The hot Volvo, eh?

  And in the morning we would start proper rallying. No more convoy.

  Furthermore I would make myself into a good navigator, come what may, and I didn't care what Phil thought of my driving.

  This was the first taste of Rally Syndrome, for me. It was possible – more than possible, almost de rigueur – to be in the deepest depths at one moment and in the next to be swept to the heights of exultation.