Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

The rest of the cars and the day's news filtered in. Only seven cars out of the whole field had cleaned the 29-minute section, two of the Iranian crews and the green Aston Martin among them, and three of those – including Carolyn – were in four-wheel drive machines. Dan and JD had broken both their rear shock absorbers and had gone out into Xigatse in search of a mechanic and welding gear. Plenty of other cars were in difficulties with their suspensions, and had dropped time at two or more of the day's stages. Phil and I felt that we had good reason to be pleased with ourselves. We were still fifth out of the five Volvos competing but we had moved up to 58th place. Tomorrow would bring another hard day's driving; we thought that our Amazon had proved to be so strong over the rough roads that we could risk going flat out once again – and maybe creeping a few more places up the order.

  It was a good night. I sat by Dave Bull at dinner and we talked about our lives at home and our families and what we believed in. It was one of those generous inclusive conversations about things that mattered – the first I had had since talking to Chris Taylor in Lanzhou. Dave was also very funny. He told me that his mother-in-law kept losing her false teeth. Most recently they had turned up in someone's luggage in a different car.

  'They'll be found biting into some poor bugger's sandwich next,' Dave said.

  Afterwards we retired to the bar, recklessly dismissing all thoughts of altitude. Everyone was buzzing with the thrills of the day, and wanting to drink and talk about it. I had a private toast to make. It was 17 September, Charlie's eighteenth birthday.

  I had tried to telephone, but I couldn't get through. I knew that Caradoc was giving a party for him at our house, drinks for his godparents and close family and friends, and then Charlie and his mates were going to dinner afterwards and then out clubbing. Sitting in my chair in the Xigatse Hotel bar, half-listening to the joking and boasting about the day, I thought very hard about what it would be like at home: I imagined the conversations and speeches, and heard the laughter and congratulations, and the effort of concentration happily seemed to bring them all closer instead of emphasising the distance between us.

  I remembered the day when Charlie was born.

  The most vivid recollection of it was the way that every one of life's perspectives changed, immediately, irrevocably, as soon as he was handed to us. I had been warned, of course, but I had never understood how having a child is the end of considering your own needs and desires first, not just for a few years, but for ever. Once we had him, blinking and tomato-faced, I understood completely. I was awestruck. It was the biggest thing that would ever happen – bigger than bereavement, marriage, growing up, or any of life's other milestones, just to be given the responsibility and the joy of keeping this small thing safe. Even though I was running around the world on my own, risking everything with a bunch of motorists, I still felt the same, even though today he was technically an adult. The central experience, for me, was always being a mother.

  The noise level was rising and the beers were going down fast.

  Three more day's driving and we would be in Kathmandu. I was full of optimism. We would get there, I would get the medicine to fix my little problem, and from Kathmandu we would be running on towards home.

  Chapter Nine

  The scenery was astounding. On the run out of Xigatse, the road twisted like a river of dust through a fertile valley with broad banks of cultivated ground rolling away on either side of it. The mountains closing in on us were dark blue in shadow and burned ochre where the sun touched them, but in the foreground the crops grew in haphazard strips and patches that were every shade of green from sage to forest, and every brown and yellow from palest gold through cinnamon and rust to rich dark earth. I pressed my face to the passenger window, keeping only half an eye on the trip and the route notes, trying to compress the picture into compartments in my memory by naming the gradations of colour.

  'How are you feeling?'

  'Okay, thanks.'

  Dr Ninety-dollar's pills seemed to have started working, just a little. Maybe it was only a placebo effect but it was something.

  We climbed through a little pass in the hills and then the route wound into a gorge. The gorge narrowed until we were penetrating a vee of rock, on a road that was no more than a lip of dirt twisting beside a drop that I didn't want to glance down into. The climb grew steeper.

  'Morgan up ahead,' Phil said. 'He looks as if he's in trouble.'

  We came up behind it and bobbed for a few hundred metres in the dust on his tail, looking for a place to slip past and losing power as our speed dropped to match theirs. At last they pulled aside. The navigator stuck his fist out of the window and angrily gestured us to go.

  'They don't look too happy,' Phil grinned. He eased his foot down and we picked up enough power to struggle by.

  The road climbed up and up. We were all right by the clock, but we were both worried about the demands that the ascent and the altitude were making on the car. There seemed to be a noticeable loss of power that made me wish I had jettisoned my Vogue. But at last, as Phil stirred his way up and down through the gears, the sky widened overhead and we crested a bleak hump of road. It was the summit of the Tsuo La pass, at 4,500 metres.

  Then there was a long, steep and dusty run down to the control at Lhatse.

  Last night's gossip had indicated that the next section was a crucial one – the organisers had revised the route to shake out the order again. There was now a 34 km short stage to a control sited at the top of the Gyatso Pass. At 5,220 metres this was the highest point of the road between Lhasa and Kathmandu, the watershed between Tibet and India – and 20 m higher than Everest Base Camp.

  Lord Montagu and his 1915 Vauxhall Prince Henry on the start line in Beijing, September 6. Unfortunately the Vauxhall only survived for four days, but Lord Montagu hitched a series of lifts with other competitors and made it all the way to Paris.

  Chinese contrasts: Pagodas and the blue wagons that clogged every highway.

  Police and army personnel monitored every metre of progress across China. Wherever we stopped, there was a rush to sit behind the wheel.

  Dan and me beside the Tanggu La stupa on the Roof of the World section. Tibet. This was the highest point on the rally at nearly 17.000 feet, and a stone's throw from the highest rally control point ever established.

  Buddhist monks and the Potala Palace. Lhasa, for centuries the focus of Tibetan religious and cultural life. The Chinese flag flies from the summit.

  Chomolungma, 'Goddess Mother of the World', is the Tibetan name for Everest. Turn left at this sign and the trail leads onwards to Base Camp. Displaying the OK sign is mandatory every time the car stops, to indicate to other crews and support teams that you are not in trouble.

  A long line of rally cars snakes through Zhangmu, the Chinese frontier town, on the way into Nepal.

  Car 82 negotiates the 'road' from Choksam in Tibet down to the Friendship Bridge and the Nepali frontier.

  The Friendship Bridge, between Tibet and Nepal, crossed for the first time by an International motor event.

  Phil in shades and the Sheikh of Araby turban with some of the Nepali camp crew.

  The nightly spanner check in high camp on the Tibetan plateau.

  Melissa and friend.

  Jingers, Rick the paramedic and Trev (silting down) on the morning time control at Nainital hill station, India.

  Water buffalo in a roadside waterhole, somewhere in India.

  In the desert, Baluchistan. The great barge-fronted wagons with their gaudy decorations bear threateningly down the centre of the road.

  Exhausted Phil reaches the end of an all-night session in the garage, Rimini, Italy.

  The Bentley Boys. Adam Hartley and Jon Turner, with Adam's 4½ litre 1928 VdP Le Mans.

  Phil, Dan and JD after the shopping opportunity at legendary Maranello, birthplace of Ferrari, Italy.

  Richard Curtis with Prince Idris Shah's Model B Ford on the Kandelpasse, Germany.

  Rally time
control with flag, Frontera, rally clock and Mick O'Malley, somewhere on the road.

  We had a time allowance, once again, of 29 minutes. Anything faster than 1 km per minute, on roads like these, signalled trouble.

  Our minute was 11.18. Phil went off from the start with his foot hard down. I set the timer, buckled my harness and checked that the fastening was secure.

  Beep.

  'One fifty, fork left. Signpost Xegar. Very bumpy road.'

  'Got you.'

  The car bounced and shimmied over the rocks. It was like being thrown about inside a tumble drier.

  'Fork coming up now.'

  'Got you.'

  Beep. The sound that syncopated my dreams.

  We swung round a tight bend past a little settlement. On the left was the Hillman Hunter belonging to the tooth brushless American women, stationary and slewed at an angle in the ditch. The car was surrounded by local people and an Iranian Peykan Hunter had stopped to give assistance. Barely two kilometres further along there was a huge rut in the road and dust hanging thick in the air. Phil swung the wheel to miss the rut and at the same instant we saw the Gulikers' Chewy pick-up buried nose-down in a concrete culvert at the side of a bridge. They were both standing beside it, and there was a four-wheel drive with a tow-rope, so we swerved to keep going and bounced on over the bridge. Renger Guliker must have seen the rut and taken avoiding action and then, unsighted by the dust from the car in front, he had missed the bridge altogether and crashed into the gully beside it.

  'Be careful,' I muttered to Phil. And then, seeing that we weren't achieving the necessary minimum of 65 kph I contradicted it immediately with, 'We need to go faster.'

  'Hold tight then. Here we go.'

  Phil looked fierce but he loved all this testosteronic display. Bare-knuckle competition made his blood sing. I could hear the tune from where I crouched in the navigator's seat. He liked it best when we skidded through some impossible gap past Mick Flick or the land crab or Thomas and Maria and accelerated into the open space in front.

  Yeahhhh. Gotcha. Let's go . . .

  I loved it too. It was beyond luck that he had turned out to be such a good driver.

  Soon we could see the road beginning to climb into what looked like impenetrable heights. The surface was corrugated dirt; we bounced over the ridges and all the contents of the car rattled and slid. The essential cassette player was working its way loose from its mountings and Phil leaned forward to wedge it back into place. We were going up now; the air was hazy with dust and a grey-white film of it penetrated the car and settled in a thick layer over us and everything else inside. White puffs of it high up in the distance marked the progress of cars making the climb ahead of us.

  'Come on, let's go for it,' Phil cajoled. 'Come on baby.'

  The Amazon obliged, but slowly. Altitude sucked the power out of her. The minutes were flashing away and it was a cruel 6 km climb to the top of the pass, but I still thought we had a good chance of doing it inside our time. Seven minutes to run.

  I hung on, hunched in my seat as we skidded around the bends. Up and up, as fast as it was possible to go, with the straining engine and the music drumming together and the trip flickering in front of my eyes.

  Six minutes, then five.

  We still weren't going fast enough, even though Phil was driving at the very limit of his own and the car's capacity. We were 3 minutes inside time when I realised we weren't going to make it. The Amazon didn't have quite enough in her and the control wasn't situated at the very summit of the pass, but a little beyond and down the other side. Even so, we were going so fast that we almost took off as we came over the top.

  Beepbeepbeepbeep. Out of time again.

  I shouted, 'Keep going. We're only going to be a couple of minutes adrift.'

  The control appeared ahead with one car pulling away, none waiting. No one could have had any time in hand on this section.

  We skidded in behind the Frontera and I leapt out and ran. Mike Summerfield was the marshal.

  'Car 82, looking for 11.47.'

  'It's 11.50, madam.' He stamped my card. Three-minute penalty. 'How are you today?'

  'Fine. Thanks.' Or at least, I would be soon.

  Phil and I were on an adrenalin high again. Gasping and laughing with the buzz of the drive we rolled past the control and parked a little further on where the Peugeot and Chris and Howard's Camaro and a couple of other cars were also pulled up. The rest of the day was decontrolled – all we had to do was proceed to Everest camp and hand in our books on arrival so, confusingly after the wild dash in which every minute mattered, there was now some time for some idling.

  Phil climbed out to examine our shock absorbers. They were too hot to touch, but there were no visible cracks or holes punched anywhere. We strolled up and down to ease cramped legs and exchanged stories of the day's drama with the other drivers. Paul Minassian and Paul Grogan in the hot Peugeot had been four minutes over on the section, and Chris and Howard had lost time too. We heard that Mick Flick and several others had taken a wrong turning down in the valley, near where we had seen the American girls and the Gulikers, and had dropped way back. Bart Rietbergen in Kermit, the green Volvo PV544, had been one of the cars in equal first place at the beginning of the day but his dynamo had fallen off because the bolt holding it to the engine block sheared. He had rushed to a local blacksmith to have a replacement made, but he had still lost 66 minutes.

  Sarah Catt stepped out of a support car and came over to tell us her story. She had been riding as a passenger in RO's Peugeot this morning when he had driven into a ditch and blown both front tyres. She had left him standing at the roadside while his co-driver battled to change the damaged wheels, and now she was looking for a lift onwards towards camp. We were ready to move on, and so she squeezed in on my lap with her head bent against the roof and her hand gripping the roll cage for balance. Rally cars are definitely not designed for three people. While Phil and she gossiped I turned my head and watched the scenery through the passenger window. It was a vast empty space of yellow-brown turf and grey peaks, without a tree or a bird or any living thing, but it was lively with vast stately cumulo-nimbus clouds drifting across the hard blue sky. The clouds drew patches of purple-grey shadow like bruises over the ground.

  Fifty kilometres further on through this barren land we found John and Simon Catt, Sarah's father and brother, changing a wheel on their Cortina. They were one of only two crews to have cleaned the day – quite an achievement. We had dropped some height from the uncomfortable altitude of the pass, down to about fifteen thousand feet, and it was time to stop and cook up some hot food. Sarah hitched another lift onwards with David Burlinson, and I spread out our tarpaulin in a sheltered hollow beside the road while Phil lit the camping stove. Somewhere to our left, masked by layers of low cloud on the horizon, was Everest.

  Lying on the ground warmed by the sun and wrapped up in my down jacket with the clink of tools and the comfortable hiss of gas in my ears, I almost fell asleep. I was more tired than I knew.

  When I opened my eyes again there were two black shapes outlined against the sky. A pair of Tibetan children had materialised out of the landscape, there was no telling where from, and were standing staring at me. The older one was perhaps five or six, the younger one couldn't have been more than three, and they were completely alone. We exchanged greetings, tashideli, hello. It was unthinkable to eat in front of them, so we shared our billycan of food and gave them some muesli bars and biros. They held the trophies tight in dirty fists, and watched us all the time we were packing up again. As we drove away I looked back and they were still standing there, two tiny dots in the great windy space.

  It was a long, stirring drive through the dust to the overnight stop. We passed the turning that led off the road towards the trailhead at Everest Base Camp and rolled onwards to the campsite.

  It was beautiful. A huge, empty straw-gold plain miniaturised the lines of cars and tents. When we stepped out of the car
, our throats thick with dust, we faced a ridge of mountains soaring in the distance, still tantalisingly veiled in cloud, with Everest hidden somewhere in the heart of it. We pitched our tent, working hard to hammer the pegs into the frost-hardened ground. The coarse turf was embedded with tiny saxifrages. Phil and I crawled underneath the car and did the evening's tightening of bolts, and checked the wheel nuts, and went through the familiar inspection routine under the bonnet. The air was so thin that putting the necessary pressure on the wheel brace to loosen and then re-tighten the nuts left me panting for breath.

  All the time the light was fading and softening and then, when I looked up again from my task, the clouds had drawn back. Everest and Cho Oyu were pin-sharp against the blue. More than a hundred cars were drawn up in long ranks beneath it, with their busy outcrop of tents and trucks and striding people. It was quite a sight.

  As I watched, the light seemed to drain out of the sky. The colour of the etched peak changed from silver-white to rose-pink, and then to forbidding ice-blue. Darkness fell and the moon rose against a prickle of brilliant stars.

  Later, after dinner in the mess tent, the day's order was put up. No cars were now unpenalised, and the field was led by the Catts, the Brodericks, and Buckingham and Mann in their DB5, all with 2-minute penalties. Number 82 was no longer bottom Volvo. We had overtaken Jennifer and Francesca, who had been having a hard time with various mechanical failures. And we were now in 51st position.

  Tomorrow was going to be another tough day, down to Choksam just above the border with Nepal. Phil was determined to give it all we'd got. The car was strong, and going well, and maybe we could claw ourselves upwards by a few more places.