Combining two posts into one, as we didn’t have internet connectivity at last night’s hotel. The official start of the 2025 Peking to Paris was at the Great Wall of China outside of Beijing, meaning we had to be on the road out of Beijing at 5:30 am. It was surprisingly cold at the start line. There was about 30 minutes of drumming, dancing and acrobatics before the first car passed under the starting gate and headed out. Subsequent cars started at one minute interval. The number of Chinese in attendance, taking pictures and asking for autographs was impressive. There were a number of cars that drove the same route as we did and took videos and pictures along the way. A theme of our first two night stops was that the group are treated as celebrities. Hundreds of people were waiting in the parking lot of our hotel tonight.
Day one was long, as we finished at about 5:30 pm in Datong. The scale of the cities in China is simply amazing. An impressive variety of road surfaces, ranging from expressways requiring tolls (Alipay to the rescue), back roads through villages and extremely rough broken pavement, gravel and dirt. We traveled through the Grand Canyon of China, crossed a mountain range by climbing dirt/gravel switchbacks up one side and down the other. We are getting the hang of the regularities, although it is clear that there are a group of competitors that take all of this very seriously
Day 2 continued to be educational. Another long day that finished with a run around a dirt horse track near the hotel. It involved doing a lap around the oval, reading a 6 character code from boards posted along the oval and weaving through a few sets of cones. We ran in the middle of the field. Another very nice hotel in a city of high rise apartments. We are learning our way around the “regularities” which involve driving at a specified speed for a particular distance. We’ve met some very nice people so far. It is fair to say that the “0.1%” are over represented in the participants. Camaraderie is fine.
Internet connectivity here is problematic. A lot of US sites are blocked and the upload time for these posts is measured in hours, not seconds. Day 3 is going to be long and then we have camping in the desert for Nights 3 and 4, so the next post will be a while.
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