Rally Day 2 - 19 May Datong to Hohhot.

I have just remembered so let you know how many kilometres we are traveling each day. You can refer to the blog “Our Route” and this has the information for each day. Sometimes we travel about 350kms a day and others much more. Our biggest day is 785kms! This will be a motorway day and probably quite boring, but we will see.

Day One was 460kms and Day 2 is only 350kms, so was quite an easy run.

So here we are at the start of rally day 2. The weather is windy and quite a lot cooler yesterday where it got up to over 35° so it was very hot. Today it’s 22 degrees but feels more like 18-19, so nice to start the day with the cooler temperatures.

I’m in the queue waiting to get going sitting behind car 43 but I will be sitting in front of him shortly we all have to go out on a specific time so our rally time start for today is 8.54 the first car is going at 8:30, we are car #24 so that is a good place to start and the rally doesn’t normally start this late. We started at 7:30 yesterday that is a more usual time for us to start especially if we have a long day.

Yesterday certainly ended up being quite a long day. Lots of cars didn’t get in till after 7:00. It was about 5:30 when we got in, which was great because I needed a rest.

Beginning of the day.

I am sitting in the car now. Waiting for Andrew he has to do the time check to start us for the rally, this is at a desk inside the hotel. Once he has done his bit he will run to the car and we will get going, so it's very exciting. It's a little bit bedlam here there seems to be a lot of civilian cars that seem to have found their way into the car park and stuck in amongst the rally cars, as a consequence they are a little in the way. But in the end everything sorts itself out.

You can watch a couple of videos where I talk at the start line on a YouTube channel here and here.

Leaving this late can be a nuisance as we find ourselves in rush hour traffic, though today is Sunday so hopefully it will not be as bad. Update: it was not great, but once we got out of the city is was enjoyable. We even drove through a village having their Sunday market, all sorts of things for sale, mostly edible and still alive!

Lunch time Update

The morning of day two has been great fun! We have been on the roadway off potholes going some 20-25 kilometres just on a road that is “very broken pavement” is the description in the route book but it’s also just full of potholes, so we were weaving from one side of the road to the other, fortunately, there was not much traffic, and clearly the locals were familiar with how you have to drive it, but any coming the other way would have had a surprised with all of us racing down their road, weaving in and out. The trees on the right hand side of the road were creating shade that made seeing the road surface, and therefore the potholes, quite difficult, so Andrew had the good idea we mostly drove on the left hand side of the road - which is the wrong side - but we could see the potholes better as they were not in the shade.

Again, we drove through lots of lovely countryside. They farm on pretty much every single piece of land available, using terracing to keep the crops on flat ground, this is probably about ease of cropping, but also irrigation. Everything is planted in rows of plastic sheeting. I’m assuming this is because the soil is very sandy and this probably helps them preserve the soil, and presumably keeps the moisture in from the irrigation. Being early in the season the crops are all seedlings, but a lot of it looked like corn. There are a lot of Willow trees around, though the place looks very arid so there must be ground water that they are tapping in to.

Each day we have a couple of regularities which are basically tests. Sometimes they are an average speed test, other times they are around a race track. Also along the way we have time checks and speed checks. Each of these is manageable if you keep to your route and pay attention. If you have a serious navigation error or break down, this can put you out of your time.

The time checks are often at fuel stations, so everyone can refuel, though this can be bedlam, with 70 odd cars coming in one after the other, and we end up with quite a queue.

Today, one of the regularities was cancelled because there are too many coal trucks on the road and so therefore not safe. It was a very interesting piece of road, winding up a hill for miles and miles, steep with a lot of bends, the test was to drive this at 50 kms/h on average. We did it following 8 coal trucks so our average speed would have been around 30kms/h. I can tell you, this was plenty fast enough, especially with no passing lines. And the thing about winding for miles and miles up a hill, you have the opposite down the hill. With a car as old and as heavy and heavily laden, I have to be very careful with the brakes and so mostly use my gears to keep our speed in check.

Our day ended in Hohhot where we have been before. This is a city of some 3 million people and they were delighted to see us. Next to the hotel is a horse racing track and the organisers had arranged for us to use this as our first circuit. I’m not sure what the racing community would have felt about the surface being wrecked with 75 cars racing around the track!

We arrived in town and they had quite the party on, we went through a blown up finish line, with a Mongolian honour guard, on horses, all dressed up. It was wonderful to see.

The run around the race track was fun. I do the general driving, and Andrew does the circuits. We had some track training in Eleanor in January, which was seriously fun, and so this has given him some new skills and confidence to give these tests a real go. In 2019 we struggled with them because our steering was not tight enough, and besides Eleanor turns like a barge. We had some tracks where we had to do a 3 point turn to get around the corners – though not many circuits are actually designed for cars, many of them, like today are for another purpose.

The circuit was a standard oval which you would expect from a horse race track. They put a deep layer of sand on it and we raced around with three traffic cone chicanes to go around and three codes we had to write down correctly. There was a lot of dust, and everyone had a great time.

I don’t have a photo of this, but you can watch a short video of this on our YouTube channel here.

Then it was back around the corner to the hotel. I went in and got us checked in before coming back down to help work on the car. It was such a delight, the hotel had arrange for dancers and other staff to be in local costume.

When I got back to the car I could see that AB was fading fast. He has done his usual, and get himself a chest infection. Every time we go on holiday it is the same thing, 2-3 days in he starts coughing and feeling unwell. It happened during the rally in 2019, in fact he was very unwell one night at the camp, I thought we might not be carrying on.

BUT I was prepared this time and he had a prescription for antibiotics, specifically for chest infections, and so we got him started on those. Also the smog and the dust does not help and so he is back to wearing a mask while we are outside.

I packed him off to bed and I finished working on the car and packed everything away. I also did some repacking of our clothes and the things we need on a daily basis, just to make it easier at night. After I had done our washing for the day, I popped downstairs and had a drink with a few of the other competitors in the bar.

Below you can see how snug it is in the back of the car with all the bags we need. The black bag has all our camping gear, the bag with blue buckles has our extra first aid and potions and lotions, and straps etc. The grey bags are our clothes, the peek of green has our giveaways and my laptop of course, so I can do these blogs. Tucked in there also is our satellite phone.

There was a lovely Mongolian man there, he spoke excellent English, having studied it (and other languages) at university. He was probably in his early 20’s and he enjoyed helping us all with getting our drinks and chatting away. It gave him a chance to use his English and gave us some insight into his life. Obviously, the Mongolians are a minority here, and many have assimilated so are really considered Chinese now, having not even kept any of their language. This young man seemed very proud of his origins and was even dressed in typical Mongolian clothes.

After a couple of drinks I came back upstairs with two plates of food and we were able to have dinner together, then AB just slept and I worked on my blog for yesterday.

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