Rally Day 3 - 20 May Hohhot to Ordos - Navigation disaster.

Rally day 3 – Hohhot to Ordos 345kms

Weather it’s 22 degrees at 8am and expected to get up to 32-35  No rain.

Today has started a little differently for us. The handicap system has kicked in and we are now starting 15 mins after zero hour. While this means we are not doing so well on the competition, it does mean we leave nice and early, which we prefer.

We are currently 12th in our class and 16th overall. That puts us in the top half for our class. But this is, of course only after two days.

Everything can change in a day, your car breaks down, you have a bad navigation error, suddenly you are out of the competition part of the rally. This is one of the reasons we stay away from worrying about the competition aspect and just enjoy each day. Though it is hard not to look at our results at the end of each day.

The day started with another run around the horse track, this time with the chicanes around the other way. Having done the track the previous night, Andrew was much more in the swing and we did quite well. We even got all the codes again. The photo above shows the view of the track from our hotel.

We got off to a great start and then…. We had a complete navigation error. I have to take the responsibility for this, because the route was not mapped correctly and Andrew wanted to use his good sense, and I mucked it up. Now the problem with mucking up a motorway exit, is that it is very difficult with the road signs in Chinese and plenty of spaghetti junctions, to get back on track and so we ended up mucking up twice. Now would be the time to introduce you to our “Navigation” blog post, which you can read here. This will allow you to see what rally navigation looks like, you can find it here.

We were working off a green route change (these are printed and given to us separately from the route book, if the 48 hour car has found a closed road or some other sort of obstacle which was not there when the route was planned). These change documents are not as specific with detail as the route book and so can be a little erroneous. Quite a few people made the same mistake as we did, our error put is out by 45 minutes.

I have to say I felt quite deflated and very annoyed with myself.

We tracked along though and very soon found ourselves humming along quite nicely, once we were out of the city, we were back on the “broken pavement” roads, dodging pot-holes, over taking coal trucks and back into the swing of another day on the rally. We found ourselves at the time check only one minute late for our time, and we get a 10 minute leeway! Sadly, unlike other mornings, this meant no refreshment stop, we had to get straight back out on the road. So, no video updates from me or photos. However, this certainly put us back into a good mood.

Having got back into our stride we felt ready for the two tests along the way. The first was a dusty, gravel back road, we had to maintain and average speed of 45kms/h and then change to 50kms/h. This we break down into amounts per kilometre so we can see how we are getting on. Bust basically you just have to sense how things are going, many of the corners you could not take at speed, and then there are the dips! We were very pleased with how we did this time, the previous ones we have been too early and ended up with too many penalties.

The rest of the day was just driving from one lot of “broken pavement” to another, we had more tolls. I haven’t talked about these yet. We are quite a sight as we line up at the toll booth, handing over cash or taking a ticket. We tend to have most of the attendants looking to take photos.

Part of the way back in the afternoon we ran along a cobbled road, following trucks as usual, and then got to go over a pontoon bridge. You can see a video of it here.

We had quite a few police along the route today. They have been excellent for helping manage traffic at important intersections. As mentioned, there are q lot of trucks around here and so I suspect much of the police presence is about ensuring we have a safe path. However, we did get stopped at a set of lights, four police got out of the car and started to ask us questions, which we did not understand. Then 3 other rally cars caught up with us, and they smiled and waved us on. They clearly were not planning to take on that problem.

Much of the driving is along dirt roads, like this below, here we are sitting waiting for our regularity to start.

Or road like this, which, though sealed have speed bumps, pot holes or uneven surfaces.

Heading into Ordos, my chief navigator decided the route in the book was again not great, in fact, this time it was just plain wrong and so I kept my mouth shut and he did his best work and navigated us through the city CORRECTLY! We were certainly not the only ones who picked this up but talking with others at the end of the day, there were plenty who did not.

So AB is feeling pretty pleased with himself, and rightly so. We arrived at the track, nice and early.

The last test of the day was at a motorcycle track. AB and I swapped seats and he took the wheel, throwing the car around one tight bend after another. Eleanor is not built for this sort of driving, she loves the open roads, and with our spare wheel on the roof, her balance is not great. However, AB did a great job and our time was fairly good for our sort of car. About half the cars one the rally are called classics - Porsches, Escorts, Mercedes. Many of which are low profile and sweep around these sort of tests with joy!

Back at the hotel we did some regular maintenance, had the mechanics look at our fuel pump because it is a little noisy, but they think it’s fine and then we got back to the room. AB is still not well so he showered and jumped straight into bed. I did our washing and got everything ready for the new day then popped over to the main part of the hotel and had a drink with the crew. The hotel staff helped me take two meals back to the room so AB could stay where he is comfortable.

About half and hour later there was a knock on the door and all four of the medical team where there to find out how AB was going. We head into the desert tomorrow for our first and second camps so they wanted to be sure he was up to it as we are further from help that we are at other times.

We were able to reassure them this was Andrew being Andrew and we expected him to be better tomorrow.

And, yes, tomorrow is the camping - I’m very excited! Though, it is hard to beat the hotels, here is a video of the one here in Ordos, it’s a Crowne Plaza and huge! Here is a video of our room! There is a main hotel and then about 5 smaller buildings, we are in the one nearest the carpark with all our cars, but the furthest from the food. And this is definitely the best buffet we have had on rally so far.

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