Rally Day 8 - Non Drive Day - Dunhuang - 0 kms
25th May 2024
Rally days 4 to 7 have been a blast.
I’m sorry I have been a bit behind on my blogs. Rally days are basically driving the very best, and often the fastest, you possibly can over long motorway stretches or rough and desert roads. When we are on the test sections, it is challenging driving, fast driving and requires a lot of concentration from the driver and the navigator. We get to the end of the day quite exhausted and then you still have to do your daily maintenance on the car - and it’s been very hot! We have been crawling into bed after a freshening-up shower as early as we can.
Because of this, I have been doing regular videos which are easier for me to do on the fly and we are uploading to YouTube. I will add links to some of them here, but if you want to have a look at all of them, you can follow our YouTube channel here.
HOWEVER!
I have lots to tell you and I am excited to be doing this catch-up blog.
Our rest (non-drive day)
Day 8 is our first non drive day and boy did I need it. We had a lovely dinner last night with our rally friends and hit the sack at 10.30 with the idea to sleep in. No alarm needed.
7am AB is up! So it was a 30 minute sleep in.
We went up for breakfast and I got to watch a young chef throwing noodles. The food was mostly food from last night though there was eggs, toast, fruit and waffles, so that was good. And the coffee was drinkable!
See the chef throwing noodles here.
The hotel is quite remarkable, the sand dunes are just off behind the building and are incredibly majestic. Unsurprisingly the hotel has a roof top restaurant to take in the fabulous view, particularly impressive at sunrise and sunset.
The had lovely attention to detail, below is a picture of our room keys.
We sat with one of the organisation team and had a good chat about rallying as a pass time and sport. It is interesting because most rallies are a day long not 37, they are largely driven by people who have experience with driving hard and fast. They are essentially a race. This rally is an adventure with competitive sections and a competition for placings.
As a consequence, there are all sorts of drivers, cars and skills sets and we are all on our own form of adventure. The thing we have in common is the ability to pay the cost to enter and a car that will make the distance. There are people like us who are more on the adventure end, people who are on an adventure and have good rally driving skills, through to a few who take it very seriously and EVERYTHING is about the competition.
On the non-drive days most people are under their cars, being supported by the mechanics if needed, a number don’t seem to know you can ask the fixers to find you a workshop. We knew you could so we dropped Eleanor off at the end on yesterday and so this morning we picked her up. It was worth it for us, our brakes are clean and tighter, our roll brace under the engine is repaired and a general tighten up of all our nuts and bolts etc. has made us secure for the next week of bumping and thumping. And I am better rested for another week of bumping and thumping.
My video update about what a rest day looks like here.
Also, for me, the journey is about an adventure, not the competition. I find it enormously frustrating we spend all day driving through really interesting places at great speed and not getting much time to stop and enjoy the scenery or speak with the people. I had decided to make sure I knew about each place we were going through and have a folder which has this information for every place. What a waste of time. We have not had any time to stop. But today will be different and this is also one of the reasons that I am pleased we used the mechanics.
After picking up the car I arranged a tour of the Mogao Caves for us in the afternoon and Andrew set about cleaning the interior of the car. It is hard to describe how much sand bounces into your car and into every little crevice. Every bump, every blast of wind, and there is soooo much wind, and every track we go on, adds to the sand count. I have brought our bags in to wash down the outsides of them before restacking them into the car tomorrow morning.
I have washed all our clothes which will hopefully be dry by tomorrow morning and then started to catch up on our blog and upload photos and videos to our drive and to YouTube.
You can find our videos here, if you want to see more.
At lunch time we popped down for our tour guide, Mary, to take us on a little drive. It was definitely the right thing to do because we had a lovely talk on the drive and she ensured we stayed away from the long queues. She certainly walked very fast.
The visit starts with two cinema experiences. The first was a flat screen description of the history of the caves and how they came about. The second was a surround experience which talked about a number of the caves and the highlights we might see. We should try to see if we can get this show for the Perpetual Guardian planetarium at the Otago Museum.
We then hopped in the bus and drove about 20mins to the site, where our guide arranged an English speaking guide to take us around. We were taken into 8 different caves. There are over 700, but they only open some to the public to ensure the humidity of people present is managed. It is a very slick experience and they limit the number of visitors to 6000 per day. It was busy, but not overcrowded so we did not have to wait too long for our turn in the caves, and it did not feel we were being moved on in a hurry without time to see and ask questions.
The caves we saw were very much the Chinese ones. They were all in honour of Buddha. We could not take photos inside so I bought a book about them and here are a few photos.
My video update on the caves can be viewed here.
After the caves we were gasping for a beer so went upstairs for a drink before coming downstairs again to catch the bus to the night market. And what a market it was. Lots of great food, which we sadly did not stop for, we really need to stay with the rally at this point. A special BBQ night has been arranged for us at the hotel. I’m sure later in the rally we will break out for a less group meal, but day 8 is a bit soon. We will definitely eat there when we return.
In addition to all the food stalls and street restaurants there were lots of stalls selling all sorts of trinkets, bracelets and scarves. AB is on the hunt for another bracelet to add to his collection, we found a nice one but it was more than we were prepared to pay. I managed to get a nice scarf – in my signature colours and a lovely stone for my dressing table.
We also picked up some delicious dried apricots, apples and dates for the car. We were given some dried mango at the first camp which really hit the spot when I needed some energy, I was hoping to get more mango but this selection should be good.
We had forgotten to get the card for the hotel for the taxi ride back, but fortunately Lifeng, our head fixer, had connected with me on WeChat and so I was able to ask her to send this on text. While there is a reasonable number of people here who speak English, especially the sprukers at the restaurants in the market, the taxi drivers do not.
Back at the hotel we dropped our loot in the room and joined the rest of our crew at the BBQ dinner under the stars, with the obligatory cultural display.
The food was quite good, lamb and chicken on skewers with mushrooms, tofu and broccoli skewers as well. The vegetables were a little sad, but we had great noodle soup which was delicious.
We sat with a number of the Kiwis and it was a rather hilarious night.
However, we were both tired and so it was off to bed at 9.30pm. We missed the birthday cake presentation for Fran, which I’m thinking would have been a lovely touch for her as she got through the stress of the accident.
So, back in the room we repacked all our things so it would be easy when we got to Camp. Little did we know how grateful we would be we had done that!
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