May 18th: Beijing to Datong

The first day of the race! We started the day with an early drive to the great wall, just outside of the city. There was a ceremony to start us off complete with timapani drums and a dragon. It was nice but we were too eager to get started to really enjoy it. Being car number 64 we were the 64th car to depart through the aureate archway onto the road that brings us from the municpality of Beijing to the province of Hubei and onwards. It was a blistering 33 degrees that day and we have nothing but open windows to cool us down. We began with highways alongside the great wall but quickly moved to smaller roads in and out of farming villages.

Occasionally we were forced to stop and wait for a herd of cows to pass by. The roads in rural China are already tough on a car but we eventually made our way to the base of a mountain pass that would prove much worse. The mountains that seperate the Hebei and Shanxi provinces are not all that tall, however they’re also not all that paved. The dirt roads have more rock than dirt and the sharp turns made this quite a difficult climb. It seems the rally organizers wanted to throw the worst possible route at us right at the beginning. Nevertheless we perservered through it and found ourselves back on asphalt again.

Closer to the end of the day on one of the last waypoints we accidentally took the wrong freeway entrance and ended up 40km off-course. After about an hour we managed to turn around and make it to the Suspended Temple in Hunyuan. In the morning we had made a plan to get some more car work done after the drive but we were exhausted from the day so we had dinner and went to bed.