28 Nov 06
On the face of it, I drew the short straw.
It was little old me who had to queue for a Chinese driving licence and hand over a mugshot that the giggling, fun-loving, uniformed girls at China DVLA deemed hilarious since they decided I was a dead ringer for the Elephant Man.
I was the one required to do the longest (almost 2300 miles) driving stint and negotiate a frontier that was dark, intimidating, razor-wired and seemingly several miles deep. It was daytime when I took my Mercedes into the multi-layered Kazakhstan/China border crossing but it was well into the freezing night when we exited.
I was the one who chose to pedal an E-Class across wastelands populated by wolves and snow leopards, through the lowest point in China (in more ways than one), the most landlocked city in the world, and, scariest of the lot, a desert the size of Germany referred to simply as Place of Death. Honest.
And after surviving all that, there were further life-threatening experiences such as roads that should have existed but did not, and a bridge we were instructed by Mercedes to drive across that was strictly for pedestrians only. And the icing on the cake? When I saw the whites of the eyes of the meathead travelling the wrong way up a motorway, at speed, in the outside lane that I also happened to be using, with around 95mph on the clock.
Not that I'm complaining about leg four - Almaty, Kazakhstan to Lanzhou, China - for one moment. I wouldn't have missed this awesome drive into the unknown for all the tea in Yorkshire. I get off on weird, once-in-a-lifetime road trips served up with a dollop of exhilarating danger and double helpings of bizarre surprises. And they really don't come much weirder, more perilous or surprising than this journey of over 2,000 miles in five days from the grubby Far East of Europe to even scruffier Central Asia.
