Continued Story of the Taklimakan Desert Rally - Update

Hi All…..to continue on with my Urumqi Bike Adventure. – another update

Well it was finally a race time for us all…..what we all had traveled a long way for and committed so much time to

The night before we all had to get our bikes checked by the race referees, this was simpler than we thought, all they looked for and took note of was the bike chassis numbers, nothing else, we all were a little surprised nothing else was checked.

From there is was all into the race officials hotel room for a race briefing, we were always treated differently due the language issues, and that we still had not raced.

We had learnt that on the first two sections, over a third of the bikes got lost in the desert or did not finish and around half the cars.

Two guys were still missing… we found out later they were lost for 4 days, however all persons, bikes and cars were recovered and in good health.

The first two sections sounded a lot of fun………maybe.

After the race briefing we all were excited and eager to get going and race the next day.

One of the issues with the whole race that we all had, I mean everyone not just us foreigners, was that the riding or driving distances between the race starts and towns to stay in, were very large.

Like today, (our first race day) we all had to group ride and drive 150km to the start of the race, then race 230 km race section, then ride again 100 km to town to stay the night, WOW… big day.

Well… just as we all headed out, 50 bikes and 180 4x4 cars and support vehicles, this was real cool, a sand storm started, and it was a big one, (you will be able to see on the photos in the Album named “Finally we get to Race”), we found out later it was the biggest storm they had seen in a long while.

It was a bit of a struggle, the sand shifted and moved across the road, you could not see the bike in front of you, we keep at a safe pace, actually it was rather fun.

About 3 days later we found out, through rumors, not officially from the race committee, a support vehicle was late in leaving and was catching up to us and had rolled due to the storm, both driver and passenger were killed. This quickly brought us all down to earth to take extra care, conditions were tough and we should respect where we were
.
However on race day we did not know any of this and rode on through the storm to the race start.
When we finally arrived to the race start, we all just hung around, no-one really knew what was going on, all the TV crews were doing interviews, everyone was setting up ready to race, great atmosphere, but no real action to get going.

We were suddenly all told the race was off, due to safety reasons and for us all to mount up and drive into town. We were all very disappointed as it would have been our first section, however the conditions were very bad and it was the right decision.

We all headed into town to find no hotel booked for us and had to find another RMB 10 place; this one had a good shower… that was about all.

We worked on our bikes for the rest of the day and got ready for tomorrows race day.

Will we ever get to race?

Find out in my next posting

Take Care

John
www.Travel-the-Real-China.com