Around the world
with the ‘Little One’
(a 1959 Renault 4CV)
My credo
“I have always been travelling. As a child, my finger
followed invisible tracks in my father’s atlas that led to faraway islands,
snowy mountains, burning deserts and rivers too wild to be crossed...
When I was 15, I
climbed onto my little Peugeot “Griffon” moped with its 49 cc engine, and drove
on my own from where I lived in southern France to Holland, where my brother
was studying.
When I was 17,
together with my friend Jaap van Poelgeest,
each of us on a scooter, we accomplished a trip from Monaco to Athens and back,
across the gravel roads of Yugoslavia.
Since those days I have travelled to many remote
corners of the Earth . But at sixty-two, I still need to fulfil a boy’s dream...
So we have to go,
my car and I, both of us the same age. We have to leave together for unknown
horizons.
I have nothing to prove, except that I am alive!”
Some history
2007 marked the centennial
year of the first great automobile raid from Beijing to Paris (the challenge
advertised in 1907 by the Paris newspaper « Le
Matin » originally planned it from Paris to Beijing). Italian Prince Borghese brilliantly won the
raid.
Exactly one century later, I started from Paris in a tiny vintage Renault 4CV . My aim was not to make it as fast as possible to
China. I just wanted to meet people along the road and to return home with a
rich collection of photographs. I also wanted to see for myself how the
different people along my route lived: the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Russians,
the Mongolians and the Chinese. Because I wanted to record their everyday life
in pictures and in words.
The 16,000 km trip, which was a tremendous success (over 20,000 visits
to my blog, many press articles, several TV interviews), took me from Paris to
Lake Baikal in the summer of 2007, over the frozen expanses of Lake Baikal
during early spring of 2008, and through the gruelling steppes and Gobi desert
of Mongolia in the summer of 2008. The Chinese authorities having closed their
borders to travel during the Olympic Games, the trip ended a mere 700 km from
Beijing.
A new plan
In 1908, « Le Matin », together with
the « New York Times », launched an
even more daring challenge: a raid by automobile from New York to Paris in
winter, crossing the Bering Straits to Siberia (this latter ‘detail’ was later
to be abandoned). On February 12, 1908, the following cars lined up at the
start from Times Square, New York: a French De
Dion-Bouton, a French Motobloc
driven by Charles Godard (the same who had showed incredible stamina on the Spyker during the Peking to Paris raid a
year before), a French Sizaire-Naudin
driven by Auguste Pons (the one who had been stranded in the Gobi desert one
year earlier), an Italian Züst, a
German Protos and an American Thomas Flyer. The German team arrived
first in the City of Light on July 26, 1908, but were penalized for having
covered Ogden, Utah to Seattle by train and for not having made it to Alaska.
Therefore driver George Schuster on the Thomas
Flyer was declared overall winner of what became known as “The Great Race”,
earning him many honours, including a reception by President Theodore
Roosevelt.
***
The “Little One” has suffered tremendously on the Mongolian dirt
tracks. But she has shown what she is capable of. She has been shipped back
from Ulaanbaatar to Europe and is being prepared for her next adventure:
Luxembourg-Paris-Luxembourg! The trip is scheduled to start in 2010. By then,
the minute Renault will be more than
50 years old
The traveller
Steven Weinberg was
born in Laren in the Netherlands on October 22nd, 1946 and obtained
his PhD in marine biology from the University of Amsterdam in 1979.
As a writer and
photographer, specializing in the underwater world and travel, he has written
11 books and over 350 magazine articles to date.
Me: He made the around the world trip as planned: you can read it here (en francais) http://www.weinberg.lu/blog2.php
Mongolia is not very close to the UK so the Mongol Rally explodes across 1/3 of the surface of the earth.
So far we got JerryW, DRMW, and ED209.
