When Mercedes-Benz called and asked if we’d like to help herd a pack of three dozen new E320 diesel sedans all the way from Paris to Beijing, a distance of 8400 miles, we couldn’t say no. We were assigned the leg that ran from Almaty, Kazakhstan, to Lanzhou, China. We were happy about that because we’d never been to either place and it was the second-longest of the five legs of this giant exercise. It included the longest single day of driving—470 miles—from Jiayuguan to Lanzhou, which gave us maximum exposure to China. The idea was to get from west to east using a minimum of fuel while making the most of this driving adventure.
It was 1907 the last time anybody did this run, and those hardy souls did it backward, Peking (as it was then known) to Paris.
We would move properly equipped, with accurate maps and route books, Siemens cell phones, Garmin satellite navigation, Icom CB radios, E-Track satellite tracking, excellent food, and four-star hotels every night.
Not to mention, we had one of the best sedans in the world and a support crew rivaling Patton’s Third Army in size and strength. Michelin brought tires, Aral brought more than 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and Mercedes-Benz brought superb organization and a battalion of video and still photographers. Mercedes pre-ran the entire course four times to get it just right.
In all, there were drivers from eighteen countries on our leg of the Paris-to-Beijing sortie. Our five-day trip was conducted in one of thirty-six gayly festooned E320 sedans, with our team driving a stars-and-stripes E320 V-6 Bluetec turbo-diesel.
Bluetec is the Mercedes-Benz technology that traps and treats diesel particulate emissions and neutralizes them with urea injection, a technology that will be in production in a year or so to meet California’s ridiculously tough emissions regulations, a technology that requires the use of the new ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel just coming onto the U.S. market.
Our car was set up to a Brazilian spec—fifty millimeters higher than normal—and fitted with factory-made bash plates under the engine, because we would be going off-road occasionally. Way off-road.
Michelin’s P255/65R-16 Pilot Artic winter tires were perfect with their tall sidewalls that kept the alloy wheels away from danger. Other than the aforementioned communications, navigation, tracking, and radio gear in its cockpit, our car was stock. Two of the cars in the fleet were dressed out as taxis, one from Stuttgart, one from Paris, both with working meters.
Kazakhstan has only recently emerged from the shadow of the old USSR, and Almaty, the old capital, is an oil boomtown full of Westerners helping to find it.
We left Almaty at 8:30 in the morning on day one in car number twenty-two, representing Team USA, with our co-driver, the capable and experienced Jaime Florez, a Colombian transplant now covering cars in Miami for Sobre Ruedas magazine.
The car had 5400 miles behind it since the Paris start, and more than 1900 miles ahead of it to get to Lanzhou. We left in numerical order, but that only lasted about three blocks until the guys in front of us goofed reading their Garmin 60 Cx nav screen that was bolted to the center console of each vehicle.
We quickly went from Communist-style eight-lane boulevards suitable for May Day weapons parades to two-lane roads suitable for donkey carts, of which there were plenty. Everything in Kazakhstan has a layer of crud on it in one way or another. We passed a female bicyclist and Jaime accurately reported, “She hasn’t washed her hair in three generations.”
In Kazakhstan, wrecked cars are turned into roadside monuments. An hour out of Almaty, we were in the boondocks, headed for the Kazakh version of the Grand Canyon, ninety-mile-long Sharyn Canyon, and some helicopter video work.
As we progressed toward the Chinese border at Korgas, we found fewer and fewer commercial establishments punctuating the farms and villages. There were lots of ugly, decrepit Russian-made cars and trucks, and thousands of people standing by as our convoy passed. We were headed for the Silk Road, a route across western China that has been used for 4000 years.
Two hours of paperwork processing got us through border patrol. But as we traveled in one herd, our three Bluetec cars held up the entire convoy because of document discrepancies.
Why? The cars had been built normally and then retrofitted with the complete Bluetec engine package, and only three of their four identification numbers matched. After two frustrating hours of us wrangling with the Chinese officials, the wonderfully cheery Berit Bremer from Mercedes-Benz read them the riot act, and they let us through, with our shiny new Chinese driving licenses and license plates matched to our car numbers. Every Chinese person we met after that was polite, helpful, curious, and friendly.
After an official welcome just down the street from the border crossing in Yining, we split for the Twin Star hotel, our first nightdriving experience in China.
Chinese commerce runs on livestock and diesels, from little one- and two-cylinder tractors up to what we would call medium trucks, all uniformly old, dirty, smoky, and smelly. It also runs on bicycles, scooters, and small motorcycles.
In between, there are Chinese Volkswagens, Chinese Buicks, the occasional Audi, BMW, and Volvo, and a whole bunch of Chinese copy-cars. The best seller by far is the VW Santana, the backbone transporter of the Chinese middle class, used as both a private car and taxi. When you put all of these together, along with unpredictable pedestrians and the livestock, you have the kind of chaotic driving experience you can’t even find in Manhattan.
We found out something that night in Yining that stuck with us the whole way: Chinese drivers don’t use turn signals and they don’t use rearview mirrors. They also don’t use good judgment, as we discovered, day after day, coping with Chinese traffic.
Chinese motorists tend to lunge out into any given intersection the instant they arrive at it, whether traffic is present or not. Their vehicles—whether cars, trucks, bicycles, or donkey carts—have no reflectors on them, and there are no street lamps out in the country. Road signs are in Chinese and Arabic, but not English. That will change.
They pull out in front of you rather than wait for you to pass. They change lanes willy-nilly, with no signal and no room. China is the only country we’ve ever seen where a vehicle overtaking another may be passed by a third on the extreme left. Their economy may be growing at 10 percent per year, but their driving skills are possibly the worst in the world. The only thing more aggravating than the drivers is the ever-present thick, stinging smog. Even in the middle of the deserts.
Western Chinese roads range from brand-new, baby-smooth four-lane toll roads, to pockmarked two-laners, to rocks and gravel, to no paving at all. And we tried them all in our five-day blitz across the third-largest country on earth, giving tires, shocks, and suspensions—not to mention drivers—one hell of a workout.
We quickly concluded that the Chinese national flower is the plastic bag, millions of which were cast off by the roadside, where they will no doubt live forever, next to the plastic bottles. Day one ended in a hotel room with an ambient temperature in the low 100s and a mattress hard as granite, apparently a Chinese tradition.
Day two, from Yining to Ürümqi (“Oo-room-chee”) in China’s largest province, Xinjiang, took us across a volcanic desert, up 6700 feet into the mountains past Sayram Lake, an utterly serene, perfectly flat, and mirror-like lake with few settlements around its perimeter. On the way up, we were surrounded by sheep, and one persistent lamb in front of the car just wouldn’t move, prompting Jaime to yell, “Hey, you wanna be a sweater?”
Then, after coffee, it was down out of the mountains and across still more desert dotted by wind farms, solar arrays, cell phone towers (the cell phone system here is fabulous), and a few desperate villages, driving in a pea-soup fog that lasted all day.
Some 420 miles after the start, we pulled into the Mercedes-Benz dealership in Ürümqi for fuel, refreshments, and a welcome party that included bevies of young Chinese women and a tea ceremony.
Ürümqi, a city of two million, is the economic heart of Xinjiang, a major hub of the Silk Road, and recognized as the farthest city from any sea in the world. It is also full of inattentive drivers, very aggressive cabbies, and somnambulant pedestrians.
Day three, from Ürümqi to Hami, 370 miles, took us across Taklamakan, the second-largest sand desert on earth, a drive in terribly smoggy, glary conditions. The Turfan Depression, 500 feet below sea level, is about the lowest point on earth, and gets only seventeen millimeters of rain per year and summer temperatures of 131 degrees Fahrenheit. Not a place you’d want to hang out in for long, and we didn’t.
We explored the green, grape-arbored Karez Paradise on a village side trip for an hour or so, then back on the toll road. Another stopover at the Thousand Buddha Caves of Bezeklik was well worthwhile, but after that we were the Hami Express, headed for town as fast as we could go.
After another night of warm fellowship and stories with the entire entourage at the homey Jiageda Hotel in Hami, a city of only 160,000 souls, we rested in our overheated room on another stone slab mattress and braced for the 385-mile run far to the south to Jiayuguan. We would cross the Alashan, the largest and least-accessible part of the famous Gobi Desert, unpopulated but for its 1300-foot dunes.
Day four dawned. We drove into a wicked headwind full of blowing sand all day, and our consumption reflected that: 23.5 miles per gallon, up from about 29.4 mpg. Our route book gave us the option of traveling the Anxi Little Road, and we took it, 100 miles of the worst surfaces and rutted dirt roads we’d seen so far, with grindingly poor villages of mud huts and thatched roofs on either side. In Jiayuguan, we all posed for group photos at the giant fortress outside of town.
On the last and longest day, Sunday, Jiayuguan to Lanzhou, 470 miles, we were blessed with a very long stretch of very empty toll road, this time with signs also in English, and ran the Bluetec E320 right up to the winter tire limit of 135 miles per hour. We left it there for a couple of hours, vastly shortening an otherwise very long day, going through the few villages and toll booths at normal speeds, and then running it right up again.
At 180 miles, we diverted off the route to see remnants of the Old Great Wall of China (the new Great Wall is further east) and to have lunch. Later that day, we went into total panic when we saw the first of many toll road repair crew vehicles coming straight at us in the fast lane on our side of the four-lane road. No lights, no signs, no warning.
The last 100 miles, we were on a bumpy, wavy two-lane highway, going up into the mountains once again, through territory that looked like the far suburbs of Los Angeles. It was there we saw our favorite road sign in English: “Forbid To Chuck Jetsam.” Our second favorite was “Do Not Drive Tiredly.”
Down we swooped and, cresting a long hill, there it was: the Yellow River, flowing by the bustling city of Lanzhou. Once over the river, in dense traffic, we finished our journey at the Sunshine Plaza Hotel (which has a huge aquarium in the lobby, and every room had its own goldfish bowl), where all sixty vehicles lined up out front for the last time on leg four. That night at the party, we handed off the keys to the lucky Americans who would go all the way to Beijing.
We had a wonderful time exploring China, we made the trip without incident (other than a four-inch stress crack in the windshield), and our overall mileage, according to the E320’s trip computer, was 28 mpg at consistently fast speeds.
We’re happy to be home, but for our entrepreneurial streak. We’re quitting our jobs in order to open a nationwide chain of driving schools in China.
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