DJ - This update comes to you from the middle of the Adriatic Sea as we approach Italy on the continuation of Peking or Perish. On behalf of Carl, this is Don and we welcome you to our update which is reaching you on board a ship in the Adriatic Ocean, in that part of the world where the ocean separates Italy from Albania and Yugoslavia and those eastern European countries on the Balkans which are very much in the news recently. We boarded last night, our time, a Superfast ferry at the Greek port of Patras. This distance between Patras and Ancona, Italy is 500 miles. The Superfast ferry travels at 25 nauts across the Ionian Sea and then the Adriatic Sea. In this part of the world, many people refer to the Ionian Sea as the Corinthian Sea. And if we ever knew there was an Ionian Sea, I'd forgotten. We invite our family and friends to take a look at geography and recall, as we have, that there is a sea called the Ionian Sea.

On our way to Patras to board the Superfast ferry, which is actually a very large ship, we passed one of the ancient wonders of the world. Carl was reminding me about his high school days when he dreamed about seeing all of the wonders of the world. One of the ancient wonders of the world is the Corinth Canal. We passed it and were really stunned by what had been accomplished hundreds years ago. Through a sheer rock wall, a canal had been dug, obviously by hand. The canal is comparable to the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal. In a canyon like way, a waterway had been created through a mountain in Greece linking the Aegean Sea with some of the inland waters in the vicinity of Korinthos, a city near Patras.

We're in the middle of the ocean by satellite telephone reaching you with this update for family and friends. We use these terms interchangeable - seas, oceans - very large bodies of water. This is my first exposure to the Adriatic Sea. It's kind of a stormy day out here on the sea, cloudy and rainy. The ship that we're on is transporting 100 motor cars, 100 semi, over the road, tractor trailer trucks and has the capacity to carry 1400 people. But on this journey it is carrying the competitors for Peking or Perish, as we move the 400 miles across the sea from Greece to the shores of Italy. We'll be arriving late Tuesday afternoon in the city of Ancona and overnighting at the nearby city of Rimini. And after that 1000 kilometers separates us from the shores of Italy to the center of Paris.

As we've done in the past, we've asked some of the competitors to join us on our update and give us their insights into their experience. Our family and friends have come to appreciate and understand the thrill, the agony, the frustration, the demands of the journey through our account and through the accounts of others and in order to get some perspective from others, from time to time, we've asked people to join us for the update account. Today I'm pleased to introduce from Great Britain, Rosie Thomas, who is a co competitor and participant in the travel from Peking to Paris. Rosie Thomas, from the UK, is an author, journalist and writer, and a person whose work is greatly appreciated through her novels and books which are commercially available. Let me hand the telephone to Rosie Thomas here on board the Superfast ferry in the middle of the Adriatic. Almost incomprehensible, Rosie, that we'd be able to talk to people from such a place in such a way using satellite telecommunications, exchanging words, images and experiences with people we dearly care about and with whom we enjoy sharing. I'd ask you to join our circuit of family and friends. Thank you for taking time out from your rest day and please share with us your experiences.

Rosie - Don, thank you for asking me to join you this afternoon. We're sitting here together at the stern of the ship in the bar looking out over the waves and it is indeed extraordinary to reflect, both on modern technology, which enables us to have these conversations and to share these experiences with people who are sadly so far away from us. It's also, on the other hand, fascinating to reflect on the experience that you and I have just shared. We haven't flown across this ground from Peking to this point, we have actually covered every centimeter of that ground in cars. One of the real strengths and one of the most intriguing aspects of this whole adventure for me has been the connection to the ground, the validity of the earth through these countries separate our starting point from here and you and I had a talk in the car park yesterday while we were waiting to load our cars and we agreed how interesting it will be to see the way the world changes, the geography changes from kilometer to kilometer. We passed through wonderful mountains, hot arid deserts, arable countryside all through Turkey, punctuated with cypress trees and all of these places have been connected by this extraordinary train of cars. Not only the ground has changed, but also the faces of people, from the Chinese to the Tibetans through to the Mongolians faces down to the round pointed faces in Nepal and Pakistan and into the west. And I think more than I have ever been aware I got a sense of the extraordinary diversity on this globe of ours, and at the same time, the ways we're connected together, the ways people are connected, the way the places have developed through the people to which they belong. And that, as you pointed out yesterday, has been an enormous privilege, it's been one of the joys of this trip we've been on. It's wonderful to be here to reflect on all those cars beneath us in this moving boat. Cars that are as familiar now by sight as almost the backs of our own hands and here they all are caged in this metal hull for a few more hours. All of them have come all this way together. It's a moment of great pride for me certainly and I hope and pray very much that we are all going to be floating into Paris on Saturday morning. We've experienced a lot together. We've been through thick and thin and there have been plenty of times on this trip, certainly for our crew, that we've had to cope with adversity. We've had sickness to cope with. I was so ill across China and the Rally doctor forbade me to go any further and the Marshals wouldn't stamp my time card any more because I was so ill, they were afraid that I would die. Luckily my co-driver ran around and found extra medication and the Rally doctor reluctantly agreed to let me continue with about 5 minutes to go before the morning time control. So we came within 5 minutes of being stopped. That brought the two of us very close together and it also made me realize, again, how very precious this experience is and how valuable and lucky it is that we are here. Paris still seems a long way away, although, we all know it's almost over. I think from our interesting talk yesterday, Don and I both feel that we will probably need to go home and let acquaintances stir up those facts, feelings and emotions. I know that for many of us, we don't exactly know what we feel about the experience we had, but it has been a great pleasure and, like we said, a privilege. As it is to briefly join this private and public circle as I'm doing now and I thank you for it.

DJ - Rosie, as I understand your body of profession work involves novels of creative circumstances and situations. This is a very real situation, one in which you actually experienced, as we all did, the unexpected. We experienced the most physical and mental circumstances. Connect for me this very real sort of journalistic experience with your talent of creating novels, as I understand, very successfully. Is it the same or is it different?

Rosie - The business of writing fiction, and I'm lucky that my books do sell quite well, for me is taking the small things that you see and then writing them large. So I don't think I'll get a novel out of doing a motor rally, but what you do get is little tiny seeds of stories and those come from snippets of conversations that you overhear in a cafe. It's the small things that trigger off the flashes inside your imagination that sows the seeds for a novel. Anybody who writes fiction will know that the exciting thing is to get an idea. The hard thing is to keep on piling up the pages as I often say. Don is nodding and I think that as a writer, he knows that too. There has been a great deal of very rich material here. Human relationships, human powers of endurance and human determination to keep going. Some of the crews of done miracles to keep themselves and their cars going. And I'm full of admiration for that. We've had nothing like the mechanical problems. The sheer will power is something that I will need to reflect on. I had, before I came, imagined that we would be running into a lot of various class forms, a lot of wealthy and possibly slightly spoiled people, but I've been proved completely wrong. None of these people are spoiled. Every single one of them has admirable focusing and determining powers. That, I suppose, is one of the hallmarks of the party. There are a lot of successful people and I guess you can't get to be successful without all of those characteristics. So I misjudged badly and I'm pleased to be proved wrong. Nobody in this party has given into adversity, they've just buckled down and got on with it, by in large. We've all had moments where we might have wished for a shower that ran hot and cold, or a meal that wasn't boiled rice. We've been traveling through parts of the world where, unlike ours, find these things are far from being normal. That is traveling. Again, we've been lucky enough to be here.

DJ - We've been visiting with Rosie Thomas from the UK. As you can tell from her use of the language, very competent at describing images and experiences and giving her reflections on our soon to be completed Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. I say soon because we reach you on Tuesday afternoon off the shores of Italy with 1000 kilometers separating us from Paris. We're on board a Superfast ferry ship that is currently rocking and rolling across the Adriatic Sea. We saw something very poignant as we boarded the ship at the harbor at Patras. Across the street from the port are a group of human beings who live in railroad cars. It seems what they do is they wait for a semi truck or lorrie and they try to get hidden underneath the semi trailer while it's being driven onto one of the ferries that moves between Greece and Italy with the hope of traveling concealed from Greece to Italy. All part of the unrest and the instability of the Balkans region of this part of the world. The officer on duty on the ship tells us that at night it's dangerous in these waters because there are many small boats and ships that move across the Adriatic Sea without lights transporting people clandestinely from the balkans to Italy. We're about to, within a few hours, disembark the ship at the Italian city of Ancona. We'll be driving 150 kilometers this afternoon, arriving in the Italian city of Rimini.

Finally, I have two local connections to report about on our travel across the Ionian and the Adriatic Sea. The first is that as I watched the many trucks loaded onto the ship, one had a very familiar logo on the side of the transport trailer. And that logo was Mercury Marine. It was a semi trailer truck with the Mercury logo and I looked at that and said, that's my home town. The other experience is prior to departing Patras, Greece, the Motor Challenge had a roadside stop at a McDonald's. And the local connection there is that inside McDonald's is Ronald on a bench. The Ronald McDonald figure was created by Interior Systems of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin and designed and painted by the staff there, lead by Lindsey Bovinet. It is my pleasure to serve as a director of that company and to have aided its progress of serving the food industry. So in Greece we saw two remembrances of our hometown - Ronald McDonald on a bench in McDonald's and the other, a transport truck from Mercury Marine Europe.

This update has reached you from on board a ship Tuesday afternoon in the Adriatic Sea. We're all thinking now that it's possible to get to Paris, but there's still 1000 kilometers and some European driving to be done through Italy, Austria, Germany and France. So we'll not presume that that is going to be easy or without event.

The 1954 Packard had a mechanical setback yesterday. The primary fuel pump had failed. Fortunately, with good planning, we have a back-up and secondary fuel pump which we're relying on at this moment. It seems that there is an electrical malfunction with the primary fuel pump.

Lastly we observed as you drive the secondary roads of Greece, you can't help but notice that the roads are lined with white, which reminds you of melted snow, but in fact, it is cotton. A person could probably do very well if you went around Greece and picked up all of the cotton that's blowing about and lines the highways of Greece. Something you might not otherwise expect to see in Greece.

The price of fuel in Greece is $4.95 a gallon and we're expecting to see even more expensive gasoline on the mainland of Europe.

That's our update reaching you Tuesday afternoon on board the Superfast ferry ship traveling 500 kilometers from Greece to Italy. People are in a good mood, but they are also in a frame of mind that they'd like to see this completed and begin to try to sort out what this experience has meant to them. Some very profound observations by Rosie Thomas, an author from the UK, hopefully gives you a sense of the emotional impact that has come with a very physical travel and adventure experience. That's the update for now. We do thank you for joining us and, as always, we hope that you'll be back with us and we can be back with you at the same time tomorrow. So on behalf of Carl, this is Don, saying so long. And we'll have to say we're not in any country at the moment, we're in international waters of the Adriatic Sea. And that part of the world where the sea separates Italy from the Balkan countries and we'll see you on the next update. Thank you and good-bye.