DJ - Welcome to the update for this, the seventh day of our trip from Peking to Paris as part of Carl and Don's trip around the world. We're using the satellite telephone, mobile personal telephone from a very remote city in western China, in the province of Qinghai. We reported to you that there are 31 provinces in China. Our journey, which began in Peking in Zhejiang at the shipping docks of Xichang, will take us through 8 of the 31provinces of this vast country, China.

We're currently in the city of Golmund. It is a crossroads city for reaching Tibet and dates back thousands of years as a junction city on the Silk Route. It would be appropriate to say this city of 300,000 people is located in an area that is very isolated and would appear to have very little reason to exist, other than it is at the juncture of railroad transportation and highway transportation into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plain.

So we're spending the night in Golmund after traveling today 500 kilometers across some absolutely spectacular geography of China. We'll tell you a bit more about that. We reported to you last night from a camping site overlooking the largest lake in China, Koko Nor. Our camping experience was not the greatest. It began to rain, heavy rain about midnight, with high winds and the rain continued throughout the evening and by morning it was quite damp and chilly and one was not able to get very much sleep under the heavy rain conditions. But, as is necessary, everyone has persevered and carried on and tonight we're housed in some very authentic and very old hotel facilities scattered about the city of Golmund of western China. We left the camp site early this morning and having left an altitude of 10,000 feet, we proceeded to drive up to 13,000 feet to go over a mountain range and for a few hours, we were right in the thick of snow at the altitude of 11,000 feet. We descended that mountain range and continued on past and through two additional mountain ranges and by 1 o'clock had past a fourth mountain range. Although this one was quite in contrast - it was all sand - dunes and sand and ragged mountains - a very arid mountain range. All of that within a span of 6 AM to 1 PM this day. We carried on and drove several hundred miles through an absolutely stunning desert. We were on a highway that went straight for 250 miles. The scenery was remarkable in our photographs, it almost looked like a sea bottom. It was just a magnificent desert scene, quite vast and very, very expansive. A lot of diversity in the geography of China. We've seen it thus far over the course, nearly 3,000 kilometers. We have, in the course of seven days, one week, covered approximately the same distance from East to West of the United States and Canada, which is 2,965 miles. Tomorrow we'll reach that mileage level. Our trip is being calculated in kilometers and for those of you who do not keep track of kilometers, 1,000 miles is the equivalent of 1,600 kilometers, or 100 miles is the equivalent of 160 kilometers. So we've traveled nearly 3,000 kilometers on these first seven days of our nearly six week trip to Paris. We'll totally cover about 15,000 kilometers when we reach Paris.

We want to report that Carl's cold is cured and he's feeling much better. Both of us are a bit fatigued from the constant moving about, in and out of hotels and campgrounds and then very strong driving days - 400 to 600 miles over very foreign and different driving conditions, weaving in and out of traffic that has it's own way of flowing here in China. As far as we've come, we're still two days away from coming near the end of the China border, which is with Nepal. Tomorrow we begin our entry into the Tibetan Plateau, ultimately reaching the capital city, a mysterious city, of Lhasa on the day after tomorrow. It will take us two days from this location to reach Lhasa. We begin to reach higher elevations and experience even further, high altitude consequences of our travel. We've been at 10,000 feet now for two days and with the assistance of Dr. Avery's advice for all of us, we're able to use some medication to block the impact of high altitude sickness, as it's referred to. Tomorrow we'll reach an altitude of 15,000 feet in one of the passes beginning to approach Mt. Everest, which we'll reach the day after tomorrow and we'll report to you how that experience goes. We're physically well. The roads are generally quite good. We're proceeding on schedule and after one week, the 1954 Packard is still in conformity with the rules that qualify for a gold medal. There are three categories of accomplishment on this journey - gold, silver and bronze. And at the moment, we have met the requirements to remain a gold competitor.

Coming across China as we have, through the provinces, as we mentioned we'll cover 8 of 33 provinces, we've seen three Christian churches and two Islamic Prayer Mosques in the course of 3,000 kilometers. We've also seen that the Chinese architecture is beginning to disappear and a lot of the buildings and structures here appear to have a sort of 1950's Russian influence of building without a lot of color and a lot of Chinese heritage. Well, I think we're able to say that we're proceeding, albeit with the realization that what we're attempting to do is very significant and a major undertaking. We certainly have had experiences that have far exceeded what we perceived the experiences might be.

We do have some brief news about other participants in the journey. At the onset there were ten American entries and we understand that in the last 24 hours two Americans have, as the English say, retired. That's their use of the language to describe how they have either withdrawn or their vehicles have become inoperative and cannot be repaired. The Kleptz's from Ohio, Chick and Arlene Kleptz, who entered in a 1919 Marmon, had to withdraw yesterday. The Marmon experienced two days of serious drive shaft problems and we understand they just could go no further. Our friend, Joe Dixon, who knows the Kleptz's from Naples, Florida will be interested in knowing that. Knowing how hard they worked to prepare their car for this event. We also believe, it's not yet confirmed, that the Brooks, Pat and Mary Brooks of Iowa, who were driving a 1949 Buick Woody experienced a mechanical problem when we departed the campground this morning and they were not on the trip today. Not certain if that means they'll have to retire, but from the mechanical description of the problem, it did not sound very favorable. The Brooks participated in one of our update reports a couple of days ago, you may have heard them at that time. There are other cars that are showing signs of fatigue and even the 54 Packard has some rattles. We're going to keep our eye on the hood latch, on tires, on the undercarriage to hold it all together. It really is a very pounding experience to take a car over this distance and under these varying conditions. But the fundamentals of the car, the engine, the drive system and the transmission, are doing well and we're quite confident in the strength, the bulk and the all around performance ability of the American designed Packard automobile to endure a journey of this nature. Other cars continue to show symptoms of distress being in the competition. We're actually not able to keep up with what is happening to everyone and we would encourage you to check in with the discovery.com web site to get their daily account of what is happening in the competition and I know that Rick and others maintaining our web site are able to get updates out of the London office as to how the competition is going. So it's possible that you would actually know more than we about what's happening with other competitors. An unique situation.

Well that's this update. Thank you from Qinghai province in far western China where public telephones and telephones in hotels are simply not available and so we're using our mobile satellite telephone to hook up to the Indian Ocean satellite and to reach you with this report. We're going to end now our seventh day preparing for our two day journey into Tibet and our first sightings of the Himalayan mountain range. That will be quite something and we'll be anxious to share it with you. Thank you for being along at this time and good-bye until our next update.