CS - This is Wednesday, the 12th day of driving the 1954 Packard across China. We are in the Tibetan city of Xigaze and we've had one very exciting day. People are extremely friendly. Everywhere the car goes and where the group goes, crowds turn out to wave and cheer and applaud. We're having quite an experience. For my South Dakota friends I want to mention to them that I've had a couple of occasions to talk with, and this morning I had breakfast with Prince Idris Shah from Malaysia. His connection with South Dakota is that he loves Sturgis, and has driven his Harley from Los Angeles or San Francisco or Vancouver, British Columbia three times to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. I know Richard Baun will probably get a good laugh out of that. One of the strange things that I noticed today as we drove through one of the deepest canyons I've ever seen in my life, we came up into an open, very, very wide alley where there were sand dunes blowing onto the highway. Huge sand dunes in the middle of Tibet. The last thing that I'd like to talk about was when we got to Xigaze, which was ahead of schedule, a couple of friends from Alabama and I went up to the Buddha temple here, which covers come 600,000 thousand square meters on the hillside. Inside this temple was a 150 foot tall Buddha. It was enough to take your breath away - the size, the color, the embroidered scarves, the prayer scarves - really part of the wonders that we're beginning to see in our trip around the world. Oh, one other thing of interest. We bought some gasoline last night in Lhasa and it cost $1.80 a gallon. I know when we get to Europe we're going to think about that. There was some question about roads from here into Katmandu, but we're told now that they are open and will be open for us so we don't seem to have any intrigue there. I'll turn you over to Don now who has some interesting aspects.

DJ - This regional city, village of Xigaze has an area population of 600,000 Tibetans and it is a starting area for mountaineering activity on the Chinese side of the Himalayas. There are 40 mountains in excess of 12,000 feet that can be accessed from Xigaze.

We have many new friends from all over the world who are coming to our web site (www.newyorktoparis1997.com) and we welcome them to our journal, following not only our journey but that of our fellow companions. We know that from Germany, Nick The Flick, as we call him affectionately, and Felix, who are in a Mercedes have told their children and girl friends about our web site and we welcome them to the journal and welcome them to the journey.

The '54 Packard is right in the event. It's not the fastest car, it's not the slowest car. Our objective is to keep in mind the tortoise and the hare parallel and we're quite satisfied to play the role of the tortoise as we proceed here across the Himalayan mountain range. Over the next two days our goal is to push the Packard up the mountain to an elevation of 18,000 feet. We're highly confident that if we can get it up the mountain then we can begin to literally coast down the Himalayas into India and Nepal, across Pakistan, through Iran and then make that tremendous bridge that exists on the channel that divides Asia and Europe in Istanbul, formally Constantinople. Our goal here is to get up the Himalayas in the next 48 hours. Tomorrow we'll be at, what for me is sort of an unthinkable location. It never occurred to me that in my life that I would have reason to go to the Mt. Everest Base Camp and that will be where we'll be camping tomorrow night, whether we like it or not, because there are no hotels in the vicinity of Mt. Everest. So we'll be camping out and dealing with that experience. The elevation we expect to reach tomorrow is actually slightly higher by 200 meters, or roughly 900-1000 feet above the Everest Base Camp, on the road that we'll be traveling. We had a really good day today. We covered a modest amount of distance. The scenery is spectacular, just spectacular. We paused on our drive in a plateau area where the farmers were harvesting grains and plowing their fields. But, what was so fascinating was that they were using ox and pulling a wooden, single blade plow. When we stopped to watch and to photograph that, rather than them carrying on their work, they paused the oxen and came onto the roadway and they began looking at us and looking at the car, just as we were looking at them. We couldn't speak either's language, but we had a good time visiting and sharing use of digital photography equipment and letting them know we were foreign friends.

To summarize, we're in the regional Tibetan village of Xigaze. It has all of the appeal of Vail, Colorado in that is sits at the base of a mountain range. Sort of reminds you of Sankt Moritz, Switzerland, as well, with a glacier river running through the village and the people are very, very friendly and very curious about us, where we're from and what we're doing. We're just feeling very good about our situation today. Many, many people from all over the world are joining us - watching the journey on the web site, and again we want to give them a word of welcome and invite them to browse, not only our web site, but for certain, go to the discovery.com web site and get the commentary of Chris and Drew who are along here on the journey, taking digital photography and writing anecdotal stories about things that are happening. In many ways, it's possible for you to keep up with some of the events involving the Peking to Paris more so than us as a result of these communication tools.

That's today's update and report. We're looking forward to driving further into the Himalayas and reaching the Mt. Everest base camp at this time tomorrow. I grew up listening to the radio and can't help but think as I'm in this locale, of a broadcaster of the name of Lowell Thomas. And Lowell Thomas would end his broadcast by saying, so long until tomorrow from Tibet. This is Don and Carl. See you tomorrow.