DJ - We have completed the second day of the great race for Peking to Paris and we can report to you that the 1954 Packard with Carl and Don is still in the race. And that is a lot to say because the hammering and the pounding that the cars took on the second day 500km run was very significant with conditions ranging from interstate highway travel for about 20% of the day, 10% of the day was on dirt roads that no motor vehicles should be driven on, and the balance of the day, 70% was on asphalt roads similar to state or county highways in the United States. All along the road conditions in China are very favorable thus far. But the cars took quite a pounding going through roads and dirt roads that had a lot of holes and dips in them. And the threat was to the undercarriage of the motor vehicles.

As we set off for tomorrow, at 5:30 AM for our next city and a day of 610km of travel here in northwest China, the rally organizers are concerned about the weight that the cars are carrying and about their ability to clear many of the obstacles that come up along the route.

In the city that we departed yesterday, incredibly 100,000 people saw us off at 6:30 AM in the morning. The Chinese people are just fascinated by the machinery and by the color and the excitement of the motor rally as it passes through their cities, towns, and villages. The rally has been traveling in a convoy for the first two days as required by the Chinese public safety officials. Tomorrow the rally breaks apart with the vintage automobiles and the more modern automobiles maintaining their own independent pace and having to navigate their own way without police escort and police assistance. Today's travels took us over a mountain range up to about 4,500 feet and at the current time we are at an elevation of 3,000 feet, in a city where the name means "where deer come", as in deer in Wisconsin and the northeast US. The name of the city is Baotou. We are actually in Inner Mongolia. There are two provinces in Mongolia, Outer Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. Here in Baotou, which is a very large city, the population is 2 million. Repeating what we said earlier, there 56 nationalities in all of China and there are 31 provinces. Our stay last night in the city that we left, Zhang Jiakou, had us staying in a very old and not so comfortable hotel right in the center of the city. Tonight we are in a very modern and very comfortable hotel here in the city of Baotou. Tomorrow we travel 610km starting out at 5:30 in the morning. That makes for a long day of motor travel. The terrain that we saw today in Inner Mongolia and northern China was very similar to South Dakota and Wyoming. The country side is without trees, not a cloud in the sky because of the warm and dry conditions, its about 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Carl said the terrain reminded him of his home state of South Dakota and the Missouri river basin in many places.

This motor challenge, with each day, becomes more and more relentless in its demands on the machinery and the people. It is said that if the machines can mechanically get all the way to Katmandu then there is a pretty good chance that the machines will be able to go all the way to Paris. At least two automobiles have dropped out of the competition, 94 started, of the two that dropped out, one was from Portugal and the other from the US. The next stage of the competition then will be from Katmandu through New Delhi and up to Istanbul by way of India, Pakistan and Iran. And it is said that if the people can survive that stage of the route then it is a pretty good chance that the people might get all the way to Paris. And for those who are a very keen about the competition of the rally, the race which is often measured in seconds and minutes over a very long course of 15,000km and 45 plus days, the race will actually take on increased intensity from Istanbul to Paris through Greece, Italy, Austria, Germany and France. So it is quite a test of machinery and quite a test of people. To navigate the highways or roads with what signs there are, is made more difficult because the signs are, obviously, not in the English language. Each driving competition team has a set of reference tools that they use, including maps that were presented at the onset of the competition, marking each country and the intended roads to be taken. Each car is equipped with a score book which has to be handed into a score keeper at the beginning and ending of each day and then there are controlled marshals along the course of the race where you have to stop and check in to certify that you have followed the course. Similar to golf only in motor rallying, someone else has to keep the scorecard. And there is a course book, a route book, which for two years has been in the planning and gives global descriptions of all the streets and roads the participants are suppose to take. And the person navigating is to inform the driver of the car when turns and what direction should be taken based on the route book. Calculators and computers are used inside the cars to calculate the distance and the amount of time between the various check points so as to know when to make a right or left turn. But with no English language signage and over a period of over 500 to 600km in a day, it has been known, and generally does happen, that people get lost and lose time and fall behind in the score keeping. That the nature of the rally competition.

Let me talk about some of the other drivers here today. We meet Kjeld Jessen and his son Henrik. They are from Denmark and as a father and son team, they are quite unique in that they are competing in the competition with a vintage car from the 1920's. The son Henrik is 19 and is one of three boys in the Jessen family. There are ten teams from the United States and two of them are from Birmingham, Alabama. We want to acknowledge them and give thanks to them for helping us to make some adjustments in our car. They are Ted Thomas with Southern Aviation Insurance and Vic Zannis, both from Birmingham, John Jung who is from Dallas and Andy Vann who is from Birmingham. These four fellows are driving 1950 Ford Coupes, both identical. Andy has been a mechanic for Davey Allison, the NASCAR race driver and was helpful to us in getting some of our carburation adjustments based on the change in altitudes we have experienced thus far.

We want to report to our mechanic Alan Bobillot in California and Joe Dixon in Wisconsin that the car generally is running very very well. It has taken quite a pounding just today and we feel, based on the terrain and road surfaces that we covered, that the car is holding up quite well. We have had a failure of the power steering assist pump and we do not have a spare aboard and so we are going to abandon the power steering assist. We have consumed about a quart of oil in the course of roughly 800km so far. And the fuel is going quite well, we were able to get 93 octane fuel today. We are continuing to use the octane supplement that we learned was necessary for these older cars in the United States. We want to report to Alan and Joe that the temperature of the radiator cooling system is running about 180 to 200 degrees, that the PSI for the oil is setting in at about 30 to 35 pounds of pressure, and that all of the metering systems that were installed by Alan appear to be giving us a good and consistent reading and the car seems to be performing quite well.

We had a lot of fun in the course of today's route by competing on a very long stretch of extraordinarily nice interstate toll way highway here in China, of about 150km. Each of the cars in the competition, there are now 92, sort of represents a unique and different engineering philosophy based on the design of the automobile and the improvements that have been made by the operators of the cars and so on certain types of roads, certain kinds of cars or vehicles perform better or worse than others. Well on the 150km of toll way highway the 1954 Packard led the pace on what was an American-like stretch of highway. The legal posted speed limit was 120km and with the police escort we tended to average right at 75 to 80 miles a hour or 115-120km. And it was quite fun to have the Packard leading the group of 92 cars. The Packard being designed for that kind of driving. In this rally, the speeds range from an average of about 35 for the older vintage cars to about 55 for the more modern cars. So there is not a lot of speed given the fact that the public roads are used and there are a lot obstructions with the normal highway traffic that has to be dealt with in the course of traveling the route. So the Packard lead the way on the toll way today and that was very fun but at times we were challenged by a pretty fancy Aston Martin from the UK, by a Rolls Royce from Bermuda, and by a Hillman driven by the Iranian team who are here with three cars. At different times in the afternoon's two-three hour drive on that toll way, the cars were all jockeying for position based on their ability to maintain the speed limit at this altitude and it was quite fun to see how the car performed and which ones did what in those circumstances. The Packard is performing well and we want to tell all those who have made it possible for our car to be in this competition how that is going.

Some other details such the sites that we see as we pass through this part of Northern China. We saw a camel being used for transportation. We have gone from seeing a modern vehicles in Beijing to bicycles and now we are beginning to see mules and donkeys pulling carts as life is quite different in rural China. Many of the older people here, those above 60 years of age, still wear the old the Mao type clothing. And it is quite normal on the dusty, remote village street to see an older person in that style of blue or gray dress but to see a modern sophisticated couple in today's dress. So a lot of contrasts here in China as it goes through its extraordinary transformation that we have been talking about. We also saw people working fields, many would often drop what they were doing and rush to the side of the highway to come and watch the parade of cars pass by. But we did see a single blade plow going through a field being pulled by two oxen. And a reminder that some things change very slowly. We did see a very disturbing sight on a roadside that we will share with you. We do not understand the significance of it and so we'll just recognize it, think about it and perhaps learn from it. We saw an object on the shoulder of the road up ahead on our left. We thought that it was an animal of some type. But as we came upon it, we realized that it was a human person on their hands and knees, literally crawling on their hands and knees, inch by inch, along the shoulder of the road. The person had very long black hair and almost appeared to be like a dog or some sort of an animal but we realized it was a human being. We don't understand the meaning of that. We had heard that in Tibet that it was common that people, for religious reasons, to make a pilgrimage on their hands and knees to Lhasa, the center of the Buddhist Monastery and the Dalai Lama. So those are some of the sights that we passed through this very expansive, colorful and very alien, foreign place of China.

We want to share with some of the family and friends some personal insights. Carl had a bit of a sign of a cold and sinus this morning and took some antihistamine and a couple of naps in the car and seems to have come through the day feeling much better. We did have a role reversal today. We've talked in the past that there is, in our car, what we described as a hare and a tortoise, but never acknowledged which person was which. But today the hare became a tortoise and the tortoise became a hare. It was quite fun to have the two banter back and forth as they changed roles as a result of the driving conditions. That is to say, different philosophies of how to drive under certain conditions and how to accomplish getting to where we want to get to on each individual's day run.

We had a chance to arrive early today after a 6:30 AM start to catch up on some of the English newspapers that are available here in Northern China. We see that China has now stated that it has lead the world with an average economic growth of 12% over the last five years, which is about 8.6% higher than the world average. China continues to maintain a rapid economic growth pace, expected to be 10% for 1997. This means that China ranks seventh in the world in terms of Gross Domestic Product and that compares with a tenth ranking in 1990. So the economic transformation of growth in China is quite extraordinary. Tourism, here in China, has been announced as, in the first six months of the year, bringing in 26.7 million overseas tourist, which is increase of 8.6% over that same period of January through June of last year.

Well the report tonight is coming to you from Baotou, meaning the place where deer come. It is a city of 2 million in inner Mongolia and the people here are extraordinarily nice and very friendly and most say hello in English and are just very charming and gracious. It's a delight and a privilege to be a guest in their country. But we're far, far away from our home place and getting farther every day, but we're carrying on and the competition is intensifying and we're going to do our best to stay right in the thick of things, hoping that our car will pass the test of getting all the way to Katmandu, which requires going through and over the Himalayas and we have several Chinese cities to see and stop at in the course of the next week. It does appear that it is going to be a very demanding test of both men and machinery. There are two female teams, one from the UK and one from the US and on another report, we'll tell you about how those ladies are fairing in the competition and how they're doing with the great race. There you have today's update. We're going to bed early now, just as you're getting up, we're going to bed at about 9:00 PM because we have a wake up call at 4:30 AM. We're required to be at the car and ready to roll at 5:30 AM. So this is no vacation, but we're glad we're here and glad to be a part of this extraordinary event. See you next time. Tell your friends and family to come along with Carl and Don by calling the toll free number. We'll talk to you in 24 hours. Good night.