Day Four

January 1, 2006

After having crawled out of bed around noon, there was no way we were going to try to head over to Africa. The celebrations last night to celebrate the arrival of 2006 had gotten the better of us. Plain & simple.

But that wasn’t a bad thing at all, since about half the rest of the adventurers in our group had suffered a similar fate. So it turned out to be an entertaining day of watching people repair & prepare vehicles to get them ready for the more challenging part of the journey. And I must say, this group of adventurers is truly a set of car fanatics like nothing else I’ve ever seen. The participants of the Plymouth-Banjul Rally don’t just love cars – they seem to live and breathe them. Every single vehicle is spilling over with tools, with repairs being made to virtually any & every part of a vehicle.

A great example of this passion is our team leader Duncan, a very friendly fellow from the UK. He’s heavily involved in drifting, which seems be taking his country by storm, much as it has in the good old US of A. Not only does Duncan organize races, but he’s also driving in one of the championship events (so look for coverage of that race in the CarDomain Events section in 2006!).

Now, on the rally vehicles again, you must keep in mind that these cars & trucks are all going to be given to a charity in The Gambia at the end of the race. So this meant that some extremely creative approaches had been taken towards customization. One of my favorites was the roof rack that had actually been welded to the roof. Certainly a solution that most of us wouldn’t choose for our every-day vehicles, but definitely extremely effective. In addition, we had several very cool little mascots on hoods of the cars, including our very own CarDomain camel on the hood of the Panda.

Trevor & I also took this opportunity to go check out the British enclave of Gibraltar here on the southern tip of Spain. So this is actually a tiny bit of British territory, with a population of about 28,000 and a huge rock jutting out into the Mediterranean Sea. And what a funky little town! After going through the very cursory border inspection, we felt like we were suddenly in a small village back in England. The currency was British pounds, everyone spoke English and they even had British double-decker buses running around. Too weird.

A brief snippet of history here for our readers. Back when Spain was a military dictatorship under General Franco, there was actually no land border crossing over to Gibraltar (he was sort of pissed off that Britain was holding onto that last little piece of what he considered Spain). So the only way to get to this peninsula was by sea or by air. The Gibraltar airport is right at the border, on the only flat part of land, so after crossing over from Spain we had to drive right across the runway. And it was a totally odd feeling looking out of my window right along this huge piece of tarmac.

Otherwise, I must say that it was a pretty uneventful day. Pretty much like New Year’s Day in the rest of the world. Most shops and restaurants were closed (but we did enjoy the down-home taste of McDonald’s on Gibraltar!), so we just ended up back at our hotel, getting to know our fellow adventurers and psychologically preparing for the crossing from Europe to Africa.

Exciting!