Two women who scarcely know each other, but with a common love of exotic landscape, vintage wheels, and high adventure (one a well-heeled Pacific Heights motorcycle enthusiast, the other a Santa Cruz-based automotive journalist, car fanatic, and mother of two small children) join forces to tackle an arduous endurance rally, driving a classic car over ten thousand miles of rough and exotic terrain in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. Prince Borghese's Trail is a classic travel adventure narrative in the tradition of Alexandra David-Neel and Beryl Markham.
Rallying vintage automobiles through exotic locales like Tibet and Nepal is typically a rich man's sport, but automotive journalist, car fanatic, passionate traveller, and mother of two young children Genevieve Obert was determined to take part in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge from the moment she first heard about it. The original Peking to Paris rally took place in June of 1907, when Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, accompanied by journalist Luigi Barzini, set out in his forty-horsepower Itala on what would be a grueling sixty-day race to Paris. Ninety years later, Genny and co-driver Linda Dodwell set out in a classic Hillman Hunter, departing from the Great Wall along with ninety-six other driving teams also racing for Paris, in an exciting and risky recreation of that historic rally.
The 1997 Peking to Paris passed through China, Tibet, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Austria, Germany, and France, traversing some of the most rugged, remote, and magical landscape on the planet. The dangers are real: Genny and Linda drive at times entirely alone through vast deserts of fundamentalist Islamic countries in makeshift purdah; an accident in Pakistan claims the lives of a German father and son team. Fast-paced, witty, and compulsively readable, Prince Borghese's Trail is packed with fascinating sketches of far-away places and their histories. The book provides a crash course in the functions and failings of vintage autos, and offers haunting flashbacks from Luigi Barzini's celebrated account of the original rally interwoven with the day by day rigors and dangers of flogging fragile classic cars over narrow mountain roads, through streams, and across searing deserts.
Prince Borghese's Trail is satisfying adventure travel writing, with a crowded cast of heroic daredevils and eccentric characters-and Obert sharply sizes up her fellow ralliers and their foibles: there are the handsome British boys of Team Chocky in their 1928 Bentley; Hermann the German, who comes down with altitude sickness on the way to Everest Camp and is found raving in a Tibetan family's tent; a middle-aged romance novelist and her rakish young driver; rally promoter Philip Young, who hectors the competitors like a drill instructor and tucks mash notes under the Hillman's windshield wipers ("Go like the wind today!"), and teammate Linda, with her bagful of jumbled currencies she dubs "frugles" and her quest for a perfect martini. Daily rumors sweep the rally; co-drivers stop speaking or come to blows. Ultimately Genny and Linda achieve their goal (a respectable place at the finish line, a Gold Medal and the Women's Cup) through a combination of daring, driving skill and mechanical smarts, and the liberal use of duct tape.
Prince Borghese's Trail is about the love of automobiles and driving, and the passion for adventure in strange and beautiful places. It's about those peak moments of "motoring" once described by Virginia Woolf, when, climbing a hill or rounding a hairpin turn, one sees "the heart of the world uncovered for a moment."
