"What needs to be proved today is that as long as a man has a car, he can do anything and go anywhere. Is there anyone who will undertake to travel this summer from Peking to Paris by automobile?"
While there are millions of cars on the road today, it's still quite a challenge to drive all the way from Beijing to Paris. But there are some similarities between the 1907 and the 2010 events ... in both cases, the participants typically have more money than sense.
Here is the original route.
Remember that cars were very new back then, and there were very few roads of any type, let alone bridges and the like for crossing rivers and ravines. Somehow, the risk of bering arrested, shot or bombed may have been lower back then. Are there any historians out there willing to venture a perspective on personal safety along the P2P in 1907 compared with 2010?
There have been a number of reenactments over the years, but the one that amazes me the most is that of the two Italians, who drove an original Fiat 500 all the way from Bari in the South of Italy to Beijing. It was in 2005 and it took them 100 days to cover the 16,000 kms.
Thanks to Wikipedia for background on P2P
