A school teachers Union protest detained us for two hours on the border which was an irritation after we had rushed from the Special Stage stopping only briefly to take photographs and admire the mountain scenery as we passed the Equator, which sadly was unsigned as was not the Tropic of Cancer later. We passed through all the border congestion at about 2.30 in the afternoon and foolishly accepted Alberto’s offer to take lunch at a Trusthouse Forte Travelodge immediately on the Colombian side. I say foolishly because night falls swiftly and early on the Equator and we had still another 300 miles to cover before our destination of Cali.
Lunch was splendid but Gordon was very sick and besides a heavy perspiration he was finding it difficult to remain conscious between his frequent departures from the table. Sue and I thought it prudent to have bottled water and a vegetable dish of spaghetti with tomato sauce and meanwhile Alberto, a gynaecologist by profession, had gone to a strong box of drugs he kept in the Mustang telling me that as there was no need for a navigator and hopefully none for a mechanic, he would be able to sedate Gordon into a totally unconscious for the rest of the journey.
It was about 4.30 when we left in broad afternoon sunlight and, having little petrol we cautiously drove to the first fuel station and there, were jocularly berated by Alberto for my steady style of driving; “You will not get anywhere in Columbia if you creep about in that Bentley. You have to drive Peter, you have to take some risks and you have to learn to overtake the big lorries”. I explained that we had been ‘creeping’ on account of our soft tyres, (I always let the pressures down on rough roads and particularly on Special Stages which were always rough), our shortage of fuel and that we certainly would get weaving once these two matters had been put right.
The late lunchers being the Bentley, the Mustang and the Alfa Romeo pulled out of the garage and onto the busy Panamerican Highway that would lead us through the most scenic mountain toll roads, equatorial jungles and humid swamplands of Columbia. Gordon meanwhile, was unconscious and strapped in the open Mustang he was oblivious of what was now going to take place – a race. And sitting beside him, looking like the Shah of Iran was the sunburned Alberto with aspirations of Fangio, his countryman, behind whom John Smallwood, the urbane hotelier, and his navigator John Pen Le Farge, intellectual eccentric and historian, both Americans from Sante Fe, they spent their rally listening to loud 60’s English pop music or ruminating on recent arguments I had put forward together with Philip Hooper, the English Australian property tycoon, at our occasional dinners together: claiming that America was totally mercenary during WW2 taking Englands gold and overseas possessions before agreeing to support us in our crusade against the total evil of Hitler! With a full tank and hard tyres, a Bentley loves the open road and was soon way out of sight of the Argentineans and the Americans. “They must be creeping”, I commented to Sue. The road was fabulous and fast and after leaving the border behind for more than 50 miles we found the roads deserted as we wafted effortlessly seeing the needle pass the 100 mark very frequently. The majesty of this road in the evening light made us want to stop and stare or take photographs but we dared not and despite our high speed, it was proving difficult to make a dent on that 300 miles before dark. ‘A watched kettle never boils’ and so it was with the mileometer as I would keep glancing at it not seeing enough of an increment and wanting to go faster. But then all too suddenly the night cloaked the road in darkness and we still had 150 miles to go.
As fatigue sets in and the night encroaches, the invariable ‘sods law’ comes into force: in this case, the road surface not only deteriorated but narrowed. In addition to these horrors, the big American lorries and the buses with their unfocused headlamps now seemed to turn out onto the inky blackness of this tropical night road. It was to become a drive of endurance over fatigue.
Somewhere in this black nightmare, the Bentley’s front wheel found a huge hole and dropped in it while we were doing 50mph or more. There was the heaviest metallic clap that I have ever heard, and we now had some experience of hitting some of those topes at similar speeds, after which Hero’s entire frame shook and seemed to groan and a few more screws dropped from the dashboard onto my feet. My normal reaction was to brake severely but I had learned that this could further damage the tyres and suspension. Instead, a delayed reaction perhaps, I pulled the wheel sharply to the right, and, still dazed by the shock of that impact, found moments later a rock-face looming-up in the headlamps beam and only able to correct for this just in time. Our speed now came down dramatically.
With the oncoming glare from the lorries, the inky blackness of the moonless night, the dark dank foliage creeping to the roads edge, my own fatigue and a bug splattered windscreen, I realised how important a white line is at the margin; a central line would be useless, not that there was one, as the lorries hogged the crown of the road but that line on the roadside would have been invaluable. We were not to get any road markings until the very outskirts of Cali where, with road lamps, they were not really necessary.