Driving the Silk Road

Have you ever imagined what it might be like to take a fairly standard luxury saloon, designed to take ministers and tycoons about their business, across the Gobi Desert in the notoriously hard 'Peking to Paris' endurance rally?

One year, after a lively family Christmas dinner, Douglas McWilliams and his brother Mike decided to find out. In 2019, they entered a Bentley S1 in the rally, which would see them depart from Beijing along the old Silk Road, which connects China with the West by land. Travelling about 16,000 kilometres in total, they drove nearly halfway round the world. Their Bentley was one of only 21 cars to complete the rally without being flatbedded or towed.

This book is about two brothers on an extraordinary journey across the entire Eurasian continent. Their story would be an interesting one even if it were 'just' a travel book about a rather exotic drive. But they entered the rally because they sensed that the world's centre of economic gravity was shifting towards the area that they were traversing: China, Central Asia and Russia. Along the way they would discover what the coming-together of the revitalised Russia and China means for the West today, on an adventure that sheds new light on our ever-changing world in more ways than one.