I am totally convinced that as a boy, Peter Crichton was an avid fan of Richmal Crompton’s "Just William" books. The grubby-kneed schoolboy had a wholesomely simple view of adults and what they saw as challenges. "What’s all the fuss about climbing Everest?" asks William. "I’d just keep walking till I got to the top." Peter Crichton’s book "Circling Home" has a touch of that same refreshing naivete. The very quality that underpinned generations of British explorers to accomplish prodigious feats with a pair of stout boots, a good serge suit and a can or two of pemmican. One day, Peter Crichton and his wife Eileen got in their Land Rover Discovery and just kept driving until they arrived back where they started from. Put as simply as that, William would empathize completely. The actual journey was a little more complicated, as the book spells out. It is significant, however, that as in William’s world, it was adults who were bent, for their own reasons, on complicating simple issues that generated the only problems the Crichtons encountered. Neither the landscape nor the Land Rover gave any significant trouble.
The bane of any modern journey that involves crossing borders is paperwork. With the route intended to maximize both the overland distance traveled and the number of borders crossed, the task of obtaining the required paperwork almost ended the project before it began. Twice it was abandoned but miraculously revived when a visa or permission materialized out of the morass of bureaucracy that governments find so inexplicably necessary.
The route was to take the Crichtons from Alkhobar to Alkhobar the long way round — a distance of 41,766 km; there’s something engaging about that sort of precision; it occurs all through the book but it’s never fussy, simply the result of a desire to inform accurately.
A detailed description of the somewhat cavalier and almost incomprehensible process of transporting a car by dhow to Karachi illustrates just what a challenge the simple task of taking a car from A to B can become. The detailed and coolly descriptive account of the characters and events surrounding the loading and eventual arrival of the vehicle sets the tone for the rest of the book. All the facts and events are dutifully recorded and give the impression of being completely true. Somehow, there’s a sense of distance between the writer and the environment in the telling of the story. Events are recalled with precision but I never felt the sense of frustration followed by relief that must have flooded through the Crichtons as their precious vehicle, the basis of the expedition, was consigned to an aging wooden dhow, left behind in Dubai and eventually arrived intact in Karachi.
From Karachi, the route ran through upper Sindh and Punjab and on to the Karakoram Highway. The expedition nearly ended there with a robbery by a seven-year-old boy and an old man. Little incidents and observations appear in written asides through the book. The route continued along the Silk Road to central China and eventually they arrived in Beijing.
On that route is one of the little nuggets of character that litter the narrative. In Xinjiang Province, just south of the Tian Shan Mountains is the city of Turpan. With one of the unsung wonders of the world — 2,000 km of underground water channels, hand hewn 2,000 years ago and still feeding the lush vegetation in the hottest city in China — the Crichtons dine at John’s Cafe. Why "John’s"? Who was he? And why for goodness sake in the middle of China and with an Internet connection? We’ll never know but it is such gems as these that encourage further reading and research. I do wish Crichton had told me though or even given us John’s e-mail address. He frequently comes up with interesting and perceptive asides that add to the flavor of the necessarily swift passage along their route. Smiling as a sign of discomfort or unease in China demonstrated in a very human way the essential differences between the traditions of travelers and locals. A pair of Chinese girls, "dressed as if going to a disco and heavily made up" flagging down motorists on a highway with the intention of washing cars would elsewhere have been badly misinterpreted.
After 1.7 tons of fuel (precisely!) and 14,000 km, some more obtuse bureaucracy from the Russians and three accidents, the Crichtons arrive at the Pacific coast of Russia ready to transship to the American continent. The journey across Alaska and the United States is recounted in the same precise and informative manner as the trans-Asia section. Given the average speed of the trip at 65.6 km/h, the amount of information Peter Crichton records in his diary entries and text is remarkable. Names, places and details not only give you a feel that he was actually there but also encourage you to think that you could follow in his wheel-tracks, using the book as a guide. It was never written as such, but the impression is one of such painstaking and accurate record-keeping that you could if you wanted to.
A talented water-colorist, Crichton includes some of his impressions of the trip together with a sprinkling of fine color photographs. I wish there were more. I feel that having traveled in exotic climes, I would like to have seen pictures rather than relying on his descriptions and my imagination. However, the photos are of superb quality and sufficient to give a flavor of some of the countries through which the journey passed. I suspect there is a "coffee-table" book in his collection of photos.
Read the book. It is a tightly-written detailed account of a challenging journey that the majority of us would never endure. There is clarity of vision and an inquisitive energy that drives the prose and triggers ideas and questions that you want to find answers to. Published by Arabian Vision at SR120 and widely available in the Kingdom, it will fire your imagination and reassure you that, far from needing supermen or women to overcome quite formidable odds, standard issue humans furnished with good equipment, unending patience and the constitution of an ox can — and do — achieve something quite spectacular.