Challenging yourself to the extremes

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What if you’ve tackled Peking to Paris in a Bentley Speed 8 but found that perhaps not too much of a challenge? Well, then you could go out and find yourself a vehicle that will ascertain you that doing ‘P2P’ in it will definitely be a daring test of both men and machine. It’s exactly what Belgian born Anton Gonnissen did when he decided a Mototri Contal was the contraption for him.

Quoting from his weblog: “Being a former Dakar (quad-jeep-truck) competitor ‘the great outdoors’ have always been on my mind. After buying a Speed 8 in 2011, I wanted to take it ‘where no man had gone before…’. So that turned out to become the P2P ’13, quickly followed by Mandalay, Inca, Baltic, Morocco, Flying Scotsman, Australia and more. The Bentley has now run 58,568kms and I had the feeling that the time had come for an ultimate adventure, the last quest, a grand finale.”

Gonnissen found the French tricycle with apt ‘Roi-des-Belges’ bodywork to be not just the right challenge, but also a very historically right choice: “Reading the original books on the Peking to Paris of 1907, I discovered that Auguste Pons, the Contal driver, was kind of cheated by the other four competitors. They never admitted it, but it looks as if they did just that. They left him in the Goby desert without petrol where he had to leave his Mototri behind. He had to walk back to Peking. My Flemish-born Calimero complex compelled me to feel a wee bit sorry for the guy but the same Flemish-born sense of entrepreneurship saw an amazing opportunity to do something crazy: bringing Auguste Pons home! Finishing what Auguste started. The idea to drive a Contal Mototri, single-cylinder, chain-driven tricycle from Peking to Paris was born.”

And there he went, with his son as a navigator the duo made it through the Gobi desert and beyond. Read more about the Gonnissen’s adventurous trip here.

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