How the Daily Telegraph’s charity drive in a 100-year-old car broke an Australian record

The driving of a 100-year-old roadster across Saudi Arabia in the name of charity has broken a record its drivers did not even realise existed. Read how.

It’s a record we didn’t realise we’d achieved until after we’d thrown on the handbrake in Dubai - we are the first Australian cars to have ever driven the breadth of Saudi Arabia from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf in the United Arab Emirates - a distance of 2300 km - and we did it in a 100 year old car.

For more than a century the closed-shop Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been largely locked away to foreigners with prying eyes - a mysterious and little-understood nation that resonated with those from the West as being something along the lines as being a vast oilfield covered by endless horizons of sand.

Sometimes explorers with more ticker than sense had tried to inveigle their way into the nation - in 1853 Richard Burton - the explorer rather than the actor - disguised himself to secretly visit the Muslim-only city of Mecca - another, Bertrand Thomas was the first European to cross the Rub’al Khali.

The Daily Telegraph’s cartoonist Warren Brown and reporter Matthew Benns. The first Australian cars to have ever driven the breadth of Saudi Arabia from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf in the United Arab Emirates - a distance of 2300 km - and we did it in a 100 year old car.

But our decision to try and cross Saudi was for a more practical reason.

While driving our 1925 Bean car across Europe toward the Mediterranean we were ever-conscious of the war escalating in Gaza which was increasingly impacting our plans to retrace Francis Birtles’ epic drive to from England to Australia in 1927 - a drive that traversed Palestine, Gaza, what is now Israel, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan - a route becoming less viable by the day for two western journalists in a bright red vintage car.

Yet just before we departed Australia for the UK, we learned that last April, Saudi Arabia had begun to relax their notoriously stringent rules to allow foreign motorists to enter the Kingdom - even allowing them to bring in their own vehicles, the nation signing up to an international carnet agreement.

Some locals stopped to take in the roadster as it travelled a distance of 2300km.

A Carnet du Passage is fundamentally a car’s passport - it is stamped when you drive into a country and stamped on the way out - and Saudi Arabia - keen to reposition itself in the world’s eyes had suddenly embraced this age-old international agreement.

And so we decided to try and make a dash to drive clear across Saudi Arabia, heading southeast from Cairo to place the Bean and the support vehicle on a ship at the Egyptian Port of Safaga to cross the Red Sea to arrive at Duba in Saudi Arabia.

With the vehicles aboard an old Grimaldi Line Roll On Roll Off ferry, we sailed across the at night - the four of us attempting some sort of disjointed sleep in the ship’s fixed, plastic chairs - when 12 hours later we finally arrived at the port in Saudi.

The Daily Telegraph’s reporter Matthew Benns (left) in action.

And so the drive into the unknown wilds of Saudi began - the Bean climbing higher into the most unexpectedly breathtaking scenery imaginable - vast, towering mountain ranges formed and weathered in a way that had a bizarre, almost unbelievable appearance - the dramatic formations almost implausible - as though they had been created by artificial intelligence.

Indeed our preconceived idea of Saudi Arabia as nothing but a sea of sand could not be further from the truth - and to think this jaw-dropping visual splendour had been locked away from visitors’ eyes for so long.

The Daily Telegraph’s cartoonist Warren Brown during the road trip.

The simple road through oasis towns such Al Lula encompassed everything from giant mesas, to the Arabian equivalent of Petra in Jordan - the carved tombs of Hegra - a region where road traffic was almost non-existent - and certainly no signs of tourists whatsoever.

In the nation’s capital Riyadh we had lunch with the Australian Ambassador Mark Donovan who autographed our car with the comment about our adventure, ‘A great Aussie story’.

As far as the Ambassador knew, we were the first Aussies to have ever attempted the drive, commenting on the century-old Bean, “… this is the first Australian car to come into Saudi…”

Not bad for an old Bean…

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