Plymouth-Banjul Challenge a car worth approximately £100. Participants in the challenge are on their own, meaning that no assistance is rendered to motorists in case of a car breakdown or even if they become stranded. Mechanical reliability is the main obstacle to completing the course given that such vehicles are ordinary road cars and are mostly at the end of their useful lifetimes. Many cars cope very well until they have to go through the desert and then almost all suffer a great deal due to high temperatures and dust. Once the cars make it to Banjul in Gambia they are auctioned
The Capital of the Ruins in 1986 by Eoin O'Brien in "The Beckett Country", and later that same year in "As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday by His Friends and Admirers". It is also collected in Beckett's "Complete Short Prose 1929–1989", published in 1995. The Capital of the Ruins "The Capital of the Ruins" is a short piece of reportage by Samuel Beckett written in 1946. Originally written for broadcast by Irish radio, it deals with the Irish hospital in St. Lô. The title of the piece derives from a booklet of photographs of the bombed-out city entitled "St.