13/08/08

By Mark:

Some of you may be wondering what has happened in since Chris' update. Sadly we haven't made it to Mongolia though we are very proud to have managed 10 countries, 5 time zones and 6000 miles in the Fiat before it died on the roads of Kazakhstan.

Before I go into all the gory details we like to thank all of you for supporting us on the trip, your donations of equipment and money to charity. We couldn't have got as far as we did without your help.

The last few days in Kazakhstan were a blur of garages, strange hotels, police assistance, bribes, mystery people in Astana, 13 hour train rides, horse intenstines, bad Russian, more bribes, hangovers, strange men following us, fermented horse milk and ugly whores bursting into hotel rooms unannounced and most defintely unwanted!

I'm afraid the car died because I drove it into a giant pothole on the road to Kostanay. This had the unfortunate side-effect of snapping two engine mounts, damaging the gearbox, breaking the air hose, leaking oil from the gearbox and shearing the exhaust manifold in two. For those people not so quite au fait with motor vehicle terms - I well and truly f**ked it.

I won't go into the madness that was loading the car onto a removals van yet, but the end result was the car in a VW garage in Kostanay with a list of problems as long as your arm and a 3 day wait and £400 bill should we have wished to have them fixed. Sadly time and money already against us we had to leave the car there.

We would have continued on to Ulaanbaator had it not cost £700 for a flight there from Astana or...[Read More]