Day Forty-Five: Roadside Mechanics

The morning arrived and although we had been warned by Doctors that Kits pain would worsen he seemed surprisingly well, if a little hungover and was using his monopod as a crutch.

If Doris the Yak could keep all her wits about her then we would be able to make Altai by the end of the day. The roads were ok in parts and Matt and George would be driving for Kit so we should sail along. Or so we hoped.

Doris however, had other plans and periodically cut out requiring a jump start from another car. Not wanting to shake the injured Kit to peices we took it slowly but we still on track for reaching Altai when disaster struck. It was Doris.

We all rushed over to be told by Matt and George that the leaf spring had snapped. For any car novice like myself, I understand this is the suspension. But in the case of this particular vehicle the snapping of this part mant that there would be nothing holding the wheels in place or keeping them from twisting out from under the car. Bad news. The good news, as we noticed was regularly the case,was that the boys had the necessary spare part. The problem would be fitting it. They said that they had already had the leaf spring on the other side of the car repaired by a mechanic and he had trouble undoing all the bolts with the electronical tools. In the middle of the desert though, you don't really have a choice but to give it a go.

A few minutes later all the boys (except the injured) were under the car wrestling the get the broken part out. We'd not been there more than a quarter of an hour when a few of the locals came over on motorbikesto have a little nosey. These particular Mongolians did not seem to have any mechanical knowledge to impart, they just appeared interested in these ridiculous vehicles littering the flat landscape and soon enough a couple more bikefulls of locals appeared. Eventually after watching us all poke about under the vanand take a few pictures they decided noting seemed to be happening much, and left. How wrong they were though! A couple of hours later and miraculously, yet again the boys managed to fix it! They got the old part out, the new part in and Doris wobbled on.

Now a little behind schedule we motored on, hoping to catch up with the other two teams we had probably frightened off with the fire the night before. The sun was getting low, and Altai was maybe only two hours away when the rumbling of our little Micra seemed more abmormal than usual. We got out to check and discovered a flat tyre. Unfortunately we had already punctured our spare tyre previously so we didn't have anythig else to swap it with. Time to get out the foam tyre filler. After reading the instructions, thoroughly shaking the can and watching in amazement as the tyre actually seemed to be inflating we continued on, as instructed by the can, to seal the puncture. Less than the 12 miles suggested by the can later it was obvious that the tyre had gone flat again. I suspect that Holts designed the filler for cars running on smooth tarmac not juddering along washboard roads and that it probably all spurted out. Determined to still make it to this stupid town before the day was out we resorted to plan B. Getting an innertube into our punctured tyre. This would involve getting the tyre off of the wheel with only two crow bars and limited knowledge. We had seen some of the locals demonstrate this to us prevously when James and Sammy punctured their tyre,by laying the wheel infront of another car and getting someone to drive over the tyre, forcing it off of the wheel. We tried this, but it was pretty unsuccessful, so we resorted to the crowbars and brute force. Amazingly we managed to pop the wheel off and were able to slide in the innertube before stretching the tyre back over the wheel. We pumped it up and voila! New tyre ready to go.

The map showed that the town should be just after ascending into the mountains but the sun was setting and it was getting cold. We pushed on, not wanting the trials of the day to delay us too much and after driving for an hour or so in the dark we finally reached Altai.

I was so pleased to get there especially after hearing how so many people had failed on that stretch of road. This new convoy was unstoppable! We found a dingy little hotel charging a pricey $25 for dusty carpetted rooms with lights that could be turned on by pulling a wire from the ceiling and conecting it to a live wire sticking out of the wall, and went to bed.