The Start of the Great Game

Having safely arrived in Istanbul and installed ourselves in the Pera Palace Hotel, one of the oldest and finest hotels in the city, we spent a day sight seeing, David in a tourist bus and me in the Bentley. I think we saw all the same things but I was saved from a visit to the Turkish Carpet shop !



The situation with inner tubes worsened in so much as various emails between myself and Richards Brothers suggested that the new tubes were not suitable for the Bentley after all and needed checking at the very least. With this in mind I found a Goodyear dealer, who after 30 minutes communicating by MSN with Ankara established that for a small price he could ship me 4 tubes by air to arrive the next day. As we have 10,000 miles to go I was not willing to risk further problems and so sent for the tubes. The next day these arrived and we inspected all four tubes replacing the two rear ones that seem most affected by the problem. The rest I have loaded as spares.

The same day we finally received the road book for the trip. This is the navigators bible prepared by the organisers to get us across Asia. To say we were underwhelmed is an understatement however, we always knew this was going to be a real adventure. Luckily we brought maps of the whole route with us and Conrad supplied a GPS which will, at the very least, help us find hotels in large cities.


The route has yet again changed but maintains the essential elements of the Wakhan Valley in Afghanistan and crossing Tibet to the North Everest base Camp. So except for a few very long days the route is much as expected.

We also finally met the other particpants and the support team, which contrary to my expectation includes Pippa the doctor, although she is almost certainly younger than Ayesha which to me makes her very young !. Jim is the route master and sometime mechanic and he, Pippa and Conrad will share driving the Landrover 110 across Asia, rather them than me is all I have to say on that.

The other teams are Bernard and Dana in another Landrover, although this one is the latest model and filled with spare parts etc. Then there is Bill and Lorette in a 1969 Morgan loaded down to the gunwales with equipment.
Finally there is the Yellow Peril with Chris and Liz previously mentioned, a small select band of adventurers facing 10,000 miles, 8 countries, and the Himalayas.

On the 26th August at 0800 we finally depart Istanbul for Ankara.


As we pass over the Bosphorus Bridge we approach another road toll booth which does not take cash, we head for an electronic sensor lane without a barrier and zoom through at speed setting off the alarm as we depart. The Morgan who is just in front of us picks a different lane with a barrier, drives right up to it and then proceeds to go under the barrier whilst it is still down, no alarm !.

It is only three booths later that we finally find out from Liz that you can buy a token in various shops to enable free passage through all Turkish tolls. Bit late but worth remembering for next year !

The drive to Ankara is uneventful and fast, it is motorway the whole way. However, whilst we are cruising at between 60 and 70, cars are passing us at more than 100mph, it is very disconcerting. The drive into Ankara is hectic to say the least but we arrive at the Hilton unscathed and relaxed.


After much debate David and I decide that we will need to modify our stops to ensure we do not do excessive milages in the next few days, neither the car nor us can stand 700kms in a day as this takes about 14 hours to drive including regular stops. As such we will not only arrive in the dark but the car and ourselves will be exhausted. So our second day on the road sees us bypass Capadoccia (where we have both been before) and head for a point further East and closer to our pre Iran destination of Lake Van. It also means we will bypass a run through the mountains on Day 3.

So we drive South East to Kayseri and stop at a second. More on this later..

The Run Up

This has been the most unsettling run up to a rally I have been involved in - Visas are still outstanding and we leave tomorrow !, we have reduced numbers from 16 cars to 4 with 1 organiser's car and I guess no doctor, real questions as to whether China will let cars enter from the west to Kashgar under current insurgency issues in Xinjiang Province.   However, come what may we will set off on Thursday fro Istanbul and the start on the 25th August 2011.   On top of all this the Bentley decided to throw me a real scare three weeks ago when by chance I noticed water on the floor of the garage only whilst showing my friends the Cubbon's around the industrial unit where I store the cars.   Having phoned Chris George, my engineer, and asked him to look at the engine when he came over the next day he reported back that we had two large cracks in the cylinder head !, Panic !.   A quick call to Peter Fitzcharles, who bought the Mercedes 220 from me that I did London to Sydney with in 2005 I had established a working fallback if we could not get the Bentley sorted.

After calls to Riskes and jeffrey Engineering, we attempted a repair using an American product called Devcon.   The cracks were at each end of the head and had travelled from the top rocker cover gasket all the way down to the head gasket and partly across the bottom of the head.   The repair was completed without delay and I took the car on a high speed run to Bristol and back.   This went well but when I got home the leaks had reappeared adjacent to the repaired head.   Further advice suggested that the head was US ad needed to be replaced.   Through chance Chris Forrest called me and suggested I talk to Jeremy Brewster an engineer who had worked on his Vauxhall 30/98.   Jeremy confirmed that there was no real repair possible to a 75 year old head and I needed to contact Will Fiennes and buy a new one, as he said "just hold out your cheque book and sign whatever he writes in it !".   Friday evening saw me phoning Will who was fairly certain he had just completed the machining of a new 4 1/4 litre aluminium head that I could have, brilliant now the cheque !.  

The head arrived the following week, Chris and 1 spent a day moving bits and pieces off the old one and onto the new head before re-assembling the engine.   No issues doing any of this and within a day we are back up and running with a brand new Aluminium head !.   A trip to my father in Kent put 634 miles onto the engine without incident and we re-tightened the head on my return to Kingsbridge.

So, catastrophe averted, Peter stood down and we are back on track for our departure this week.

My co-driver is David Moffatt - we have travelled together several times but in separate cars, including London to Peking, London to Sydney and Kuala Lumpur to Hanoi.    We both think this may well be the biggest adventure we have had even though we have been to most of these countries before excluding Afghanistan and Tibet.

Afghanistan sounds hairy but we are going to the northeast corner which is known as the Wakham Valley and is a tongue of land that extends into China.   As of this week the border is shut but we are told this changes daily so hopefully we will get through.

I am desperately keen to visit Tibet by car and especially Everest Northern Base Camp which is only reachable from Lhasa via the Rongbuk Monastery.   The last 40 kilometres will be extremely difficult and not in the classic cars but staggeringly uncomfortable Chinese 4x4s.

We are both keen to see Iran again, we found the people there really friendly and approachable.   This time we are going closer to the southern edge of the Caspian Sea and passing through Tehran.   

So there we are, the route we are taking to Istanbul is a combination of trains, ferries and driving.   We drive to the Channel Tunnel and then onto Hertogenbosch in Holland.   Here we put the car on a train and travel overnight to Livorno in Italy.   A beautiful drive through Umbria following the route of the 2000 London to Peking to Ancona and then the Superfast Ferry overnight to Igoumenitsa in Greece.   From there we take two days to drive across Greece via the monasteries of Kalampaka to Istanbul. 

We hope to collect our second passports fully visas from the organiser, Conrad Birch, in Thessalonika before taking him with us across the border into Turkey.

So, next report en route to Turkey I expect