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