The Mongol Rollercoaster
They shouldn't call this the Mongol Rally, they should call it the Mongol Rollercoaster (of emotions). As you may know, our recent woes began with a day where our friends got stuck in the sand, then their bumper fell off, then we got a rear tyre puncture in a sandstorm with strong hairdryer-hot winds. The puncture took 4 hours to fix and entailed getting lorrys and landmovers to drive over our tyre to try and get it off the rim and using a method of pouring meths into the tyre and lighting it to explode it onto the bead. This was followed by a 90km drive to the next town in the dark on terrible roads with the brakes seizing up. Throw in a mozzie-fest of bitings and a smashed bottle of red wine, it was a good one. Well, that day was followed by a full day of repairs to the ambo and trying to get our spares onto the relevant wheels etc. in order for us to continue. We set off the following day with high hopes only to be dashed by another puncture on the same side at the rear a couple of hours into the journey. We totally trashed the tyre on the loose gravel surface so managed to get it off the wheel relatively easilly. However, when attempting our next fire trick to get the new tyre onto the rim, things went wrong even further still. Having attempted to use spray gas, but being unable to light it, Scotty then tipped about half a bottle of meths into it, which caused a large explosion and blew out our only good wheel valve. Fail! We sent Wells and one of our mates off in the Skoda to get the 120km to the next town with our wheel and two tyres while we attempted to glue and tyre-weld a smaller valve into our remaining spare wheel. After a couple of hours we suceeded in getting a tyre on that would hold pressure and continued to limp on to the next town. Arriving in town later we found that Wells had enlisted the help of two local guys by relaying messages by mobile phone to the guy's mother who spoke English. They had lined up a load of inner tubes and new tyres for the following day, as well as getting us a cheap hotel and taking us out for a late dinner. Seriously great guys, really lovely and helpful and asked for nothing in return. The whole of the next day was spent buying and installing 4 new tyres and sorting a spare, which after hours of work still refused to entirely go onto the bead. The following day we set off again, thinking that with 4 new tyres, we couldn't fail to get a good day in. How wrong we were! About 50k out of town we felt a vibrating feeling. On geting out of the ambo we realised that in the previous day's haste the guys had neglected to tighten the wheel nuts on one of our back wheels. We'd absolutely destroyed one of our 5, extremely rare, American 8-stud wheels, damaged the bolts and even managed to snap one off altogether! To add insult to injury when changing it for the spare, the Ambo slipped backwards off the jack and onto the rear hub. You'd think that this was enough to ruin our day, but no, that wasn't the half of it. About 100k later, we went to overtake a lorry, hit a massive pothole and snapped one of our rare, American suspension leafs, leaving us sitting on the rubber bush on the back axle on one side. This could feasibly have been game over for the Amboriginals. We limped a massive 850k that day to power on to Astana and the help of Dahan, our local fixer, who along with our friend Azelle, had booked us a hotel for the night. The next morning we set off to trawl the garages of Astana with Dahan, with the massive task of repairing our ruined wheel and somehow find a suspension leaf spring that would fit. The first place we attended basically said in no uncertain terms that we'd have no chance of finding those parts in Kazakhstan and it would take weeks to order them in from abroad. However, in an almost unbelievable stroke of good luck, the 2nd garage we tried had 2 broken Chevrolet trucks sitting out the back! The pendulum had swung in our direction, now we just had to hope that we could get the parts. In what was an astounding piece of blaggery, Dahan managed to get the number of the manager of the whole garage complex, tell him that he worked for the government and that we were volunteers distributing medical supplies throughout Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and convinced the guy to give us any parts we wanted, absolutely FREE! What a find! Honestly, the chances of us finding these parts was so slim, these could have been the only two such trucks in Kazakhstan and we'd stumbled upon them and been given free reign to take what we wanted. New suspension leaf, 2 of the rare 8-stud wheels we'd been craving, even the brake calliper springs that had been missing for weeks now. The mechanics got to work on removing the parts from the old Chevrolets and installing them on the ambo, a job that took about 4 or 5 guys a full day to well past finishing time. Both vehicles were seriously corroded and things were being hammered, heated with acetylene gas torches and cut with grinders to get them off, it was not an easy task. While the work was being done, it transpired that behind the garage complex was one of Kazakhstan's finest extreme driving schools, they had a twisty, turny, bumpy dirt track where they had trained many people in extreme driving, including the president's personal body guards. We were allowed by the assistant boss of the complex, Aibal, to rag it round the track in the vintage soviet 4x4 which he was restoring to use for wolf hunting in the winter. Amazing! When the day came to an end, we bought the boys a load of beer and blasted Aibal's kazakh music out of the now-finished Flo's sound system in celebration. We tried to find out how much labour would cost and were, to our extreme surprise, told that it was all free of charge. Could this day get any better? Yes. We turned down Aibal's invite to the sauna and went to leave, when I remembered we still had his memory stick of Kazakh tunes, I ran to give him them and was told, "no, take them, they're yours." Awesome. "Is that it?" I hear you ask. No. We met Azelle and Dahan's big brother in Astana for dinner, turned out that the big man is a director of a local law firm, and refuses to let us pay for dinner. It doesn't get much better than this. That takes us to this morning. Where will the rollercoaster take us next?
