14th August, Hovd, Mongolia
We would have to make miraculous progress in the next days in order to make up for all the stops we had been making, but when we woke up Rupert could hardly move because of a back problem. A trapped nerve must have come on during the night. We all had a go at healing him. Jonno got out his badger rub; Jim said he always sorted his back ache with a game of football; I told him to put his hands on my shoulders and stretch as he followed me walking around in a big circle. I think the paracetamol was the decisive cure. Nevertheless, we were away quite early and things were looking good. Rupert’s back made a miraculous recovery, soothed and massaged by the 2CV’s gentle bouncing across the corrugated track.
On approaching Hovd we spread out across the numerous tracks, racing in parallel and pulling faces at each other through the windows before burning off. With Hovd in view, the roads had separated us to the extent that we had lost sight of each other. We retraced our path and found the others lined up and looking smug. They had found the best tarmac road in all of Central Asia.
The two hundred metres of pristine metalled road led us comfortably into Hovd. It was an unremarkable town and reminded me of the Kazakh town where I had lost my camera and where Hywel and I had so nearly undermined our chances of ever getting to Mongolia. We pulled up on the dust outside a garage and had a play with the cars. The Fiesta was constantly losing fuel and so could not hang around for us at the garage. Instead they pressed on to find someone who could fix their leaky fuel tank.
One of our doors wouldn’t shut, having been wrenched when the wind caught it on a mountain pass. I removed the hinges and hammered them straight against a homemade inspection ramp, assembled from a hundred welded scraps of rusty steel. Rupert helped Jonno diagnose our, infinitely more important, chronic loss of power – which had developed since arriving in Hovd. The fuel supply to the carburettor was inconsistent and soon ceased completely. We saw that the fuel was getting to the pump but not past it so we decided the fuel pump must be broken. Fortunately, Rupert, had a spare.
Back on the road again we were making reasonable progress and had not lost too much time. We had lunch on the move in an effort to keep up the pace. Jonno steered us carefully alongside ‘Team Clouseau’ and I passed over some hastily made sandwiches. ‘We’, was now just ‘Us’ and ‘Team Clouseau’, having decided not to look around for ‘Team Moon Unit Alpha’, thinking it best to hope to see each other on the road. Indeed, soon enough we did and very good it was to be reunited. They had found a garage with a welder where – having four spare men and no hydraulic lifting gear – they had lifted the car onto its side by hand. With the undercarriage exposed they removed the now empty tank and welded a patch on, fitted it and rolled the car back down again – all for about £5.
Soon after Hovd we were on a bleak, foggy, wet moor. At the end of a huge shallow lake, black water was lapping across our path at the mouth of a small tributary. We all got out and scratched our chins. I soon spotted a line I was confident with and after talking tactics with the others I was ready to go. Just then, a local pulled up and waved ‘no’. He then pointed out a lump on the far side of the bank he thought would strike our undercarriage and then commented on the depth. He then showed us his alternate route. It looked ridiculous. Where my preferred route was fast flowing and had a peaty hue, his route bent upstream mid course and then went through a still black pool. I was perplexed. We all agreed to trust the local knowledge although from everyone’s expression I could see we shared a thorough distrust of the newcomer and his appalling logic. But, being strangers, we felt compelled to take his advice.
So with everyone agreeing I went for it. It went all right to start with, on the entrance I had chosen originally. As I turned into the current and went deeper into the water, things began to get a bit hairy. I kept the revs high and made it to the far side but as I climbed the bank, steam billowed out and the revs dropped and the engine stalled. Still confident we would get it going again after a rest, we looked to getting the others across. Rupert and Jim had devised their own crossing. It was a brave new move and a new ford altogether. The entrance was relatively steep but the water very shallow. Very slowly they entered and edged across and up the other side. They were through without fault, not even a push. ‘Team Moon Unit Alpha’ were next and perhaps encouraged by Jonno, who had belatedly got his feet wet and tested the depth of my favoured crossing, blazed full speed across the ford. The water hardly went over the hub caps. It was such an easy crossing. We had fallen victim to our own goodwill, humouring an obvious simpleton, who felt compelled to add his unwelcome ten pennies worth. It was a mistake that would come to cost us dearly.
We checked for water under the bonnet and found everything dry, the air filter had not been hit and there only seemed to be splashes quite low down the engine block. Encouraged we tried to start her up but she would not budge. Some Englishmen turned up in a Toyota Land Cruiser. They had just won a stage on the Transsyberian and were understandably very happy about it. They had had a good day and the Cayannes had done terribly. The Porsches had been fitted with their thinner rain tyres as they were fast running out of their general off-road type, a logistical error which was causing a terrible stir in our rivals’ camp. The rain tyres had all burst, putting the closest competitors as much as thirty minutes behind our new English friends. Confident they could hold their mammoth lead over the next stages, they towed us up the bank. The car bump started successfully at the second attempt.
Hoping everything would be fine, we pressed on but all too soon we started losing power. The car was spluttering and firing on one cylinder. I tried a few things; giving more gas, reducing the revs, riding the clutch – all made us lose momentum. I found pulling out the choke and sticking it in second gave the best results. The engine responded well to a bit of a load and we were able to proceed at about 20km per hour without touching the pedals. This only lasted so long and we soon stalled. First we tested the fuel supply, which turned out to be at fault. In fact the fuel line had split in at least two places. Overcoming a few complications this problem was fixed. However, the car still wouldn’t start. Several Porsches came past us before the Transsyberian Rally’s private ambulance stopped to offer some help and check that we were safe and well. With a bump start we got going again and drove on a bit further. The paramedics were a very friendly, intelligent pair. The driver, Klaus, could have passed for an assassin with his heavy lidded eyes and calm, deliberate demeanour. His companion, Dan, had an extremely generous and open manner and I liked him.
Soon, we lost power again and that now familiar feeling of dread that had first settled on us as we stalled at the ford was back. We pretended that nothing was wrong and drove on hoping for the best. Even as we refused to acknowledge it, it challenged our denial and took on an almost physical presence, greasy, desperate and truly sickening. It was as if we had received our death wound, a knife to the spleen and the blatant futility of any attempt to brush it off, unspoken as it may have been, could not be ignored forever. Yet I could not escape the possibility that the whole event was somehow untrue, a lie or a waking dream, that everything would be okay again if we just concentrated and pushed on. When we came to a stop, Rupert played around with the carburettor and we got another half an hour down the road, before we stopped again. Of course changing the oil should have been a first move but as it had been changed in the last few hundred miles, Jonno refused to let me even try. We tried everything else we could; changing the plug and the HT leads, replacing the points box, spraying everything with WD40, resetting the valves, checking the fuel flow. The frustration was awful. Nothing seemed to be at fault and every time we touched something the car would work for an agonising twenty more minutes, only to fail again.
As we pulled into camp it was clear we would have to work on the car all night if we had any hope of sticking together with the convoy. We had noticed a loose bolt on the back of the carburettor which was not accessible without lifting out a big mess of pipes and manifolds. The whole thing was rusty as hell and it didn’t look like the bolts would go back in again if we ever managed to get them out. We had come to a halt near a lake and the mosquitoes were out in their thirsty thousands. Despite the exhaustion and the relentless biting, Jonno valiantly stuck at it, applying putty here and there – I had lost faith by then.
