Spring Fun
19AugI wake early and write some hand notes for the blog. It’s cold in the Ger, and it gets colder as the man opens the skylight. Eventually he closes it again and lights the copper stove. We are served more tea and fried bread (it’s cold, but fried previously). We are also served some really hard cheese. The flavour is so strong it has to be gnawed a little piece at a time. I retrieve the bag of Joyce’s presents from the car, and we give each child a car. I give the man some Australian coins for his coin collection (it sits in a frame on the wall), and he takes a metal silver pen, which he proudly hands above his bed. We give the girl a hair care set, which is a brush, a comb and a hair clip in a plastic case. She immediately has her mum get to work on brushing her hair and putting the clip in.
Joyce’s hand knitted bird takes pride of place on top of the TV between the tiger and the chicken:
Stephen’s favourite child was quite scared of his strange photographer:
The family
Very happy with the new hair clip and brush, this girl was ultra hard working around the house. The colours inside the Ger were beautiful:
It’s blowing a gale outside, and the temperature must be close to zero. I have all of my layers of clothes on. We have decided to perform a temporary fix on the spring, and then limp to the nearest large town, where apparently there is a mechanic. We can’t work on the car in this gale though, so the plan is to find shelter next to one of the abandoned buildings and get to work. As we leave the Ger everything seems okay, but Tim’s ipod has gone missing. When we leave things are getting sour. Later we find our Mongolian Lonely Planet has gone, which is a real blow on our first day in Mongolia.
We jack the car and put a block of wood between the chassis and the diff. We hold it in place with wire. Then we wire from the diff forward to the where the spring connects to the chassis. This is about a 40cm length. This wire has to stop the diff from moving backwards. What hope does a thin piece of wire have?
Stephen works at wiring up the spring. He’s got a bit more brawn than I can muster. You can see the block of wood that we propped the car up with before we have wired it in place.
A Policeman comes and asks for our documents, but Stephen calls his bluff and it works. We get the car re-loaded and head to the next town of Olgiy. It’s only 60km, but it’s down the south road, not the north road we’d planned to take. The first part of the road is dirt and becomes very steep. We need low range to climb the hill.
The view from the top of the hill on the way to Olgiy:
Some lout stands on top of the car to stretch:
The first Yaks we see:
Then there is a 30km long stretch of hot mix bitumen! [There is no more bitumen like this for another 1500km or so]. We arrive in the town and are surprised to find an atm where my Westpac visa card works. Next we head to a mechanic. We are only there two minutes when 2 other mongol teams show up. It’s the Micra and the Subaru van we saw in Kyrgyzstan. The other 2 teams have a local with them. He has kind of helped them, but has also roped them into moving some furniture for his grandmother and acting as a taxi service. At sight of 3 wrecked cars the mechanic tells us he is busy. We head in our separate directions.
We head to another mechanic. At first they are not friendly, but I show them our spare front spring, and explain I think it’s too short to fit. It’s also got one less leaf. We were originally hoping to borrow a jack and some tools and do the work ourselves, but the mechanic quotes only $15US to fit the spring. They work on the car outside, so we sit on the gutter and watch. I try and point things out where we can, as they sometimes they seem to lose the plot. It takes them 4hrs to fit the spring. In that time Stephen has 3 shots of vodka, the car falls off the jack once, and almost falls off about 20 times, and the price increases to $40US. They insist on jacking the car from behind the petrol tank, which requires so much height they need two jacks and a stack of bricks under the jack. None of the bricks are square, so they have this uneven pile of blocks. Several times the mechanic screams at us to stop the car from swiveling of the jack when he is underneath. When it actually falls there is a ‘ooooo’ from Mongolian onlookers. For the mechanic though it must be common place, as he sees it coming and rolls out from underneath.
It was inevitable, the car falls off the jack:
There are several problems to overcome in the process. The front rubber bush on the old rear spring has a metal sleeve, and the front spring doesn’t. The mechanic has to burn the rubber on the old rear spring bush to get the metal sleeve out. He does this using an old petrol torch. I’m standing well clear at this point. There are more flames coming backward out of this thing than forwards, and I’m unsure what is actually stopping it from exploding like a petrol bomb. He is enjoying the challenge though, and eventually it comes off. It still has rubber on it though, so he rests it on his thigh and slices the rubber off with a knife. I can’t watch. Surely there will be blood everywhere!...but no, he slips continually but always misses slicing his thigh. With the bush inserted they put the front bolt of the spring in. However the spring is so short that the diff must be pulled about 50mm forward on the left side before it can be bolted to the spring. We’ll have to drive to UB with the diff crooked. The next problem is the rear of the spring, as it’s just not long enough. Unfortunately we didn’t take a picture of the completed set-up. The picture below shows the shackle with the proper rear spring. The red line shows th angle of the shackle once the short spring was installed. We had to bend the shackle stopper plate with our chisel so that the shackle could be moved far enough forward to fit the shackle pin into the spring. The problem is, with the shackle almost horizontal, the linkage is just about locked out, and I was unsure how long it would last. On top of this, the spring is too soft, and it’s resting on the bump stop before we even put our luggage back in.
With the diff crooked we have to drive with a quarter turn of lock on the steering wheel to go in a straight line. With the diff further forward the tailshaft has to cover distance from the differential to the transfer box. It has a splined joint, but it is almost completely taken up. There seems a small chance that we could bend the tailshaft, which would be a bit of a disaster. It’s almost dark when we leave the mechanics, so we drive out of town on the south road and set-up a very windy and cold campsite, next to a pile of about 100 sheep skulls. It’s so windy we have to cook inside a tent. I’m thoroughly tired and depressed. The plan is to get some sleep and then have a look at the map in the morning. We’ll decide then whether to back track to the north road, or continue on the south road.
Mongolian towns in general are not very picturesque. This is a better view of Olgiy:
‘I’m pretty sure they’re not human skulls’. The pile of sheeps heads next to our cold windy, campsite:
