17th February 2015 birthday boy

Our marshalling duties were snatched out of our hands today so a purely sweep duty was the order of the day, leaving the Shangri la hotel to head north after half of the cars was our task this morning, we dressed in our newly laundered work clothes and headed once again to the sweaty hotel underbelly where our truck was waiting to carry out its task for this day.  We had a pretty uneventful morning until we arrived at the regularity this afternoon, a car had dropped the equivalent of Saudi Arabia's oil reserve up the steep hill making us wonder what car had slicked it's way up the heat soaked road towards the hotel waiting at the end, it revealed itself as a volvo PV with a snapped rear axle nearly making it to the end, it's currently all being welded up at one of the million garages that seem to fill the town we pass through so fingers crossed it will all be well tomorrow morning.

Earlier in the day we had received a call that one of the invading German crews had holed their suspension air bag causing a major collapse in the third reich or the back end in this case, neither Owen nor I had ever replaced one of these so it came to us as a great relief to find it in a garage being replaced however, when I got under the car to see what's going on one of the Thai mechanics leant towards me and said 'help please' and not wanting to look like an incompetent mechanic I set about helping them replace it, we managed to fit the new one and get it all working in what seemed to be no time at all so big cheers, strong Bavarian pats on the back were delivered all round, a good job done by all!  

We finished the day on the famous thousand bend road down to the hotel, a tight twisty main road full of hairpins up and down with great views at the summits, definitely will be needing new brakes after all that, some bod has actually counted the bends and I think they mentioned that there were over 1500 hairpins in total!

We eventually arrived at the hotel and whilst the brakes were cooling down we replaced two prop shafts, checked out a noise on a mercedes, fixed a leaking radiator on a Bentley and repaired a handbrake on a volvo, all these jobs were finished in plenty of time to then get washed and changed, have some great food and enjoy whiskey at the competitors expense, this was a good day!

Peter and Zoe Lovett are extending their lead every competitive section so with limited competitive days left looks like they've got it in the bag over Gerry and Matt in the Leyland, but this is rallying and anything can happen!

This has been my most favourite day so far, let's hope tomorrow is even better!

Saw a great sign today, PYs lodger should take heed!

16th February 2015 crap receptionist!

Firstly I've titled this 'crap receptionist' I have done this for no other reason than the photo below, the staff in this hotel are excellent but,

Yes her name is 'Poo!'  Brilliant!!

A hangover is now present as we work in extreme temperatures in the basement car park, it's gone mental, there's brake problems, suspension issues, there's welder needed, wheels to be changed, starter motors need fitting, it's not easy as we should be only working until 12 but it's half one and still work is piling up!  I eventually finished having replaced the leaf spring at the back of a model A and one of the competitors has bought us down a chocolate cake which makes a very welcome change to the beer they usually pay us with, a quick spot of lunch in a little cafe down the road, I had steak and chips but some others had more local dishes, a really nice relaxed lunch had here, and no prostitutes!  A little lay down after food was very welcome giving us more energy for the team dinner this evening, I'm not drinking tonight and in many ways looking forward to leaving this big city and finding a more rural hotel tomorrow night, some of the competitors that have been missing for a few days are now back in the rally so the spare rooms will become less available, Martins elder offspring will have to again share with Nikki I guess but I've given Nikki some earplugs to block out the snoring coming from 'chainsaw Clark'.  Not a lot to report from today just the mosquitoes are getting more bitey and my legs are taking a hammering, I'm going to start eating raw garlic I think as nothing else seems to be putting the little bastards off, could it be the Paco Rabanne I have?

Really looking forward to getting towards Burma now, we are in proper northern Thailand now and I've heard there's some revolutionists in the area that don't like the colour red, good job I'm not driving a big, bright red truck!?!

It's now getting to the point that people are missing their loved ones now, Nikki is missing Kim, I'm definitely missing Emma and the boys now but am enjoying this journey immensely, Thailand is an interesting place with some delightful people, definitely would come back here but not sure how the tourist side of this country would measure up to this adventure, the beaches are awesome, as is the countryside, get rid of the mozzies and prozzies and it would be perfect!

15th February 2015

The rally has changed feel as we arrive at our destination in Chiang Mei in eager readiness for the "day off" I use inverted commas as we don't have a day off and we are referring to these days as non driving days!  The competitors have settled into a routine with the rally, they know how fast to drive and are looking forward to the uncharted border crossing into Burma, I am now looking forward to this exciting new experience as is Owen. 

The route today was one of busy highways and meandering hairpins with mixture of gravel, tar and broken concrete, through paddy fields and pineapple plantations with the odd coconut trees lining the sometime narrowing back roads, the competition element today started with a regularity section at the top of a mountain, the local traffic has hindered some of the competitors and their times show this, but this is rallying and for people to share roads to go rallying we have to expect that sometimes it doesn't go completely our way!  Owen and I again had a go on the regularity and arrived 1 second early to the finish control, I say it's not good enough but I am improving with time!  We proceeded on the route taking time to try some arty filming with Owen hanging out of the side with his ipad whilst closely following Anton in the Bentley, Owen had to give up as he was slowly turning browner and browner with the dust sticking to his face and hair whilst filling up his eyes and nostrils, he proved this by blowing his nose and showing me the contents of the tissue!

We arrived at the lunch halt where the Cottons were running the time control and we had a spot to eat at a lovely rural looking cafe where the food was excellent but the coffee tasted like mud!  People were working in the fields nearby but stopped to let me take a quick photo of them.

  We sat with the doctors and discussed high brow topics such as who's going to get the most drunk tonight and which competitors we fancied the most, mine was Dana Hadrecky, Owens was Paul Merryweather, Dr Ollie fancied Dr Matt, and Dr Matt fancied himself!  

The Bentley of the two posh lads was finally running right after two weeks of tinkering and they are really loving the car now, isn't it great that it took an old metro ignition lead to be fitted to make it run properly!  The Chevy Impala lost a bolt on the suspension in the afternoon but Skippy and Tony were on the case getting it all put back together ready to drive up to the hotel.  Once we arrived at the Shangri la in the middle of town we were ushered to the basement where another Bentley was waiting with a noise from the rear brakes, these hadn't been adjusted since before the event and a quick twiddle of the nobs it was back to proper brakes, and so we were ready for the night before the day off, we are now realising that these nights are pretty much all messy especially for the management who have a bit of a blow out as they don't have work the following day, we need to watch what we do as we have to tend to the cars early tomorrow morning.

We had a pre dinner drinking session in Nikki's room where she had filled the bath up with beer and wine bottles, laid on some nibbles so we could have a chat before we headed down to an official dinner with the competitors, there were a few tables laid out just for the Peking to Paris 2016 competitors and Nikki asked if we didn't mind sitting with them as we had been on the event previously, I sat with the Hadrecky husband and wife team who have entered and had a ball chatting about preparation, both them and the car, spirits where very high and the food was excellent and the wine plenty, I was the only one on our table drinking white wine so I couldn't finish the second bottle on the table, needing to leave room for more alcohol when we left to go out on the town.

The taxis where summoned as about 22 of us gathered in front of the lobby, it very soon got out of hand as Chris Elkins, Owen and Tony thought it a great idea to climb on the roof of the cab as there was a luggage rack that obviously looked too inviting to ignore!  Once these morons were ordered off the roof and ushered into the second taxi we sped off to the emptiest, noisiest club in this town, it was rubbish and after listening to rubbish music and necking a bottle of gin between us all we wandered down the road and ended up in a bar called Loco Elvis where karaoke was in full swing, many drinks later the Kirkhams decided to get up and sing as it was there 35th anniversary, not wishing to be shy the doctors went up to sing 'you've lost that loving feeling'!  A great rendition was enjoyed by all but quickly overshadowed when Owen, Kitch, Tony and I leapt on stage to perform a one off surprise but excellent performance of 'hey Jude', the crowd starred starry eyed and amazed at the beautiful sounding quartet that shone before them, we left the stage to flowers being thrown at us and a huge cheer and round of applause as we soaked up the sheer admiration of our fellow staff and competitors drinking before us, we were awesome!

It didn't take long before we were ushered out of the pub as they were closing now, the night was still young so the pub staff pointed us in the direction of a club called Spicey, a prostitute ridden hole with crap beer and worse whisky.  It didn't take long for the midget prostitutes madam to thrust a young girl at me giving me a price list and what that price included, I wasn't sure this girl was a girl to be honest but the whole situation was not a pleasant one for me and although it was funny to start with we were all feeling a bit uncomfortable to be honest so exit strategies were being formulated, it was getting so bad towards the end of the night and I was starting to feel sorry for this girl as she had only been doing this for a couple of weeks so I did the best thing I think I could've done, I paid this girl the going rate and told her to go home, it wasn't very much money in our terms but guess it's a lot to them, the problem with paying her to basically leave me alone was that all the other prostitutes then stormed me to give them money to not go with them so I legged it, straight into a tut tut and left at breakneck speed with one of these girls still trying to climb in next to me, I yelled at the driver to go as quickly as possible shaking of the girls as we roared towards the Shangri La, phew that was an experience I do not wish to have again!  I texted Emma as soon as I got back to the room which made me feel a lot better and we had a bit of a laugh about my evening escapology!

Need to sleep now as proper pissed and tired!

14th February 2015 valentine

Firstly I'd better start with wishing Emma a happy Valentine's Day, we at home don't do it like Thailand, bands everywhere, heart shaped monuments go up, we thought it might be because of the Chinese New Year but not so sure now.  I'm starting this blog sitting half way up a mountain ready for the competitors to start the regularity section of which we are the start control.  We are on the edge of a small car park, a waterfall to the side of us.

The brains behind the event, Anthony has just pulled up to make sure all is ok, had a quick chat and buggered off to make sure all of his minions are behaving in the appropriate manner!

Rumours are circulating that Martin's youngest offspring visited the local nightclub with the doctors last night and didn't get back to the hotel until an hour before we had to leave this morning, I saw Marinas sister in law this morning and looked surprisingly chipper!  I'll get the full story later, currently Peter Lovett is leading the event but Crown/Bryson should over take him by the end of the day as its all very hilly and the P76 has miles more power for the steep inclines.  After the long hill climb from our regularity there was only one casualty, a Datsun with a failed fuel pump, quickly fixed we had a long downhill into the lunch control, the brakes on our HiLux haven't really been used until now so got very hot and caught fire much to the amusement of some competitors!  The lunch halt was a pontoon out in a lake but the food was good so the novelty was short lived!  Owen changed an alternator on a Chevy fangio and isn't feeling too well now, possibly a touch of dehydration?  

A lovely drive through the jungle took us to the test this afternoon, lots of dust around and steep climbs, we had time to fix fuel vaporisation on the impala and he soon roared off up the hill, we took some pictures at the start line.

We stopped to look at the thickest jungle we've ever seen, had a pee and drove on towards the hotel.

Once back at the hotel we set about repairing a couple of the bentleys, one had a broken exhaust and the other had ignition problems, also fixed a couple of punctures and rewired the chavelle (beginning to really dislike this car for lots of reasons) a pushrod on an alvis is being sorted as I write, the beetle I spent a few hours on last night seems to have given up putting waste to the hard work put in to it.

A couple of beers and an early night is needed so ta ta

13th February 2015 marshal free

It had been decided that Owen and I weren't to marshal today so it was straight forward sweep duties, we were to leave after 20 cars with skippy and Tony bringing up the rear, rob and Alan were marshalling miles down the road so would catch up during the day.  We left at ten to eight in the morning and had an event free day until we came across the massive Chevrolet Impala with a broken brake pipe, within fifteen minutes a new pipe had been made, all brakes bled out and they had gone, we did a little shopping and continued on the 450km leg.  A dusty section made for very difficult driving and very nearly took out a moped rider that we couldn't see because of the dust!

This is the model a that I fell in love with on Peking to Paris but with all the problems they've had so far I'm rapidly losing interest in the car sadly but the two chaos in it are full of the Dunkirk spirit so they are plodding on.  We've seen some interesting sights today with overloaded trucks both with people in them and others with crops in them, this is a completely different world here and it's good to see health and safety hasn't arrived yet!

I'm sure half these people were pissed aswell, good to see this sort of behaviour on thailands motorways.

We arrived at the hotel and set about replacing a grease nipple on an AC for once a small job, then Owen re engineered the braking system on a ford coupe, I had the enviable job of seeing why a beetle wasn't running too well, once I'd removed the spark plugs and found one of the ends damaged I did a compression test and found none, removed the rocker and found a push rod had come out and jammed the valve down subsequently hitting the piston and wrecking one cylinder, however the crew are going on push on to burma (hopefully) on three cylinders, should be ok until we get into the hills, maybe we should dig out the tow rope in anticipation!!

Once all the jobs were done some locals asked to have their photos taken with us, a nice bunch who spoke excellent English, well better than my Thai!

All seems to be settling down now, let's hope there's an early night on the horizon!

12 February 2015 Owen looks different

Today was an odd day, the competitors were doing a big loop today and returning to the same hotel in Kanchanaburi visiting a nature reserve up in the hills where apparently elephants roam but sadly we didn't see any, I wasn't with Owen today as we had decided that Owen was staying at the hotel with skippy and fixing a couple of broken cars in the car park and Tony and I were out fixing broken cars at the road side, we started the day at Hellfire pass, the notorious cutting for the Siam Burmese railway where thousands of POWs died in WW2 along with workers from Thailand as depicted in Bridge on the river Kwai starring Alec Guiness, we visited the museum before heading off on our duties, we came across a beetle that had run out of fuel being towed to the petrol station, we got it off the tow rope and started pushing toward the fuel pump, clearly the driver thought this task was beneath him and didn't help, thinking it was more important to fiddle with his telephone and then roll up his tow rope, I think we made it clear that his behaviour wasn't acceptable and thought his navigator seemed embarrassed.

Once the beetle was running we buggered off up the road, concrete turned to gravel and her came the first regularity section of the day, tony had never navigated on one of these events (and he's done loads) so jumped at the chance of doing the regularity and was pretty damn good with only a 2 second difference which is a damn sight better than nearly all the competitors!  We nearly didn't do very well as  just prior to the finish control there was a Bentley moving out of the way for a porsche that had got it all wrong, another Bentley was trying to back up out if the commotion but selected first instead of reverse and nearly went in to the Bentley in front, luckily they didn't touch but was great to watch!

We carried on up the road and came across the jaguar SS with ignition issues, a quick check over found the points were duff so changed them and left, next up was one of the datsuns who's rear hub assembly/shock mount had sheared, we lashed it together to drive it to a welding shop in the village where work started on it immediately, within fifteen minutes we were back in the road closely following the 240Z to make sure all was well, it was.

Now with this fixed we were a long way down the road from the hotel and the chance to see the bridge has now disappeared along with a mercedes that seems to have got lost and has broken down somewhere off route, we have been in contact with the crew and they are en route to the hotel, I hope they make it in enough time for us to look at it before bedtime!

Haven't seen the docs today so can't have a Buckley bogus fact, haven't seen Alice's auntie either so have nothing to report, an early start tomorrow means an early night to bed, so ciao.

Here's a rather camp photo of Buckley, he'll enjoy reading this blog when he gets home, "hello sailor"

Here's some random snaps of the last few days 

 

11th February 2014 Kwai oh Kwai!

Today was a really really early one, Owen and I had got to bed about half one in the morning after our late night repairs on the Volvo, we had breakfast at half past five and left shortly afterwards to travel 285 kms to our control right beneath a reservoir and dam, it was lovely but the rustling in the bushes was quite disconcerting so the wees we needed were done with great risk I'm sure!  We set up and proceeded to whittle some wood, Owen was trying to make some sort of minute boat thing whereas I was doing the regular spear to throw at the animal clearly stalking us from the bushes, Owen I think got a bit fed up with his bit of wood and promptly lobbed it in the dam release river.

It was infact an idealistic place with lots of locals showing off and hooning around the hairpin right nearby, some looked puzzled at what we were doing but no one stopped to chat, lots of waving but no actual conversations.

Whilst we were marshalling we received the news that the work on the Volvo last night didn't pay off as 150kms in to the day the con rod decided to call it a day and made a break for it through the side of the block, that is definitely game over from them although we have heard reports they may have found an engine in Bangkok so I see another all nighter coming up!

With the checkpoint all cleared away after the competitors had left we left and soon came up behind a very sick sounding Buick and as we were the last sweeps of the day we had to follow them the last 230kms back to the hotel with them breaking down no fewer than eight times after that!  We arrived very late at the hotel where there seemed to be carnage, Owen went to advise some competitors on changing their differential in an alvis but ended up basically doing it, skippy and tony were doing something on something, rob and Alan were draining a fuel tank and I was investigating a noise in a Bentley rear axle but only found a bent back plate so with one tap of a hammer it was fixed.  I was then lending hand to a ford coupe specialist who had flown in from the UK to fit a gearbox and he needed an extra pair of hands so with all the work done it was a quick chat and beer and a little catch up with Marina's sister in law before I headed up to Owen and my room in this lovely hotel on the river Kwai over looking the famous railway bridge which I haven't seen yet as I've only been here in darkness, we are returning to this hotel tomorrow night so may see more then!

Some of today's snaps