Putting Noddy back together again..

Tonight’s missive will be short as we have just returned from the ‘Red Scorpion’ garage in Almaty at midnight having done 2 days work to fix our car and we need to be up at 4am to do final work on it before leaving around 6am for a 700km driving day.  No peace for the wicked.

Subject to a rear wheel hub arriving on the overnight flight from London with the Shooter’s son George, who is bringing their gearbox, we believe we are good to go.  Rupert has done fantastic work over the past 2 days rebuilding the transmission after the bearing fell to bits, aided by the competent Abdullah who worked with us for 2 days, and some incompetent help from Simon (whose learning curve is rather steep).  We have been able to buy new supplies from huge car supermarkets such as Car City. Hundreds of individual stores in a massive warehouse. 

The larger chap in the shiny suit (yes, another one..) is, as you can imagine, the garage owner.  He has probably made more profit in the past 2 days than the rest of the year put together as his garage was crammed with cars from the rally.  But there has been a lot of successful bodging going on so we hope we will have more runners leaving Almaty than when we entered.  Sadly car 8, one of the Irish contingent, is a casualty with a cracked pinion.  They are looking at shipping their car to Istanbul and repairing it with new parts sent there.

We sadly saw little of Almaty.  Just time to visit the state department store to acquire appropriate new headgear but we were very lucky that this was a 2 day stopover to enable us to make our repairs.  How we run on tomorrow’s long itinerary will be the acid test.  We spend another day in Khazakhstan before heading to the Uzbekistan border. We’re told the roads a re better there - they can scarcely be worse…

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