Driving to India, MSC India that is…

It has to be said that it is actually quite scary knowing that in just over five weeks’ time we will be landing in Namibia ready to embark upon our journey. You can feel your muscles clenching with anxiety at the mere thought of the occasion, wondering if what you have begun really is the right decision. You can feel your chest pounding knowing that every pulse you are one step closer to realising your dream, a dream in my case I have held since childhood.

That angst was at full force last weekend. Last Friday the front of one vehicle didn’t exist. Quite simply, there was no bonnet, there were no front wings, the electrics were incomplete, its annual roadworthiness certificate had expired and both vehicles needed a thorough service. Also, the other vehicle developed a coolant leak. Not too difficult I hear you say to do in six weeks.

Therein lies the crux of it all, we had two days. By three o’clock in the afternoon, both vehicles had to be delivered to the other side of London Heathrow Airport ready for loading onto a container. By any stretch of the imagination our goal of completing both vehicles and obtaining a roadworthy certificate was almost impossible and certainly unrealistic to achieve in time.

I invited a friend over, Reece, to help us out, knowing full well that by ourselves it would be impossible to achieve. I have known Reece for many years and these days’ works as a mechanic for Everyman Racing fixing vehicles such as Lamborghini’s, Ferrari’s and Porsche’s. He calls fixing an ancient Land Rover “light therapy” and I’m still not sure how he comes to that conclusion!

To say he was a godsend would be a massive understatement. Quite frankly, this project would have stalled last weekend without his support. By ten-thirty on a cold Friday night we had got a thirty-nine year-old Land Rover running, exiting hibernation after four months of rebuilding. The bonnet was on, the electrics, we thought, were complete and the front wings were on.

At seven o’clock the next morning it was booked in for its annual roadworthiness test. It failed. Two key factors stood out:

• The warning light for the rear fog lamp, compulsory for any vehicle registered after 1 April 1980 in the United Kingdom, wasn’t working in accordance with the regulations. It was working, but not correctly.
• A bolt was missing out of an item called a ‘steering relay’. Basically this unit acts as a crude damping mechanism as well as allowing the steering to move the wheels left and right. Whether it fell out on its way to the testing centre or we just missed it out on reassembly, we shall never know. What mattered was that it was missing for the test and it was required.

I’d love to say that it was an easy fix, but there was one more thing. The brand new windscreen wiper motor boxes weren’t working. Luckily, because older Land Rovers have a folding windscreen, the wipers and washers are not part of the test, it passed its roadworthiness inspection, but this, at the time of writing, is a job I am not looking forwards to fixing.

Anyway, having got the wipers to work, finished off a few odd jobs (a lot of work actually), we finally got the vehicle ready for the trip just thirty minutes before we had to depart for the Moto Freight offices near Heathrow. Then it was just the mad dash to get both vehicles temporarily loaded up for the trip. It’ll all come out again when we arrive at the start point of our trip, so it wasn’t particularly worth loading it up permanently.

I must say, for a vehicle only finished thirty minutes before departure, it drove the one hundred and twenty miles down to Moto Freight very well. It was as if it had never been apart! The engine pulled strongly and the new gear change mechanism from Syncro Gearboxes worked perfectly. The system, called a Slick Shift, effectively is a short shifter kit coupled with a bias spring to utterly transform the gear change.

It was an uneventful drive, sitting at around fifty-five to sixty miles per hour for the majority of the journey. At one point, keen to see just how the engine was pulling after laying dormant for the best part of six months, I put my foot down, reaching an indicated seventy-one miles per hour. It should be said that the speedometer is wildly inaccurate and the Garmin satellite navigation system I was using indicated just sixty five miles per hour, as did the speedometer in the Discovery 3.

On the way down I noticed that the fuel gauge wasn’t working on the right-hand fuel tank, so I decided to stop and fill up at Oxford service station on the M40. Conscious that the old Land Rover Series III is a thirsty old beast, I filled up with fuel and took on twenty-two point one-seven litres (four point eight-eight Imperial gallons). Given that the journey according to the GPS was seventy-nine point eight miles, I’d averaged just sixteen point three-six miles to the Imperial gallon. Ouch, not a good sign!

London beckoned on the horizon, and as you approached, you could see the smog on the horizon, a yellow haze rising about five hundred feet in to the sky, enveloping the city like someone wrapping a blanket around their new-born child. We all hear about the pollution issues in London, but only until you go there on a particularly bad day do you realise that something needs to be done, and fast!

Finding the place wasn’t too difficult, even if we did drive around in circles for a bit. However, we did have our first incident of the trip. Tony, still thinking he was on a motorbike, decided that a Discovery 3 can go through a gap not much wider than a motorbike. Needless to say it didn’t make it cleanly, clipping the left-hand mirror in the process against another car. Worryingly, he didn’t realise he’d hit another car. Myself, being further back in the other Land Rover, could see it all happening, although from where I was in the queue didn’t see the actual collision happen, could tell it was risky at best. Maybe we need to learn to drive with preservation in mind and be mindful of the size of our vehicles. This isn’t the first time he’s done this, previously breaking the mirror against a stone wall in the Lake District with our previous Discovery. Number one driver, as our friend Becky teasingly calls him, has history!

Needless to say our arrival at Moto Freight wasn’t without another incident. This time, it was the return of faulty wiper boxes, or in this case the driver’s wiper box. Stuck in traffic, literally moments after Operation Dismantle Mirror, I decided it would be an excellent time to clean the windscreen. The new windscreen washer jets were badly aimed, spraying water all over the roof rather than the windscreen. The driver’s wiper decided, mainly because the windscreen wasn’t wet enough, that it wanted to wipe fresh air, and park slap bang in front of where I needed to see. Dashboard off again, I presume?

Having dropped the cars off, we spent the next few days in London having a break. It was a nice break actually, seeing the sights of Canary Wharf and plane watching at London City Airport. I must say though that the fumes and pollution made my eyes sting and my throat sore. Something really needs to be done, and I have the sneaking suspicion that cars and trucks, are only a small, yet still significant, part of the problem. The place stinks basically.

So there you are, now back at home we finally are completing our route plan for the trip, and I hope you have enjoyed this, somewhat lengthy, blog entry.

Happy travelling!

P.S. If you’d like to track the ship the vehicles are on, it’s called MSC India. I’ve found https://www.myshiptracking.com/ to be a particularly good tracking site.