The challenge was this “Somewhere in SE Asia (not sure what countries you are going through), possibly Thailand or Vietnam, in a restaurant you are eating in, ask the waiter to ask the kitchen to provide you with 5 green chillies. I will give you $20 for each chilli you manage to swallow (and not throw back up or spit out). You have to at least take a bite of each one and not swallow them whole. Instead of photos, I want video footage from you asking for the chillies to you finishing them.”

Natalie, I’m not sure if we can be friends any more!

The next day we drove across the border and up to Dili.  Timor Leste strikes me as a place of enormous potential, although at the moment the overwhelming presence of the UN detracts from the atmosphere and local character.  This was was, however, our last stop before Australia and the sheer relief that we had made it to Dili in time to load our car to Darwin meant that I was on a high.  We washed and packed the car and after only 3 days we boarded our flight to Darwin.  So now, we are in Darwin relaxing while we wait for the ship to arrive.  It is a strange feeling being back in Australia- it is hard to explain, although maybe it is because it has been over 3 months since we were in an English speaking country.  It is good to be back in Oz, and I can’t wait to get the car now to start the drive home and catch up with friends along the way.

We have developed a strategy along the trip for dealing with officialdom and beaurocratic procedures which can be best described as ‘smile and wave’.  It’s incredible the number of circumstances which this will carry you through.  When the police look like pulling you over, a smile and wave will send you on your way.  In Pakistan, a smile and wave allowed us to cruise through half the highway tollbooths without needing to stop.  The height of smiling and waving came when we arrived to Laos and passed through the entire entry process for customs with a smile and a wave. (This actually almost brought us unstuck on the way out, since we didn’t have any of the correct import paperwork, but a smile solved that problem too).  Driving down to the ferry from Java to Bali however it finally stopped working.  While smiling and waving, our third police car for the day pulled us over regardless to check all our paperwork. First they needed to see drivers licenses (the first time we’ve been asked in the entire trip!), then car paperwork, then customs paperwork.  After we’d produced all that, they decided that they were going to take us to the station to register our details.  Given our very tight schedule, we didn’t have time for a delay like that and tried to explain the problem.  They decided instead to escort us to the ferry, which sounded OK, but then things got worse.  At the ferry terminal we had no less than fourteen police all standing around thinking up thinks we needed to do.  These included having to register at the police station, get insurance for the car (which we already have) and register at the Australian embassy, which was six hours drive in the wrong direction!  After standing and arguing for close to an hour it became obvious nothing was going to happen soon.  I managed however to wrangle our paperwork back and we simply got in the car and drove to the ferry gate, still with the police shouting at us to stop.  After getting up at 6am to make an early ferry, we were pretty annoyed at the whole episode and generally not in a great frame of mind to finally be on a ferry 2 hours after we could have been.  In hindsight it was obvious that the police were making life hard for us simply to try and get a bribe from us.
Our bad mood however was almost instantly turned around when a young girl in the car next to us said ‘Hello, do you speak English, I’d like to practice’.  We spent the whole hour on the ferry over to Bali chatting to Ivana and Regina in the back seat who were translating for Mum and Dad in the front.  The whole family were lovely, and it was great just talking to them and telling them about our trip, as well as hearing about them.  We drove off the ferry to Bali feeling very different about Indonesia.

After one week and five ferries, tonight we are in Ruteng on Flores and will drive down tomorrow to Ende to find out if we can get one last ferry to get us to Timore in time for the boat to Darwin.

Before arriving in Penang we had contacted a shipping company who reportedly had a weekly boat running over to Malaysia. We arrived last Sunday evening in Penang and headed down to the shipping company’s office first thing on Monday morning, only to find out that they didn’t have a ship running at all last week! We’re on a fairly tight schedule to make it to East Timor, so this wasn’t very good news. Not giving up however, we drove over to the container terminal on the mainland to see if we could dig up any other options. By random luck, we did find another guy who worked as a shipping agent and thought he could find a container ship for us. With the time consuming and tedious details of this all sorted, we loaded the car in to the shipping container on Thursday morning. The agent told us it should arrive in Malaysia on Monday or Tuesday (yesterday), which meant we had the weekend to kill while we waited. After a week of hassles trying to arrange shipping, it was nice to hang out on the beach up on the north coast of Penang.

Flying in to Medan in Indonesia on Sunday evening we optimistically contacted the local agent on Monday morning to find out about collecting the car – to find out this time that the ship is not scheduled to birth here until Thursday! Unfortunately this means another frustrating wait in Medan until the car shows up.

We’re currently killing time in Medan perfecting lap times on ‘Fast and the Furious’ and getting through countless dodgy DVD’s. Also working on my bowling game. I’d like to think I’ll be consistently bowling a 200 game by the time we leave, but I think I’m getting worse!

Today was a bit of a landmark however, because we’ve finally made it to the beach – our first sighting of the ocean since the Black Sea in Turkey! After leaving Bangkok this morning and stopping for some new tyres on the car (£220 for four Bridgestones – bargain!) we had a fair drive down to Chomphon where we’re staying tonight. Unfortunately the monsoons have caught up with us, but that didn’t stop us going for a kayak out across the bay and having a swim.

The car also got a bit more TLC at Subaru in Bangkok. After a bit of a hunt with the satnav, we did finally find the ‘Subaru Dealer’. Unfortunately the guy in charge only spoke two words in English, and one of those words was ‘no’, in response to the question ‘Do you speak English?’. Luckily though there was another customer there who did speak English (and also had a cool turbo Vovlo, but I digress) and he helped us out with the translation of “We’d like an oil change, new air filter, and can you see if you can sort out the bloody rattle near the front right wheel”. About 40 minutes later, after they’d taken some other poor customers car off the host to do ours, we had an oil change, new air filter, and they’d fixed the bloody rattle! (a worn swaybar bush, in case you’re interested). Result!

The photo is of me preparing for the challenge.  Apart from spending days trying to learn the song, I had to have all the lyrics written out (in case I forgot) as well as set up the camera and a mobile phone to record my voice out on the street.  I think it hasn’t come together too badly but Cha, I’ll leave it up to you to judge the ‘artistic merit’.

Here is the original Nancy Sinatra version.

And my effort.
You can click the ‘HQ’ button to watch it high quality too.

We are already missing our guide Linda. She’s a city girl from Chengdu and it was her first overland trip too – but she managed to help us find our way 8000 kilometres across China, making the most of the sites and food along the way. She helped to mostly avoid the ‘terrible’ food (not that there was much!) and despite the joking threats, she didn’t managed to kill us with ‘hot and spicy’! Having Linda along was more like having a good mate than a guide – we wouldn’t have chosen to have a guide unless we had to, but now we’re very glad that we did! Thanks too to Karen from NAVO (our Chinese tour company) for doing all the work behind the scenes – we started to take for granted rocking up in to town and already having a great value hotel booked (never mind getting us in and out of the country)!

Laos has been a very pleasant suprise. Before leaving China, the research I’d done had made me think that the roads in Laos were going to be appalling. I was expecting long days bumping over potholed dirt roads to painfully cover only a few hundred kilometres. In reality, the opposite has been true, and I think today was possibly one of the best driving days of the trip. We had a leisurely drive through the Lao jungle on excellent roads (by Asian standards!) with the windows down and the roof open – enjoying the steamy heat and watching the bamboo and banana trees along with all the baby pigs, chickens, ducks and geese as we cruised past. The longest delay we had was stopping to buy delicious fresh bananas from the side of the road. Lao drivers, unlike those from China and Pakistan, don’t seem to be trying to kill themselves and everybody around them, which is also a refreshing change! We finished off the afternoon with a drive out to ‘The Waterfall’ near Luang Prabang for a swim in the turquoise water amongst the limestone formations. If the next few days in Laos are like this, we’ll be pretty happy!

Driving has gone to a whole new level of crazy in China…never have I seen so many people with a complete disregard for their own personal safety.  For example, to turn left across the traffic, rather than slow down and make a 90 degree turn, it is customary to drive head on through the oncoming traffic for about 50 metres…it does keep you alert when driving.

I am sure you have all seen the photos of the sights along the way, so I won’t bore you  with too many details, but China is definitely my favourite destination so far…I will be coming back here.  The Terracotta army near Xi’an and the Giant Pandas in Chengdu have been increadile to see, and that is only in the last couple of days.

After resisting the temptation to buy thousands of souvieniers along the way I have finanlly caved in.  I am now the proud owner of a terracotta army (well maybe just a plattoon), and a few paintings (picture is of the artist from Xi’an University).

By now we were running late to meet our guide in China, so we headed for immigration to get out of Pakistan. They had no power so couldn’t use their computers to process our passports .We were told to wait “5 minutes” and it would be fixed.  Five minutes later and no sign of anything happening, we asked what the problem was.  The generator start cord was broken and a mechanic was “on his way” which in Pakistan could be anywhere from an hour to 3 days.  At this point we decided to have a crack at fixing it ourselves.   We grabbed some tools out of the car and 10 mins later we had it up and running.  Another 5 mins and we were on our way. A fitting end to Pakistan.

The drive up the last of the KKH to Kunjerab was nothing short of breathtaking…both literally and for the amazing scenery.  We reached the top at 4700m, surrounded by snow, yaks and weird little creatures that we have decided are ’arctic beavers’ for lack of any actual identification.  And that was where things started to go bad.  We (well Dave actually) had to change a flat tire in the snow, while Chinese immigration (all 15 of them) took everything out of the car and preceded to play around with it just for the hell of it.  We were finally let through, with an inspector in the car to drive the 2 hours to customs in Tashkorgan, where we had to take everything out of the car again.  Dave managed to run over a sheep on the way and cracked the bumper.  Turns out we have to pay for the sheep and some additional “fees” to the police.  I won’t bore you with any more details, but we didn’t get the car out of customs until lunchtime the next day. Not the best introduction to China.

Not everything was so bad.  We met Linda our guide at the customs office in Tashkorgan.  Leaving the car in customs meant we had to spend the night in town, so we headed out for dinner to celebrate my birthday.  Linda and another guide Michael organised a cake for me which was both unexpected and greatly appreciated after a long and tiring day.  We are in Kashgar now and ready to start exploring China.

What the KKH lacks in any sort of driveable road surface though, it totally makes up for with stunning scenery. For most of the way the road is cut in to the side of steep mountains, which fall away hundreds of meters down to the Indus river below. It’s a little disconcerting looking out the drivers window, but it makes for some pretty impressive views!

The people so far have been a mixed bunch. In the south eastern region of Pakistan (in Balochistan), despite having a reputation for being a bit lawless, the people were almost all really friendly. We would regularly get a wave as we passed people on the road, and whenever we stopped people were interested in chatting and finding out about what we were up to. As we moved further north towards Quetta and Lahore, we’ve found the welcome slightly less warm. I guess this is largely partly due to the fact that we become less of a novelty in the larger cities. Up on the KKH now we are again getting the occasional wave, and people in services stations and so on are keen for a chat.

Although we are still only at about 1000m, the weather is a lot cooler and it’s nice to be able to drive with the windows open – whenever we aren’t stuck behind a sticking bus or truck!