32 Days along the Silk Road by MGB – On the Road – Part 1

Thursday, 4 May 2017

Of course a lot of our Silk Road travel – and we don’t even really start on the Silk Road until we get to Xian – is actually on the road. Part 1 of some ‘on the road’ shots. The trip has featured in an Australian Financial Review article.

▲ We can pack out a petrol/gas station up when we all pull in to top up, this time it was on the road in Laos.

▲ And of course these are old British cars, from the era when British cars were notorious for over-heating. On a very hot day on the road between Vientiane and Luang Prabang in Laos the road twisted and turned as it climbed very steeply up a mountain pass north of Kasi. We all pulled over to let the engines cool, that’s my car Burgundy closest to the camera. Burgundy didn’t actually boil, but a couple of cars had got that hot.

▲ Driving from Luang Prabang in Laos up to Luang Namtha just before the border with China

◄ Our last stop in Laos before we crossed into China, that’s Burgundy parked in front of the stupa that tops a hill overlooking Luang Namtha.

▲ In China we had to get temporary Chinese driving licences at our first stop, the town of Mengla. Plus the cars had to be put through a Chinese safety test, several of them failed at the first attempt, either for headlight problems or parking brakes.

◄ A graphic ‘don’t drink and drive’ warning poster at a Chinese highway stop, the grim reaper hauls a foolish driver out of his crashed car

▲The only car problem which has held us up was a fuel pump failure a day or two into China with one of the cars. The initial diagnosis was something electrical and we spent a lot of time messing with the ignition coil, the spark plugs, plug leads, distributor cap and then the distributor itself before realizing the problem was fuel rather than electrical.