I am now well on the road heading North across India but to my dismay I am not really making very much progress as the roads are not exactly suited to the Mini or any vehicle for that matter, I said roads didn't I. Well from what I have just experienced I cannot exactly call the Highway's in this country roads, more like dirt tracks, with pot holes rocks and very little tarmac.
   
    I left Gunta and headed north for Hyderbad which turned out to be another long and hard day's drive. At first I thought the roads were not too bad but as I got further along the main highway 5 the tarmac started to disappear and more pot holes were dotted along the road so the going was very slow at times. One little problem I had to contend with was the relentless honking of the horns, it's as though they cannot go two hundred yards without hitting the horn at least twenty times and it began to wear me down until I caught the bug and started to do it myself "surprising how much fun it can be".
   
    After eight hours of driving I managed to get to Hyderbad which is a very large city indeed set almost in the middle of India. As I was told not to stay in the car at night I began to look for a cheap hotel, in fact almost all the hotels are cheap and very well maintained. It took me over an hour to find this hotel which was right next to a big lake and was a very beautiful hotel, at first I thought it was first class and after they saw the car I was almost treated like royalty, I suppose it is because I am a little unusual, or at least the car is.
   
    In eight hours of driving I only managed to cover 201 miles and to be honest I was so glad to be in a nice safe haven where I could spent a little time working on the car and trailer, the lights on the trailer were playing up and I had to re do the whole loom, plus clean out the inside of the car as it gets very untidy during the course of the day. My second day of driving and my eleventh day in India and already I feel exhausted, so I was happy to be a little pampered. And I still have a long way to go yet.
   
    Next morning I was up like a shot and ready to tackle almost anything but, if I knew now what sort of a day this was going to turn out like, I might have decided to stay in bed for the whole day.
   
    I set out at 9.30am which I admit is a little late but I had a few jobs to do on the car and that held me up for longer than I wanted. I didn't want to work outside the evening before as there are too many mosquitoes about as soon as the sun goes down and I really don't want to get bitten, so I try to get indoors before it's too late.
   
    I had previously planned this day's drive and wanted to drive about 300 miles to Nagpur another large city north of Hyderbad and at first the roads were pretty good and I stopped to get petrol and oil and began the journey in Ernest. By about 11 0'clock I had covered 90 miles and according to my calculations I would be at my planned estination by around 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon which would have been perfect but the roads began to get worse and my average speed dropped to around 31 miles per hour and at times even slower. The trailer began to sway from side to side which meant the contents had shifted so I pulled over and sorted the things out plus through a few things away like the old food that I had been keeping and a food box which had gone very mouldy, I really couldn't be bothered to clean it plus I wanted to cut the weight down a little, so I left a whole pile of food at the side of the road. Some lucky Indian I expect has already made good use of it. I set off again and the problem had been sorted out but the roads got even worse and the going was even tougher so much so that I had to drive all over the road just to avoid the bigger holes but I had to take the car through the smaller one's and this began to put too much pressure on the trailer until eventually the draw bar actually broke away from it's mount and I pulled over again to try and fix it but there was nothing I could do and I was just about to abandon it there and then when a village doctor came up on his motor bike and explained to me that there was a village just 7 k's up the road and I could get it welded there, so I got back in the car and very slowly drove to the village which took about 25 minutes and got it fixed. That cost me 25 Rupees which it about 35 pence but I gave him 50 Rupees because it felt too cheap for what he had just done. After about 30 minutes I was back on the road and once again making good headway. That was until I got to a stretch of road that looked more like the surface of the moon and went on for about 10 miles up and over a high pass. This was the beginning of the end for some parts of the car and trailer as the constant shaking, rattling and crunching was taking it's toll on the car. One rock caught the underside of the car and ripped off the fuel hose which resulted in the lose of several gallons of fuel before the car came to a halt through the lack of fuel, so I had to get under and re do the line. This happened four times through the course of the day plus the roof box broke away from it's mounts, the instruments popped out of there holes in the dash board, the radio fell out and the bonnet pins came off which meant the bonnet shot up every time I hit a hole, so I wasn't having a great time and time was going by very quickly. Through the course of the day every thing that could go wrong did and at around 6.00 o'clock the trailer broke again and as I was so far away from anywhere I had no choice but to take all the things I needed and wanted to keep and dispose of the broken trailer. I was very sad to leave it behind but that day I had just about had enough and all I wanted was to get to Nagpur which was still another 120 Kilometres away. As I approached Nagpur the inside of the car filled with smoke and a live wire had worn through and shorted out causing an electrical fire in the car rendering the entire electric's useless and I lost even more time sorting that out before I could drive to the city. I eventually got to Nagpur at around 12.30am and was so pleased to find a hotel to rest up. I shall never forget this day, for me it was a visit to hell ! I decided to take the next day off to sort out the car as I now had most of the contents of the trailer in it plus the wheels from the trailer I had to put on the open boot and rope them down, I also lost one of my spare wheels which had a good tyre somewhere along the way the last night. I spent the entire next day working on the car, I had to completely empty the inside of the car plus the boot and roof box to sort out what I wanted to keep and what was to be left behind and, it did really take me the whole day to do this. I did manage to keep quite a few things but at the same time I did dispose of a lot of things which would help the car a lot as the weight would drop and I could go a little faster, roads permitting of course.
   
    Now that the car was all sorted out I was looking forward to getting back on the road the next day and heading for Delhi.
   
    DUNCAN