At times I felt a little uneasy !!!

Pakistan
   
    I arrived back in Lahore after a great break for the Christmas festivities and to celebrate the new millennium with my wife and family, and now with the new wheels and tyres I needed. To my surprise the weather was fairly cold in Pakistan at about 5°c which I think was a little unusual for this country, as I did hear that there were warnings on the radio for the local inhabitants about the cold and how to keep warm, so it must have been a very unusual weather indeed, even I had a coat on.
   
    Going through the customs was a bit of a game as I had so much gear with me and it looked a little funny what with four wheels and several big bags plus, I had to use two trolley’s to get it all through in one go. Once outside I had a cab take me to the hotel where the car was and on the way we stopped to put air into the tyres as I had to remove the air due to pressure in the tyres which could have caused a bit of a problem in the hold. As soon as I got to the hotel I could see little Mini waiting for me and she looked very dirty indeed. I was a little worried about the battery but as soon as I got into the car and turned the engine over she fired up straight away and I immediately took it around to the rear of the hotel where I could do some work on it and change the tyres.
   
    I spent the next four hours working on the car and as soon as it got dark the mosquitoes came out even though it was still cold so I went into my room and tried to settle down for the rest of the night.
   
    Next day I decided to work on the car and get it all ready for the last long journey home, and so I cleaned it out and gave it a bit of a service. When that was all done I was ready to leave.
   
    Next morning I left Lahore and began to head South which is the only way to get to Quetta the last big city before Iran, I could of course go through the mountains but this is not recommended so it was the long way or not at all.
   
    To my great surprise the roads which were quite good at first turned out to be just like those in India, with no tar Mac on them and ruddy great holes all over the place and nothing but dirt tracks which meant I was back to driving at around ten miles per hour for hours. Plus they too like to have loads of speed bumps in the middle of nowhere so each time I had to drive over one I had to almost stop just in case the car came to a grinding halt half way over and rip the exhaust system off plus cut the fuel hose again. On the evening of the second day I pulled over to a nice quiet place and decided to cook a little dinner before I sat down to write my diary and get some sleep, in fact I did manage to have dinner and to get my diary written but just as I was trying to get some sleep a police wagon pulled up and I was moved on. I was told it was not safe to park where I had and so I was shown a place which was safe and eventually I did manage to get to sleep. The drive through Pakistan was supposed to only take two or three day’s at the most, but how wrong I was it actually took five day’s. What turned out to be a nine hundred mile drive to the boarder of Iran was in fact well over a thousand miles and most of them were over rough terrain which I could have well done without at that time. I reached Quetta fairly late on the Friday evening and had to spend at least an hour looking for a hotel that had a decent car park as I hate to leave the car unattended or out in the open where I am not able to at least see it from a distance. Eventually I was booked in and enjoying a really good shower which I had not had since I left Lahore, then a small meal before retiring to a real bed.
   
Next morning I awoke at around 5:00am and got on the road by about 7:00am, to my utter amazement I could get a decent picture on the television which was in the car and even better as it was the BBC world news. I watched the weather report and saw all the trouble in Turkey what with the heavy snow and after that I was heading out of Quetta and over the mountains through some pretty cold areas. I had never seen petrol freeze before but the two rags which I keep on the necks of the fuel fillers were frozen and very white, I too was quite cold at this point and so I decided it was about time I connected the heater to the cooling system. Ah, warmth at last but, this was short lived because as I headed out of the mountains and into the dessert region the temperature rose to around 28°C which was very nice. There is about 300 miles of dessert to the boarder of Iran and I don’t think I have ever seen so much sand and sand dunes in all my life. The land is vast and still very primitive looking, goodness knows what would have happened if the car had had some serious problem way out there but as it happens I spent most of the rest of the day following a couple of trucks that were from Iran. We also ad lunch together sitting between the two trucks shaded from the mid day sun. I followed them all the way to the boarder town and parked the car right at the customs building where I spent the night really looking forward to the next day when I would drive the car over the boarder and into Iran.
   
   

Just a little fuel problem