From Frider

INDIEN 2000

Expedition

Länder-/Routeninfo

Indien2000@bigfoot.com

From Frieder (1)
for the English-speaking friends, 9th May 2000

Hello my dear friends,

I will write this little report in english,although I do not know, how many of you are actually reading this. And as you may imagine, I am a little bit lazy and do not like to write the same thing in English and German.

So please, drop me a line via email if you actually happen to read this. Otherwise it will be difficult for me to find this extra energy for the English version. Thanks.

Well.well, where shall I start. By now you all know that Christoph and Sibylle had already started the trip at the beginning of April as they were so lucky to finish off work sooner. While the Landcruiser now was already in Greece, Bernhard with his HiLux, Margena and I in the Landrover had booked the ferry to Greece for Friday the 29th in the evening, leaving from Ancona, Italy.

It was planned as a relaxed start of the trip but turned out to be terribly stressful. We worked on the car and packed until three oclock in the morning, only to continue at seven in the morning on Tuesday . We wanted to meet Bernhard in Wetzikon ( where he lives ) on the late morning of that day but happened to arrive only late after midday. And only after buying some more supplies and checking the load of the car ( Landy at 2420 g , 20 gram under max load , but with only very little fuel and no water ) we started into Italy where we arrived in Como at night to count the casualties of the first day. Well, we had the speedometer fixed before the start and it broke down during the first hour. But, what`s new, the Landy just does`not like to be perfect.

We slept on the roof of the cars and were so lucky just to escape the starting rain early in the morning. And then during the driving through Italy we realised why the rooftent of Christoph and Sibylle sadly refused to protect from rain, as the rain poured down like millions of spaghettis coming from the Italian skies.

Well, we continued the travel through Italy to Ancona enjoying the Overdrive and the renewed power of the engine due to a fresh setting of the timing. And amazingly the new seals in the windows actually did the job and only the occasional flooding of the left foot ( the one operating the clutch ) with torrential rain finding its way into the Landy somehow reminded me of the proper origin of the vehicle. We had plenty of time to test our CB-radio while driving and the external loudspeaker although this did not make an impact on the outside noise coming from the air trying to find its way around the relatively fast moving Landrover . Some air decided to find its way through the Landrover which is not a very difficult task but with the heating operating in full swing we managed to stay on the inside without using the special Landrover-owner-arctic-clothing-equipment. Bernhard`s Hilux decided to drive behind us and using us as a shield against the terrible forces of nature so it was easy for Bernhard to report a dry and quiet interior of his car ( „ I listen to music on the radio „ ). We arrived in Ancona and drove to the ferry company to get our tickets and subsequently were led into the huge ship which sailed us to Patras/Greece. On the vessel Marzena had a little fight with some Polish guys being drunk and shouting around but a couple of Polish swearwords together with terrible threats ( probably : My friend will come and he drives a Landrover ) silenced the crowd.

Touching Greek soil with our ferocious looking cars we expected great interest of the people from customs but only a lost policeman gave us directions to Rio, a place 10 miles away where another little ferry helped us North. The ferry personnel there showed us the way how to load 40 cars on a boat designed for 20. But the Landy is designed for robust parking anyway so sweating was seen only with the owners of the rather smaller cars on the boat.

Oh sorry, I forgot to mention this little incident on the ferry from Italy, when, while boarding our cars, Marzena saw this dark black spot ( like oil ) under the right fuel tank of the Landy but I decided that some leaking is just natural for a Landrover. I just had a little fuel leak of the pipeline repaired and was quite confident with the result so I took little notice of that spot, in fact we decided that the spot must have come from another car on the ferry.But, unfortunately, that was not the case as you will see later.

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