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OK so I am home now (so you know that I survive!) but there is so much that isn't yet on here that I need to bring you up to date with. I will do it in the same format as before.

This is probably a good time to let you know a couple of things that I didn't dare put on the blog whilst I was still traveling the main one being the brake issue that I have eluded to earlier in the blog.

Said 'brake issue' was a little more serious than I have perhaps made out. The foot brakes first started to go a bit soft in the Ukraine and progressivley got worse through Russia for the first time. By the time I reached the Kaz they didn't work at all and I was driving only on the hand brake! In Kaz we tried to get the brakes repaired thinking it would be a leaky hose but it turned out that it was the master cylinder. An attempt was made by those clever guy's in Astana to strip the master cylinder and repair it (there would appear to not be an abundance of spare master cylinders for 1959 morris minors in central asia which I found very strange). They changed the seals and proclaimed her fixed - you would not believe my relief which could only be match by my disappointment when the brakes again failed 20 miles later and it was back to the trusty handbrake!!

So by the time I am in western mongolia I have driven some 5000km on the handbrake including 2 mountian ranges and in particular the Russian Altai mountains which were a little hairy to say the least. Road dwarf seemed keen to keep a good distance ahead of me for some reason!!! (perhaps memories of the early shunt were playing on their mind?!

I have a whole stack of further ongoing problems that I am nusring on Martha at this point including:

A loss of power uphill
no drivers side window (uncomfortable in rain and cold at night as I sleep in the car)
no drivers side door catch (easilly replaced by a bungy cord)
no rubber round the gear stick(generates a dust cloud in the car in dry conditions and a water spout on a par with a blue whale in wet)
broken taillights (like I care about that)
Worn out steering bushes(I have a carrier bag of inadequet rubber ones that I have to replace every 100 miles)
Exhaust seperated from manifold (I have repeatedly fixed this but now it won't stay put for more than about 2 miles on these rough roads) - This makes the car very noisey and I am getting very sleepy and some really bad headaches from the fumes - maybe its good that I have no choice but to keep the window open.
Any of course the fuel pump or 'that bloody thing' as we generally call it now. Right now it is working but of course that changes very fast (it doesn't like wet, cold, hot, dry, dusty, humid, windy, still or foggy conditions as far as we can work out. In all other conditions it runs just fine though so fingers crossed. Usually stripping it down, cleaning it and rebuilding it gets it going again - don't ask me why - I havent a clue!!)
Oil - I am not a mechanic but Martha is using a litre of oil now for every 10 litres of fuel and I have reason to suspect this might indicate a problem - lets face it if all cars did that you'd have an oil pump at service stations and a second tanks for the oils (I have taken to carrying 15 litres of oil at all times as it isn't easy to come by over here - you have to buy it from shops and not mechanics or service stations).

There are various new rattles on what now feels like an hourly basis some of which are important but many I can't find the source of.

So I guess that s the scene set for Mongolia!