'Rest' days in Lima?

 

I learnt from Chris last night that his parents are now avid followers of our adventure. Stephen and Valerie, like Nigel’s mother, have the atlas open on the kitchen table and follow our ups and downs on a daily basis. It is of course extremely reassuring to know that at least three people are reading  these daily updates.

 

The cars arrived in Lima needing some time, some attention and some tender loving care. Without doubt the Rolls was in the greatest trouble spilling oil all over the immaculate Peruvian roads. They are of course far from immaculate and no one will notice the gallon or so of 20/50 being dripped onto the road every hour or so however it is a major concern to Chris as without a fix the car is going nowhere. The second major issue is with Nigel’s Lagonda which runs perfectly out on the open road but as soon as it sniffs a town and traffic seems to suffer a melt down, in this  case quite literally from significant fuel vaporisation. This issue has been testing Nigel and David’s patience and brains for the last two weeks.

 

 

Each car has been allocated its own bay in the garage and there are three mechanics who are going to help us get the cars sorted.

 

 

The first attempt at a fix on the Rolls was carried out on Wednesday and involved the oil pipe being cemented into the block with silicon and chemical metal. This fix was left to set overnight.

 

 

Nigel’s Lagonda had all its fuel pipes lagged and new heat shields made and installed in the engine bay all aimed at ensuring that the fuel supply system was protected from the constant heat in the engine bay. The water temperature in Nigel’s Lagonda seems to be significantly lower than mine but still his fuel ends up boiling. Hopefully the amount of lagging will now prevent the fuel from vaporising.

 

 

In the meantime Barbara and I spent our day examining the challenges of the route ahead. We still face some significant challenges.

 

1.     We must ship the cars around the Darien Gap from Cartagena to Colon in Panama. No one seems to be certain about  whether or not there are ferries or whether the cars have to go into containers. Nigel has fortunately excellent contacts in shipping in this part of the world and we do now have a solution but the cars must be in Cartagena by the 26^th which is earlier than we were originally going to arrive.

 

2.     We aren’t getting anywhere with permission to take right hand drive cars into Costa Rica. We could just risk it but if one car is not allowed in we all might be waiting for a couple of weeks to arrange transport. We know we can arrange transport now, so probably better to take the guaranteed option

 

3.     We have got an indication that Nicaragua will allow us into the country despite banning right hand drive cars so we need to nail down when and where we will be arriving to ensure the promised smooth entry.

 

We awoke for our second ‘rest’ day to discover that the fix on the Rolls hadn’t worked and that oil was still spilling out of the engine. David, Chris and Mr Glew all went back to first principals and David came up with a permanent fix. Although this fixed the first leak it did in turn expose a second oil leak which hadn’t been noticed before. Thankfully this was relatively straightforward to fix and finally we had a non-oil leaking Rolls!

 

 

The Lagonda’s went through the full standard service, greasing, points, oil, gear box, magneto, shocks, differentials..everything that could be checked has been checked. Faulty electrics on both cars were fixed. All four tyres were changed on both cars which should last until the US and finally both cars were ready to hit the road again.

 

We have the three cars back ready for the road.

 

Leaving Lima is sadly a non-trivial task! The traffic is appalling all day, every day but there is a small window at around 04:30am when you can sneak out. That is our target for Saturday morning. The cars will be ready, packed and fuelled and we will depart in the early hours of Saturday morning. We have two new co-drivers joining us, Nigel’s wife Bumble is returning for a second go (having sat in Buenos Aires for 3 weeks and not got in a car!) and my old friend Didier is replacing David. We are leaving Lima just before they arrive but they are going to catch a flight to Trujillo where we will meet them with the cars.

 

Tomorrow we are going to visit the largest car collection in Peru and then meet and thank the Aston Martin Lima management team, before an early dinner and early to bed. We have an early start on Saturday.