Approaching Altay, Mongolia. People tend to love driving off-road. I like the idea of it, but I can't help feeling that giving me the keys to the car here is a little like Hugh Heffner handing control of the Playboy mansion to a eunoch and going: 'seriously chief, do absolutely anything you want'. It's a nice idea, he replies, but I'm going to need a lot of help. And a Haynes manual.
But after Jeff's willful destruction of our rear-end in last night's frenzied heavy-rock-and-Jelly-Baby rush, it seems I've gone up one place up the driving pecking order. I guess the logic is that the worst that can happen at the pace I move is that the engine nods off out of sheer boredom. But like Jeff, I too draw inspiration from the desert rock gods.
We drive on. The boys in the Suzuki Jimney score the ultimate prize - soon they're strapping a skull with horns to the front grill of their jeep. It's a good look, especially as they've also simulated a pair of bollocks hanging out of the back. Viewed side-on the car takes on the appearance of the complete beast. It's incredibly painful following on behind and watching its dangling jewels taking bad whacks on desert rocks.
We've got about 1,000km to go till we reach Ulaanbaatar. We're averaging around 20 miles an hour. That's not good. We're still trying to get there in three days, and the Skoda is still having problems. Again, there's a lot of waiting. And faffing.
Soon enough though we arrive at Altay, and our second visit to a rally graveyard. This time the idea is to find someone to fix our rear suspension. A chain-smoking mechanic beckons Steve to drive Mr W in over the car pit so he can take a look. I feel bad for the car. She must feel like C-3PO when he wandered into the Jawa's transporter and saw all the broken droids screaming as the weird little dudes went to work on their feet with the welder.
But there's a stroke of luck: sitting among the car corpses there's another Fiat Punto. It's blue too. In fact it looks worryingly like Mr W. The only difference is that its rear springs are intact. So there's no reason why we can't just pull the springs out the back and swap them - at least then we'd be in the same position as we were when we left England, on springs that are short and stocky and designed to take the weight of our car.
I say there's no reason not to swap them, but that doesn't account for the logic of Mongolian mechanics. Ours is a bit of a character, an old dude in red overalls who stinks of booze. But he seems intent on denying us our plan to pilfer the springs. Instead he's trying to get us to buy brand new ones - ones which look worryingly like the soft and useless Audi springs we had back in Kazakhstan - so he can cream a few quid out of the sale.
We indulge him, figuring he knows what he's doing. And it all looks great. The back end looks amazing. Until they let the car off the jack and the back slowly sinks down about half-way over the rear wheels. It's laughable. Still they seem convinced they've done a decent job, and ask Steve to take her for a test-drive. The underside takes an almighty scrape just trying to get out the garage. That doesn't stop the mechanics getting arsey with us for being awkward.
It's a huge pain - we know what we want but we share no language, so it takes a couple of hours to convince them we're right. It's a big ball-ache, and another lesson in that quality which the rally has taught us so much about: patience. Much of the conversation takes place rubbing fingers through the dust on the Punto's back window, trying to convince the bloke it's just the springs that need doing, not the whole shock system.
After a long protracted process involving the rally organisers' Mongolian representative, we finally convince the bloke to pull and fit the springs from the dead Punto. It works fine - and could have saved us two hours. So right now we owe a debt to the Plight of the Navigators, the owners of that poor Punto, for unknowingly helping us back on the road and towards our twisted destiny.
Jeff is chatting to the mechanic about our route. The bloke uses mime to convey the idea that the last section we drove was the really shit part. The worst is behind us. But he's still warning us to be careful. He does this by chucking a stone on the ground in front of him, pretending to approach it in a car, and then grabbing Jeff by the testicles. Then he repeats it, instead moving his imaginary motor around the rock, and not grabbing anyone by the testicles. He seems to be saying that, if you're a careful driver, you won't have to suffer weird drunken mechanics grabbing you by the testicles.
It's all been a bit of a pain in the arse. Working stuff like this out in a foreign language is rubbish. But by the end we're all friends. We manage to chop a few quid off the price by chucking in one of our jerry cans. The mechanic ends up hugging it like a drunk suffocating a baby.
We celebrate our success with a bowl of dumplings in the cafe next door, and then set off. Not before the Mong Way Round boys manage to pick up a hitch-hiker and shove him into their tiny weird car. He's a Swiss guy who's ambling around the country and decides for a laugh to go back to Ulaanbaatar with them, having just left the city a day or so ago.
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