Auto Carma

Driving. It seems so easy. At some point I even had grandiose ambitions to drive a car all the way around the world... Then reality set in - cars tend to be [almost] nothing but trouble. I may have come to expect the mini to develop assorted suspension maladies on the unpaved super-highways of Mongolia, but here, back home in Seattle? In the midst of American civilization? Things should just work here, or, at least, be easy and straightforward to fix when they don't, right? Not so much... So, starting from the beginning:

I left Seattle in the middle of December and drove my car - the BMW, a convertible allergic to the cold, from Seattle down to San Diego. Along the way was the mountain pass in Oregon... which was busy getting covered in snow, so chains required. I'd never used chains before. I bought a set and tried to install. I failed. I had a chain wrapped around the rear axle of the car at one point... I was starting to think I may just be stuck in the middle of Oregon. Finally, a brilliant lady named Julia, working for the Oregon highway department, came to my rescue, installed the chains correctly and got me on the way across the border into California. I'd been aiming for San Francisco for the night - I ended up stopping in the first town past the Oregon border instead at about 5 in the morning. We'll call the town Mt. Shasta because it may actually have been Mt Shasta. Some five or six hours short of San Francisco. An inauspicious beginning...

This was followed by three weeks in India piloting a rickshaw, a tuk tuk, whatever you want to call it. Bajaj, the manufacturer, calls it 'Inspiring Confidence.' You should not call it that. It inspires nothing of the sort. A permanently rattling muffler, a hole in the cylinder head (yes, the only cylinder), a home-made side door, and pieces of the roof rack welded together, then lost anyway, later we arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal and were all too happy to part company with the three wheeled monsters. Except the locals decided to throw rocks at us while protesting, but we waited them out and finally got rid of the damn things.

Cyrus taking the wilderbeast offroading somewhere in Kerala

the Mongol Rally. Perhaps you've heard of the little 27 year old mini that we nursed along from Paris to Ulaan Baatar to Japan, and finally across the Pacific to Seattle. Some highlights of things that went horribly, horribly wrong along the way:

I filed it up with gazole. Which means diesel in French. Which is quite bad for an engine designed to run on gasoline.

the French mechanics who fixed the diesel problem did a bit of other work, removing and consequently reinstalling the cooling fan in the process. They installed in backwards. Quite bad for cooling

the Molodovan customs authorities sent me back to Paris when it was discovered that the VIN number on my French documents didn't match the one on the car itself.

we lost the front grille somewhere in Western Kazakhstan. I don't know where exactly, but removing it did make the engine cool down much more effectively. I eventually insisted on replacing it with some chain link fence. I doubt it did much good, but it keeps amusing all mechanics who happen to see it to this day.

I sent the car sliding sideways at a disturbingly high rate of speed along the gravel near Altai, Mongolia. I did not kill Tina (or myself) in the process. We did smash into the embakment, which did kill some parts of the front right suspension. They would later be repaired - in part, by welding a piece of a wrought-iron chair into the system. Also still able to provide entertainment to mechanics the world over.

The right wheel pointing off to the side a bit after the impact. Note the awesome chicken wire grill! Hey, at least we weren't as badly off as these guys:

Picture taken approximately 30 minutes before the one above

Push-starting the mini is easy and had become very much a right of passage, so when it wouldn't start upon arriving in Vancouver, push starting seemed an obvious solution. Down in San Diego, on the other hand, I found my BMW's battery also quite dead, but push-starting didn't seem quite so obvious, or easy (I wonder if you even can, it was s stick shift?) AAA came out to jump start me instead, without any trouble. An hour later, they came out again, after I had stalled the car at a traffic light in pouring rain (yes, in San Diego, California!) and had found [much to my chagrin] that the battery was so dead that it had not gained any charge after the hour of driving. First, actually, I walked, in the driving rain, to an Autozone a mile away to try (and fail) to get the car started using their portable jump starter.

I spent the following 6 months in Latin America and Antarctica. The closest I got to actually piloting something was a horse in Brazil. In retrospect, I'm a little surprised it didn't kick me off.

Upon returning to the US in July, the problems immediately resurfaced. While visiting friends Eric and Kristine in San Francisco, we found the battery in Eric's car dead while trying to get to Napa valley. AAA to the rescue. I proceeded to rent a car and drive it out to Tahoe. Where I promptly locked my keys in the trunk. AAA to the rescue. Another rental car at Crater Lake in Oregon. The car got slammed with 15 minutes of sustained hail on an August morning. The day before had been 75 and sunny. AAA not involved, just seemed a bad omen.

Arriving in Seattle, I attempted to make the mini run again. Tina and I failed to push-start it - the skills may have eroded since Mongolia... or maybe the battery was just too far gone. Jumper cables eventually got the car going, aside from connecting them backwards at first, which got the jumper cables a little hot, and the wires in the mini even hotter, as I later discovered some of the wire harnesses in the front to have melted. I've since purchased a fire extinguisher, but the car is yet to catch on fire! Small miracles...

Which brings us to this past week. Lott doesn't tend to use his car all that much, so he's been willing to let me borrow it on occasion. The car and I were getting along reasonably well up until last Monday, when it failed to start. Collateral damage affecting innocent by-standers: Logan, (as in Logan who was traveling around India in a rickshaw with us), whom I was going to give a ride to the airport, if the car had started. He ended up catching a cab. The next day, the car continued to refuse to start, so I had it towed to a nearby mechanic (for not actually owning a car anymore, I've been using AAA a lot this year), who charged a tidy sum of money, but by Friday morning returned the car, which was now starting - hooray!


By Saturday evening, it was once again not starting - booo! So much for the high-tech American mechanics being far superior to their Mongolian counterparts (to their credit, the Mongolians would've insisted on doing the repairs using only a welding torch and a large hammer, which may not necessarily have been any more effective. But probably would have been). Sunday, I was playing frisbee up in Shoreline, about 10 miles away. With the car still not showing any signs of life, and the weather looking beautiful (for what could be the last time this year), I biked. I made it in just over an hour, and it was a beautiful ride on a kinda warm sunny morning. Then the way back happened, and the car karma decided to strike the bike - the right side of my front brake just sort of springed off the bike right as I was passing through Ravenna Boulevard. I noted that there was a screw missing... and put it back in place, determined to get to the nearest bicycle repair shop. Five minutes later, the brake springed off again - this time, unfortunately, into some thick bushes, where it quickly proved to be lost forever. No matter, the front brake's just dangerous anyway, carry on.

Around the U District, I got to my second bike shop along the way, and this once was even open on a Sunday afternoon. But didn't have the part I needed - guess it would've been convenient if mine hadn't been buried in a bush somewhere. Well, carry on, I suppose - there's plenty of bike shops around Capitol Hill, I can resolve this tomorrow...

But... it gets better! Right as I had made it most of the way up the hill, my rear gears started skipping even more than usual. A bit of readjustment got things going again the first couple of times. The third time, it didn't work - I could now spin the pedals. Or I could spin the rear wheel. But there was no correlation between the two. Some little sprocket inside the gear mechanism had apparently snapped and my chain was no longer causing the wheel to spin. It was also getting colder and more cloudy, as I spent the next 30 minutes walking with the bike wondering if I was now a pedestrian and should be on the sidewalk or if I was still a biker and should be in the bike lane?

There wasn't going to be any resolution for the bike this evening, so I decided to give one last effort to the car - it wasn't out of gas, but the gauge was showing it running pretty low. But... what if the gauge's lying, and Lott's just never mentioned it? Seems improbable, but why not, so armed with the biggest gas canister the 7-Eleven across the street would sell (1 gallon - sigh...), I put more gas into the car. And tried... and it started! I was pretty stunned, really, so I didn't think to try and give it any more gas while it was running. About 3 seconds later, the engine died again. Mildly encouraged (and surprised), I went back to 7-Eleven and got another gallon of gas. The car responded by doing absolutely nothing. I conceded that it was time to admit defeat, so plan for Monday morning: go back to the shop that had worked, oh so diligently on the car last week, and yell at them - see if they can actually get the car properly fixed this time, In parallel, find a bike shop, and see if they can re-establish the close-knit relationship between the chain and the wheel. And maybe fix the front break. Unfortunately what I really need to do is fly this guy in from Bolivia so he can bless the car (and the bike) and hopefully reset my auto karma!

A priest from the Copacabana Cathedral performing a perfectly serious 'Blessing the Cars' ceremony. Daily!

In the mean time, a few more automotive adventures from the road:

A rental car near Alice Springs, Australia - taking a shortcut along an unpaved road. Yes Avis explicitly prohibits taking the car on any unpaved roads, but I wanted to get back before it got dark! No problems ensued.

Avis NZ now, on the other hand, does not explicitly prohibit driving their cars through the ocean, so Buster and I taking our rental car for a little dip at the bottom of New Zealand's South Island was perfectly legitimate. In an unrelated story, Avis NZ would later try to charge me a much higher daily rate for the car. My indignant protestations eventually got most of the difference back. Through all this Avis remained wholly ignorant of our little ocean detour.

I had rented a few scooters in Thailand and Indonesia. Somewhat surprisingly, nothing ever went wrong with them - not even when I strapped a surf board to one in Bali. I did burn my arm on the exhaust pipe in Yogyakarta, but it was perfectly minor. I don't think I even really needed all that anti-burn medication I got out of my medkit!

Traveling into Vietnam from the Laos border is a challenging proposition, so Peter, Nathalie and I ended up catching a ride in the back of a Vietnamese truck. Went surprisingly well, in spite of the truck driver, upon arrival, asking for twice the payment we had agreed on. We refused and moved on. It did set the stage for me not particularly liking Vietnam.

Beware of Bigfoot! While biking around Seattle...

Monday morning update: Lott's car is now back at the repair shop. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was a newspaper article posted on the wall listing the best mechanics in Seattle, according to someone's ranking. Presumably Moss Alley shop is in that list, or it would be a little awkward to have that hanging on their wall... Second thing I noticed (or rather overheard) was a lady dropping her car off because some service they had recently done on it turned out to not have permanently fixed her problem either. Oddly familiar...

Monday evening update: Both vehicles have been repaired - we can make this work yet, karma! With or without the wacky Bolivian priests...

She lives again!

September 2, 2008


Septempber 2, 2009


Oh, how far we've come! Exactly one year ago, we had just crossed over into Mongolia and were camping in the steppe, trying to find our way to the [supposedly] nearby town of Olgiy. A year later, and I was driving the mini again - this time, on finely paved North American highways! Then again, we haven't really come all that far - in Olgiy, we were headed straight for the local mechanic in order to resuscitate the poor mini's horribly abused suspension. Here in Kirkland, I was driving to a different mechanic in order to have him have a look at the suspension... The suspension had been abused [them welded back together] a bit more in the intervening months...

The intervening months included almost half a year of travails across Mongolia, Russia, and Japan, culminating in a sail to Vancouver, where the mini first emerged on North American soil...


... and was promptly abandoned when I ditched it in Tina's garage and took off for Latin America. But now, finally, she's been re-awakened! Well, jump-started, if you want to be precise about these things.

What have I learned in driving the mini again the last couple of days? Well, first, and almost surprisingly, I rather enjoy driving it (still)! Yes, you can feel every bump in the road, and climbing uphill can be a monumental challenge. But, it's tiny, it's got a stick shift, so it still responds quite eagerly. The turning radius is nice too... On the downside, I've interviewed a couple body shops about restoring it to some of her former glory - $10,000 + parts, done by next summer? It's very much inline with what I had been expecting, mind you, but you still cringe just a little at hearing those numbers.

I've also learned that there's actually a good number of classic mini's in the Seattle area - the owners even have a club, which even has a website, with a forum, that could probably be very helpful to me. Unfortunately, in order to post to the forum, one must register, and registration has currently been disabled by the administrator - Sorry! I love websites that choose to apologize to me for their incompetence... So if you happen to know anyone associated with http://www.seattleminiowners.com/ in any way, do me a favor and yell at them... It might not help, but I'll feel better. Meanwhile, some things never change - the mechanics in North America find the mini just as cute and fascinating as the ones in Europe and Asia did, and none of the ones that have seen the state of the suspension so far have been in any way discouraged, so it doesn't seem like restoration is going to be a problem. It'll just be expensive...

Other miscellanea from around Seattle, as long as I have your undivided attention:

Pretty sunset in downtown Seattle

Tina and I went to watch a wakesurfing competition last weekend. I later found this pink wakeboard, which is clearly perfect for her...

Long Lost India

Well, it was never really lost, but it never quite got as much blog and photo coverage as some of our other adventures. In part, because India was just difficult, so, while it was undoubtedly quite interesting, I think it's fair to say that none of us enjoyed it as much as some of the other places around the world. There also wasn't much internet access along the way, and I was just learning that Facebook was a good place to store your photos... Well, that's all changing now (except that India is still difficult) - having been in Seattle for almost a full month now, I've got all the pictures more or less organized, so, time to revisit India!

Lott, Logan, Cyrus, and myself were, of course, in India to do the Rickshaw Run in January 2008, a charity event organized by the same people that do the Mongol Rally. On Janurary 1st, we set off from the Southern city of Kochi, in the Kerala state, and 23 long days later we arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, greeted by the astounding sights of the Himalayas in the distance, and not so astounding sights of rioting mobs right in front of us.

The map of our 5,350km adventure across the sub-continent, along with the actual SMS updates we were sending from the road:


View The Long Way across India in a larger map


And let's have some more pictures:

The four of us in India - click here, or the picture itself, to be taken to the full album.

And arguably an even more interesting album (to me anyway) of pictures from the roads of India. Of everything that you can find on the roads of India!

Just your typical weekend in Seattle

How can you be passive-aggressive in looking for a job? Well, so far I've sent out a few resumes to contracting agencies around the Seattle area and am left waiting, and exercising my patience. I'm choosing to call this passive aggressive. Eventually, I suppose, bills will start to arrive, and I will have to be more aggressive and less passive about the whole thing, for now though, I get to enjoy what's left of the summer, while making the best of my free time here in Seattle.

So, starting on Thursday, because in my world, the weekend certainly begins on Thursday. It was a study in contrasts: healthy - yoga early in the morning. Not so healthy - Dixie's barbecue for lunch. But barbecue was quite important - when you go overseas, the exotic international food is always interesting and exciting, and South America was no exception. However, there's definitely foods that I had missed too - Thai, Indian, and sushi had already all been taken care of, so barbecue was another void to fill in. The barbecue was, as always, quite excellent, unfortunately Gene, the proprietor, was nowhere to be found, so no 'Man Sauce' to be had. Consequently, no taste buds were forced to commit suicide over the course of lunch.

And here's Gene himself... except, of course, he was nowhere to be found on this fine day!

Thursday was also Lott's birthday, but since he's now vaguely responsible (as are apparently most of his friends that are not residing on his couch), the actual party had been pushed off till Friday. And Friday night didn't disappoint, as some 30 of us filed into Liz' apartment, overlooking Pudget Sound and the Olympic mountains, in time for sunset and focused on grilled things and champagne mixed with Eldeflower liquor. Yeah, Eldeflower - I'd never heard of this French concoction before either, but it's quite good. Especially with champagne and a couple raspberries...

By 10 o'clock Saturday morning, the champagne was mostly gone from my system, so I figured it was a good time to be active and play frisbee. 30 minute bike ride to the field up at Greenlake included. Downhill almost the entire way there - yeah! Uphill on the way back... not so good, especiaully after running for two hours... but I am trying to get back in shape, I suppose? Lott was apparently far enough over the champagne by 10AM to play frisbee too, perhaps not far enough to be willing to bike there though... so he showed up by car, 15 minutes after me.

Saturday night, it was time to see more friends I hadn't seen for a better part of 18 months as we were off to Jon and Janna's house for potluck, featuring Jon's smoker (smoked tuna and trout!) and high tech oven contraption in their newly remodeled kitchen - roast beef! They live just a couple of miles away from my old townhouse, so, as an added bonus, I got to see the old neighborhood. And record that not much seems to have changed, except that my former condo complex appears to have a lot of units up for sale. Remaining glad to have sold when I did. Back to roast beef, etc. - amazingly good food makes it easy to justify running and biking for three hours earlier the same afternoon... even if my knee didn't seem to agree entirely...

Ignoring the said knee on Sunday, I was up before 7 and meeting up with Lott and Megan to go on a 15 mile hike to the Necklace Valley Lakes. It's a pretty hike (rated a 10 on the scenery scale according to a guide book Megan had) and it is an agreeably short distance from Seattle. This one also deserves pictures - I wasn't really going to go an entire post without any pictures, whether I'm in some exotic part of the world or not:

Lott excited to be out in the wilderness. Also pictured: equally exciting bridges on the hike

Megan leading the way up

And after gaining about 2,500ft in 2.2 miles, we finally reached the first of the lakes! I kept thinking about just how much more convenient the metric system is - there's five thousand and how many feet in a mile again...?

Heading for lake #2, and lunch... to be followed by a nap in the sun

So, that was my second weekend back in Seattle - see friends, enjoy excellent food, and get out hiking, while the sun's still out in Seattle. End the weekend thoroughly exhausted. Monday would be spent primarily within the confines of the couch, recovering in time to get back out there and play hockey Tuesday night...

As a parting shot, this picture of a funny-looking bus I passed by at Pike Place market, where I felt oddly out of place being surrounded by a sea of tourists:

One last stop - ёжик в тумане

What do China, India, Bolivia, Indonesia, Russia, and the US have in common? That's right, they are all places where I've taken an overnight train on this trip - what, not obvious? After nearly a full week in San Francisco and Tahoe, I hopped back onboard the Amtrak and headed on North for Crater Lake, a National Park near the Southern border of Oregon.

Amtrak #14 - Coast Starlight: my ride from San Diego to Seattle - probably a bit more comfortable than the alternatives in all those other countries above. Definitely a lot more expensive.

Oregon and I got off to an uneasy start - I picked up my rental car in Klamath Falls and headed into town for breakfast. Eating, I got to watch my car get pummeled by hail. Yes, in the beginning of August. The locals thought this was a little out of the ordinary as well - the day before it had been sunny and 85. Undeterred, I drove off towards Crater Lake itself.

We've got fancy entrance signs in out National Parks - take that, the rest of the world!

And here's the lake itself - complete with Wizard island in the middle of it.

As that last picture may suggest, the weather didn't improve a whole lot by the time I got to the park - it was gray, dreary, and drizzly here as well. In fact, we got more hail while I was having lunch... (I'm happy to report that no precipitation occurred during dinner). I carried on, and the weather did cooperate somewhat, improving marginally as we got later into the day.

Now, a bit of background on Crater Lake. About 7,500 years ago, Mt. Mazama sat in its place, and was the tallest mountain in the Cascade range. It was, of course, a volcano, so eventually it blew up (an eruption many orders of magnitude larger than St. Helens in 1980). With the volcano's magma chamber now empty, the big mountain collapsed upon itself forming the caldera (which is different from a crater, but I can't recall the specifics) that we see today. A short time later, geologically speaking - within another thousand years - the caldera was filled with water. Crater Lake has no inlets or tributaries, so the entire volume of water is the result of snow melt and precipitation, while the lake loses its water only through evaporation and some seepage through the softer surrounding rocks.

Owing to its volcanic origins, Crater Lake is one of the deepest lakes in the world (9th deepest to be exact at 594m), the deepest in the US. Not the deepest on the continent, however, as Canada's Great Slave lake in the NW Territories checks in at 20 meters more. California's Tahoe also makes the list at #16. Baikal, deep in Russia's Siberia is #1 at almost three times the depth of Crater Lake. This is what wikipedia is for, so a complete list, for the curious... Random trivia gleaned from that list: Antarctica has lakes! In fact, lake Vostok is the 5th deepest in the world. Unfortunately, it's buried under thousands of meters of ice, so you can't exactly go for a swim... Back to Crater Lake - it's also rated as containing the clearest water in the world (since all of its supply comes from precipitation and snow melt) - the measuring method might seem a bit hokey, but the water certainly looks incredibly clear to the naked eye. The waters are also some of the purest in North America in terms of the absence of pollutants...

Now that we're done with the geology lesson for the day, back for more pictures... The National Park surrounding the lake isn't really all that big, so while you can do a bit of hiking, the primary activities are to take a drive along the rim and to take a boat ride on the lake itself. So Day 1, I set off on a drive:

That little formation is called Phantom Ship

And these are the Pinnacles - fossil fumaroles created by the Mazama eruption

The night was spent camping. Your camping guide for Crater Lake - the 'good' campsite in the park charges only $10 for the night, is located in a quiet little bit of the forest on the way to the Pinnacles, but only has space for 16 tents, so it was full. The less good site is gigantic (and thus less good in mind) and charges $23 for a tent site. And those were all full (the tourists were clearly not swayed by the less than perfect weather), so I was offered an RV site for a bargain price of $28... Paying almost $30 to put up my tent next to a bunch of RV's seemed like the worst idea in the world, so instead I paid $5 to stay at a campground in the nearby town of Fort Klamath, where I could listen to the river gurgle right outside my tent. Peaceful...

The following morning, time to get down to the lake itself, which, by the way, can be dangerous:

Danger, Will Robinson! Take the one and only path we have to get down to the water. It had been a while since I had seen a truly amusing warning sign.


The weather wasn't exactly encouraging as I got to the boat, but five of us decided to persevere and set off for the ride to Wizard Island. For a while there, I thought that turning back really wouldn't be such a bad idea. We did not, however, and were instead rewarded by rapidly improving conditions once we landed on the island, which the five of us had all to ourselves for the next three hours.

At the top, it was getting downright sunny as I was looking down into the crater (Wizard Island is also a volcano, of course)

Still some clouds behind me

But overall, very clear - enough to bring out the bright colors of the deep waters of the lake

There's a few emerald ponds on the island - an intriguing sight even if you do have to crawl over a bunch of loose volcanic rock to catch a glimpse of them

Back to the dock to have a little lunch - the chipmunks on the island are well aware that this is the very place where tourists [with food] arrive

And on the way back across the lake, cruising a little closer to the Phantom Ship rocks

Back at the car at top of the caldera, I found myself once more enveloped in a dense cloud of fog. On occasion, it would shift just enough to expose a glorious view of the lake:

Wizard Island peaking out of the fog

Most of the rest of the time, I was feeling a little lost in the fog, which made me think of ёжик в тумане - check out that post title... If you are not up on your Russian, that means 'Hedgehog in the fog,' which is a famous old Russian cartoon about ... you guessed it, a hedgehog lost in the fog! Thanks to youtube, you can now actually watch the whole thing for yourself here. According to Russian wikipedia, the cartoon was recognized as the best of 'all time and all nations' ... by a panel of 140 film critics and animators.

A couple of hours later, I was back in Klamath Falls, trying out the local cuisine at Applebee's... and departing the following morning for Seattle. Not before catching this site:

Perhaps the American rail system still isn't all that much more advanced than the Indian one?

The weather Saturday morning as I was waiting for Amtrak's late-running Coast Starlight? 75 and sunny - that's right, I was at Crater Lake for just about the two worst days they had had this summer - sigh... on the bright side, I did have a few not-entirely-cloudy days in San Francisco, which is equally uncommon this time of the year!

At 5:04PM on August 8, 2009, I crossed back into Washington State (without an onward ticket this time), and by around 9 that evening I was back in Seattle, bringing the almost 20 months of wondering around the world to a successful (I think?) conclusion. My bag had by now accumulated a pair of jeans from Colombia, my French towel, my Thai swimming trunks, my 'dress shoes' from Tenerife, an Antarctic t-shirt, Czech toothpaste, Peruvian shaving cream, a camera lens from Bolivia, a pocket knife from Russia, a jacket from Kathmandu, Nepal, a pair of socks from Japan, and sunglasses from a Shell station in Klamath Falls, Oregon... so, yeah, I guess I'd been around a bit.