Mini World Adventure Part 7

Anyone who has owned a Mini will understand the picture above; rain has managed to get into the distributor cap,so I am drying it out and treating with WD40.
A day or so after all the rain we were driving and I came across Jack stopped in the road, We always travelled with Tony Driving the lead car (Jack) and I followed on so if he broke down I would find him, if I broke down it could be some time before he knew I was no longer following. This was well before mobile phones, so some days we would not catch up to each other until we stopped for fuel to to eat or if we came into a large town and directions may be an issue.

The rear suspension cone had broken, not a part we carried, so I drove back about 5 miles to the last house/farm, remove the part from Jill and walked the 5 miles back. 

It was such a different experience walking, I saw so much more wildlife, beautiful birds, leaf cutting ants, butterflies and one snake. I rebuild Jack and we drove back. 

We then took a bus the next day back to the last town about 150 kms away and found a blacksmith who did a fantastic repair, got the bus back and refitted the cone and to it is still there to this day.

The cars were suffering quite badly due to road conditions and the weight we were carrying, luckily the next ‘service area’ was run by an Englishman and as you can imagine it was much better organised than all of the others we had seen. One of the cars had cracked the rear sub frame and the roof rack needed attention. He had a welder but of course there is no mains electricity this deep in the jungle, so he had a generator that was powered from an old truck jacked up with one of the wheels off. 

A belt then ran from the drum to the generator, not very health & safety but it allowed us to repair the cars.

About 150 kms before Manaus Jack blew its head gasket, normally this would not have been a problem as we carried the parts on board, but as we had changed the engine to 1275cc, the parts we had were for 998cc. I tried to modify the gasket as a temporary measure and we managed to limp on.

The rivers were getting wider and at least we reached the Balsa to take us to Manaus, it is where the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers meet and is over a mile wide! The Amazon river is brown and the Negro black and they run side by side for many miles not mixing which was an incredible site on the Balsa.

Manaus is a city the size of Truro but 1500 miles up the Amazon surrounded by Jungle, it is the largest inland port in the world and prospered from the rubber trade but when we visited pretty run down with large areas of Favelas, 

but still has the Italian designed Opera house.

One of the good aspects of the City is because it is on the River Negro there are not too many mosquitoes.

We found a very cheap guest house to stay in and managed to persuade Pecton a subsidiary of Shell who were exploring for oil in the area to help us. We left the cars with them and used their phone and telex to try and sort out the parts required to repair the cars. It was such a luxury to go to their headquarters as it was air conditioned and out of the oppressive humidity.

It took 6 weeks to sort out parts, flying them to Manaus and customs etc. We spent the time working on the cars and on one of our walks around the back streets found an old Mini Moke, it was abandoned, so we rolled it onto its side and ‘borrowed’ the rear suspension trumpets. Our third cameraman left us here after picking up some form of tropical disease 

There was a small English speaking community, mainly Americans and passing through backpackers travelling the length of the Amazon from Iquitos to Belem, I can vividly remember two days here; one was the day John Lennon was shot and the other was my 21^st. We managed to find a bar with a banana tree growing through the tables after drinking Caipirinha cocktails and eating Plantain crisps; I climbed the tree and brought down the bunch of bananas, quite a different celebration.

Finally the correct parts arrived after much work behind the scenes from my parents. I rebuild Jack’s engine, we re-loaded the cars and headed north. We were still not sure that a road existed between Manaus and Venezuela, which seems incredible, some locals said the road only went for a couple hundred kms others said it was there but very poor in places. We had no alternative but to drive on and see. 
To begin with the road was hard a bit like a cobbled street 

and before long we came to the equator and for fun lined the cars up and sat either side, a leg in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the southern.

As we pulled out of the jungle towards the high planes of the border the roads got steadily worse, the road was a brilliant white colour,

very rutted and the cars struggled.
We eventually made it to the border and crossed without issues, although they did steam clean the underside of both cars to prevent any bugs being imported from Brazil.

The landscape was just so different, open plains with quite deep rocky streams to cross, less humid but still very hot. We had found a large bunch of bananas and lots of limes in an abandoned Fazenda.We mixed Limes with sugar and they made a very refreshing drink.