Ushuaia or Bust: The Pan-Am 2K Expedition

[Revtor]

I like that front bumper you got Tom, was it on the truck when you got it?

[tmckeon88]

Yes, it was- then when it finally rusted out I got a galvanized replacement through DAP Enterprises, but unfortunately it is no longer available. I think it's set at a bad height, like trap-a-toddler-under-the-car height, so it's not sold in the US. I'd still have the galvanized one except we had a little accident a couple of years ago and bent it, so I'm back to the stock bumper now.

We tried to have that galvanized bull bar straightened at a local metal fab shop, but after trying to bend it by lowering a bulldozer blade onto it (and failing) we reckoned it was not fixable. A shame.

Update: Trip planning.

I wanted to mention something about the vehicle carnet, which is like a passport for the car, which greatly facilitates passing through border checkpoints. It's a document that has several copies of all the relevant info about the car, and also represents the fact that you have set aside a bond for the full value of the vehicle so that you can show that you don't intend to sell or dump the car in a foreign country. Especially important in Central/South America where you might have people trying import used American cars in order to sell them sort of in a black market sense in a foreign country. Information about it is available through the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA). Apparently the AAA doesn't arrange them, or at least they didn't in those days. Very helpful document, although it was a pain to have set the cash aside for that. I did half in cash, half on my credit card. (We had to have a RN appraisal of the vehicle done to have a specific figure to give them.)

Other plans: We contacted the US State department for tourist updates on all the countries we were visiting, as well as the embassies/consulates for most of them. Usually we would get back some helpful maps and brochures from various countries. The state department sent us a big "No way" concerning Colombia, where kidnappings and other problems were rampant, especially for an obviously foreign vehicle like ours, so we decided to skip Colombia altogether. There's no road route from Panama into Colombia anyway (see information about the 1970s Darien Gap Expedition - Land Rovers and Range Rovers trying to slash through the jungle) so we planned to have the truck container shipped from Panama to Ecuador. We would fly, and meet the truck in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and continue from there.

Packing: Basically we wanted to cover the bases of being able to camp, hike and be comfortable. The timing was such that it would be summer or spring much of the time. We didn't bring any dress clothes (I might have packed a tie). We didn't have a rooftop tent (they don't seem to make sense to me, unless there's a major snake/scorpion issue or something; you lose your roof rack space) but just our usual backpacking rig. The camping stuff ended up taking most of the roof rack space because it's isn't very heavy and you don't need except at most once a day. So we had tent, tarp, backpacks, sleeping bags, pads, field kitchen stuff, MSR stove and fuel. I'm comparatively minimalist when it comes to camping (think 7 lb tent rather than 3-room screen house) so we had a fairly compact camping rig. I brought a 5-gallon water jerry can (plastic), a water filter (slow, but I'm glad we had it), iodine tablets, and a few recipes. As far as food goes, we brought what we might have on any camping trip. I imagine people on the forum here already know what they like to do for camping and eating outdoors, so I won't say too much about it. Except maybe for the Fry-Bake pan- this is a heavy aluminum pan that can act as a Dutch oven as well as a fry pan. If you're not backpacking it's very handy- we baked and sauted in it. Good for canoe and car camping too, and comes in two sizes.

Having said all that, we didn't camp as much as I imagined we would. We did more in Canada and the US where the sites were plentiful and clean, much less so once we entered Mexico. Lodgings were comparatively cheap after that anyway, and I am soft enough to enjoy a shower and a real bed after being deafened and dust covered for 4 - 5 hours. I did learn a few things about cooking and eating on the road.

Next Update: spare parts and tools.

[tmckeon88]

Update: Some camping pictures. We generally were car camping of course so we could carry whatever food we wanted. We had a small cooler (as I recall) but of course we did not always have ice for it, etc., but it was handy. We usually pitched our tarp over the cooking area.



These are mostly sites in Canada and Alaska. We had a few memorable episodes with the voracious mosquito populations you sometimes encounter up north- in one primitive provincial campsite in British Columbia we we warmed by the worst mosquitoes I have ever seen and after hastily cooking something and eating we jumped into the tent at about 6:00. You could then hear the general hum of thousands of mosquitoes lighting on the tent. It made me think of the early travelers and Indians in these areas, for whom this was a daily fact of life.



Because we sort of gave up on camping much in Mexico and Central America, I think the single can of Coleman fuel we brought lasted us the whole time. (It would swell and contract interestingly as we went up and down in altitude.) The MSR Whisperlite stove we were using is a solid piece of equipment- they used to be temperamental but I have been very pleased with ours. i've used it from probably 15 years without a hitch and with very little maintenance.

We liked making tortillas in camp because it's quick and easy and seems more homemade than boiling up dried soups and so forth. They are easy; mostly just flour, salt, water and a little baking powder, then rolled out using a water bottle as a roller and cooked quickly on a dry pan. The only drawback was having unmarked bags of white powders (flour, etc.) when our car was repeatedly searched in Mexico. We emerged from that safely though.

Camping recommendations: Thunder Bay area of Lake Superior, anywhere in British Columbia, which is beautiful, Oregon and California. BC really stands out in my memory as being spectacular everywhere you went. We preferred national forest and provincial parks to private campgrounds, because you can get further from the RV crowd that way. I like to have it quiet and private when I'm camping, maybe from my backpacking experience where you are usually far from crowds.

Next time I'll get into the actual travel pictures. Sorry if I don't have tons of Rover pix in this; there are some here and there but much of the time we were just driving on roads so nothing exciting there. There are some breakdown/repair stories which I will relate. Spoiler alert:

Antarctic ocean in Ushuaia (we made it):

[smukai]

Enjoying this thread and dreaming.

Thanks for the continual posts!

[tmckeon88]

Update: Crossing Canada 1



We went through NH, VT, NY and into Canada above the Great Lakes. We stayed with friends and camped at Thunder Bay on Lake Superior (I think). Roads of course all good- we were planning to get on the Alcan highway eventually. Notably in the Great Lakes area we came upon a tractor-trailer carrying orange juice that had just overturned on an incline. The driver & passenger were shaken up but not hurt too bad; we got out our big first aid box and dabbed some cuts and bruises but nothing major. We waited for an ambulance and then were on our way.

It probably bears noting that we had no phone with us, or computer. We had to occasionally make calls but there are plenty of phones in the world so that was no problem. Once in a while we had to prevail upon a passerby to make a call for us but generally it was not an issue.



Starting the Alaska highway in Dawson, BC.

I don't have a lot of strong memories of crossing Canada- it was nice, friendly people and so forth, but it was about two weeks of sameness and low-quality coffee. The great plains area of the US extends up into the Canadian prairies so there long stretches of uninterrupted flat land. We were also sort of fighting the westerly headwinds much of the time so we were sometimes slowed to about 45 miles an hour ,despite the overdrive. We would try to get in the baffles of big trucks sometimes to travel in their slipstream, but that was sort of dangerous. Mechanical problems: just my perennial weak brakes, that always take a couple of pumps no matter how much adjusting I did. (I solved this problem many years later, just last summer in fact, and for the first time I have decent brakes. It turned out that my right front backing plate had a lower pin broken loose, so the shoes were sort of floating on a moving pin, so you could never fully adjust to take up the slack in the system. I found a replacement and put that in, along with new drums and pads, and a little machining later - presto, proper brakes. I can't believe I lived with it for 15 years.)

We crossed into BC and got onto the real Alaska highway which is mostly gravel out that way, although they were in the process of paving it and I imagine it's all done now. It was built originally during WWII to allow military materiel to be moved more quickly to Alaska in case of a Japanese attack on that territory. It has been continually upgraded. Traveling in some traffic there was the first time I had really encountered a bad dust problem. We ended up closing all the windows despite the summer weather, then trying to open them all to create a draft to keep the dust out, etc. Not successful. It was here too we got hit with a flying piece of gravel that put a small hole in our radiator, and we learned by it is all the trucks have fine screens in front of their radiators on these gravel highways. I got a section of screen at a hardware store and wired it to the back of my grill to keep stones out, but too late. (It's still there, in fact.) Because of this gradual seeping of coolant, we spent several days topping it up every morning and trying all manner of tricks such as pouring pepper into the radiator to create sort of a plug and also using some of that aluminized power that purports to do the same thing. None of it entirely successful. One thing I find noteworthy is that the Rover will continue running even if some systems are not working 100%. In a modern car, if one module or sensor goes, sometimes the whole thing can be immobilized. (On the other hand, no A/C in the Rover!)

We got into Alaska and made our way to Fairbanks fairly uneventfully.


Next up: Alaska and the Dalton Highway.

[Revtor]

Awesome Tom!

[disco2hse]

Enjoying your thread and looking forward to the next instalment.

[tmckeon88]

Update: Alaska, the Dalton Highway and the Arctic Circle

We drove through some notable locations in BC and the Yukon Territory (it still amazes me to have visited the Yukon, after have read a bunch of Robert Service and Jack London as a kid). Whitehorse, Yukon is a great little town with a natural history museum describing Beringia, the prehistoric landmass encompassing Alaska and eastern Russia, connected by a land bridge then. They have fossils and reconstructions bears and giant sloths and so forth. Keeping an eye on the radiator levels, we drove to Fairbanks to get ready for the final push up the Dalton Highway.

I'm having some trouble with uploading these pictures; as I recall these are slides of prints and are not great quality anyway. We camped in Fairbanks in a commercial campground that was unfortunately noisy and dirty, so we were glad to get our supplies and head north with full jerry cans, water jugs and food.

The Dalton highway runs alongside the famous Alaska pipeline, which we criss crossed a number of times. It's essentially a big pipe on a raised scaffold crossing the tundra. I've heard that the friction of the oil running through the pipe keeps the temperatures around it above freezing. The road is gravel, but big and wide and generally in good condition, so you can get going 50-60 mph if you are inclined, but watch out when the big trucks come barreling along because that's really their road, not yours. We got more stones and chips thrown at us and got a chip in our windshield, which is still there as a reminder to me. I had that screen over the front grill so the radiator was protected, but we were traveling on borrowed time because we had to keep adding water to the radiator and I began to worry that we would never be able to make it without an overheating problem which might really damage the engine. We crossed the Arctic Circle (again, my picture files are too large for some reason) and went on. We had planned for stop in Coldfoot, Alaska, where there is a little restaurant and PO, and there we had to assess our plan.


As you can see, Coldfoot offers few amenities. There were lots of trucks and truckers though and I asked around to see if there were any mechanics who could patch our radiator, but no luck. It was gray and drizzling and muddy and not an auspicious day generally. We ended up going as bit further on to stay at a national forest campground but at that point we decided to take the better part of valor and return to Fairbanks.

We had intended to go all the way up the Dalton to Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay, where the big oil refineries for the Arctic Sea are, but we were concerned with not finding lodging or fuel, and also with the fact that the oil companies limit access to that area. Not just anyone can blunder in. So we sort of consoled ourselves with the idea that we had gotten into the Arctic and a mechanical fault forced us back, but we hadn't really lost too much. On the return trip we were stopping to refill the radiator every few miles, so it had gotten pretty bad (despite the large dose of coarse ground pepper I had dumped into the radiator from the little diner in Coldfoot).

We got back to Fairbanks and stayed at a B&B rather than camping. I had had a new speedo cable sent to that address (ours had failed in Yukon somewhere) and had a memorable time lying on the side of the street trying to get it installed around the overdrive unit. We also washed the truck- it had picked up a thick ,velvety layer of dust from the gravel Dalton Highway. We sought out a radiator shop and persuaded them to repair the radiator- if I removed it myself and delivered it. So , I parked the truck at their shop, got out the wrenches and removed the radiator and gave it to them to work on. The shop was staffed entirely by women, which I found notable at the time, and apparently mostly worked on giant tractor-trailer radiators, big, finned monolithic slabs of copper. But they got ours fixed in a day and I put it back in and it never gave us any more trouble. We hiked around where the Yukon River cuts close to town and rode bikes around that were loaned to us. Now that we had reached the "beginning" of our southward route we felt like we'd turned a corner.

Other mechanical issues: we were averaging about 18 miles to the gallon. It actually improved over the course of the trip, perhaps because running the engine at high revs for so long burned away some gunk. My mileage now is worse. We lost the speedo but got that replaced (although this car tends to eat speedo cables, I've found). We still had the weak brake issue which never got better and my rear hubs tended to leak oil. I repeatedly pulled the drive flanges and resealed things, but it never got fully fixed until somewhat later, after the trip. We were consuming oil as usual and generally couldn't get oil changes because quick-lube places wouldn't have the canister replacement filters for us. But generally the car started every day and ran all day without too much fuss. We would usually drive through two or three tanks of fuel a day, maybe 500 miles on a big day. That's a lot in the hot, noisy truck. We had a radio but usually couldn't hear it well. We both learned to doze sitting up in the passenger seat with a pillow on the lap. So we were making headway.
Next: Back in the USA.

[disco2hse]

A note on preparing photos for upload. I tend to use Photoshop to resize mine to a constant size if there is a limit on the site I am uploading to. 800 pixels on the longest side, JPEG format and use the best quality setting. Seems to work most times.

The other thing, if you use one of the photo sharing sites like Google+, you can upload your scan and resize them using the image location url. For example the image below is of my friend, Jerry's cool Carawagon in Australia. The image location is

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-XvnrkatIjKk/UOSpw7uNyiI/AAAAAAAAAfs/_0Rq6Ei7_bg/s805/P1030964.JPG

The important bit is s805. That denotes the size. Change to make it bigger or smaller.

s805 ==



s350 ==



Important: Deselect the "Retrieve remote file and reference locally" check box if you don't want it copied to this site.

[tmckeon88]

Update: Alaska-BC-Pacific NW

Just a few pictures to show of the return trip down from Alaska. After getting our radiator and speedo cable sorted out, we headed down through British Columbia which is a spectacular place that I recommend to anyone. Mountains, lakes, even semi arid landscapes, plenty of places to camp and so forth.



Some black bears and a grizzly in the distance. (We were in the truck at the time so we could do a quick getaway if need be.) Beautiful provincial parks and campgrounds, although I encountered ferocious mosquitoes here a few times too. This part of the trip went fairly smoothly as I recall- we were just tooling along and adding oil to the engine pretty regularly. The roads were good, just not superhighways.

What was probably most noteworthy was getting close to Vancouver (actually Chiliwack, BC) I was stopped at a gas station and when we pulled away I heard sort of a "kathunk" and then noticed oil drizzling out from under the car. Upon inspection it turned out there was a hole in the rear differential case, right near the bottom by the drain plug, and oil actually dripping out. (I admit part of me thought "Yay! My diff casing still had oil in it!") and we were dead in the water. I got it towed to a garage close by and then there started a chain of phone calling events that ended up with us going to another garage where there was a mechanic who knew Land Rovers (he said he used to race them?!) and who relatively quickly got under it, pulled the differential off, and determined that all of the crown ring bolts had come loose and the diff was essentially floating in the casing back there. One had been jammed against the axle case and made that hole. Well, we were sort of stalled until MORE phone calls were made and he located a distributor of Rover parts located an hour or so away who had a new set of those bolts (and some sundries). We just had to go pick them up. How, without a vehicle? Well, this mechanic actually loaned us the use of his pick-up camper, which we drove down the highway, got the bolts, brought them back, and gave them over to the mechanic. All this happened over the course of a couple of days, during which we stayed at a little B&B in Chiliwack ("Hedgehog Hollow"). I was pretty astonished at how helpful everyone was, which is a theme that ran throughout the trip. When we had mechanical troubles, usual people were only too happy to help the old beast get running again. Once in a while I even had an appropriate spare part on board.

He got it all buttoned up again, had the hole in the casing welded (still holding today) and we were off for Washington State where my wife had relatives. That experience gave me faith that we could find help just about anywhere, a belief that was tested and borne out a few times further down the trail.


Next- Washington, Oregon, California.