The Beauty of Functionality

In the bus we use a bucket for showering. It’s a tatty old bucket which is starting to split, and although it’s clean, the outside is mired in embedded black grime that stains it. It used to hold 10 litres of engine oil and the mechanics that helped me rebuild the engine in Delhi gave it to me when I was stranded in the engineless truck there.

Christina points out that it’s ugly and unsightly and when we are showing the bus off to visitors it makes the place look dirty. She’s right of course, and a new bucket would create a much better impression. It’s one of a number of improvements to the interior of the bus that would doubtless engender a more positive response from people we meet. For people interested in the journey it presents a distraction which suffixes the thought “but I couldn’t live like that” to the verbalised encouragement of “This truck is great”. The worst of it is that it creates the association that “eco” means dirty.

But there are a few sentimental reasons why I like this bucket. It reminds me of the hard work under the oppressive heat of a Delhi summer I had to put into it to scrub it clean of the engine oil that was in it, of the satisfaction of seeing it filled for the first time with clear oil-free water, it reminds me of the people that gave it to me, of the work we did together on the engine, of the insight into their lives they shared with me, of the showers I took after replacing the engine pistons and the dirt that flowed out of my hair into the shower tray.

I like that it’s waste too, that it’s living out a second life after the oil it originally carried is circulating around an engine somewhere. This sentimentality would be almost reason enough to keep the bucket forever, even build a plinth for it, but the fact that it's waste is the real reason I don't want to throw it out for a pretty new one. And far from being ugly I find that it is beautiful, because of the way it does what I need.

Firstly it coincidentally fits perfectly in the corner where we store it and it has a comfortable metal handle that doesn’t cut into your hand when fully laden. It’s made with a softer thermosetting plastic than most buckets making it less brittle and more resilient to cracking when crushed or knocked by the heavy jerrycan that lives next to it, and it’s the perfect size for one shower’s-worth of water. All of this leads me to see it as beautiful. It works so well, is so harmonised with its purpose that it is benignly beautiful.

So it is with much of the bus interior; devoid of aesthetic, the hideous curtains stitched by my sister with material offcuts work brilliantly at maintaining privacy, keeping out the heat but maintaining a bright interior, the grotesque seat pillows are cut to shape that folds into a spare bed, the atrocious carpet that lines the ceiling was fished out of skips and bins, and provides unprecedented thermal and acoustic insulation. It’s no beauty to look at, but it’s beautiful to see it at work.

Aesthetic and functional beauties aren’t mutually exclusive argues Chris, and suggests that I wouldn’t welcome her shaving off her beautiful long blond hair to be more functionally beautiful needing less water to wash it. I risk a scowl replying that her function is to be attractive to me so I see her hair’s aesthetic as being a functional feature and consequently beautiful on both levels. Perhaps it's the double compliment that saves me from getting so much as a frown. Aesthetic can serve a purpose, just like any other aspect of design; the choice of material, scale and dimensions.

To my mind’s eye, the ugliest thing in the bus is not the bucket or unpainted wood panels, the fraying seat covers, the stained shower tray or double glazed window at the back. It's the fridge that doesn’t’ work efficiently enough so that it can be left on permanently. Intermittent refrigeration is worse than none at all. To me it sticks out like an irritating needle in my functional fung shui of the drab cupboards and shelves that surround it. To everyone else it looks like a charming wood effect panelled fridge set against some rickety draws.

So with an upcoming round of presentations to give in Bangkok I was tempted to invest in new bucket. I've been faced with this compromise before. Should I do something against the principles of using waste to promote the benefits of using waste. Is there a greatergood? Or should I remember I am not an eco-disciple, responsible for teaching the world how to live, just someone who's overdue a shower.

On the Road Rage Again

After a few people sensing my despondency, and several attempts to motivate and revitalise me, it’s an unlikely contender that gets my thanks for giving me and this journey a sense of purpose again.

The pleasure I got from staying put is hard to overstate. Despite an engine rebuild the bus continued to leak water, and I was nervous about 100 problems that might manifest themselves at any time, so my subconscious brain didn’t want to drive anywhere and did a pretty good job of getting my conscious frontal cortex to come up with excuses why I shouldn’t.

But eventually after a week I was able to tear myself away from the comfort of good friends, the good flying and a familiar routine. The bus started second time, not an ominous sign, but not a good one either. Nothing about being on the road again seemed enjoyable. Even less so when I crossed back into the chaos of India. Traffic, incessant fucking horns, chronic potholed tarmac, kamikaze oncoming 17 tonne trucks, and an instant scrape to the low hanging exhaust on a speed bump which means it needs welding, again.

A rickshaw slips back into the side of me as I’m driving past and instantly shatters the toughened door glass. It’s a sound that makes you want to duck for cover and I need a few milliseconds to understand what’s happened and make sense of the spiders web of shards that remains in the door. The rickshaw driver has the nerve to start out expecting me to pay for his bent rain cover, until he sees the extent of the damage to the bus, and while I’m sweeping up the glass he makes a discrete exit.

Getting the glass repaired is the even more tortured than I imagine. The absence of any English speakers means I don’t realise the glazier only has offcuts of toughened glass to offer. Toughened glass can’t be cut, so the job requires 3 hours of sifting through piles of glass looking for a piece that will fit, give or take a few millimetres. I don’t know this as I’m waiting in the now unlockable bus and expecting him to return with a cut piece ready for fitting in no more than 20 minutes so after impatiently waiting 2 hours I flip out and my stroppy fit results in the search pace intensifying, and eventually a tinted piece which acceptably wide and only 10cm too short is found and fitted, with another smaller bit wedged into the gap.

“If you want to charge me a westerner’s price I expect a western quality job” I tell him in English knowing my words mean nothing. I hand over 60% of the price we’d agreed pointing to the smear of silicon filling the gap between the panes and he accepts.

The next day I give the bus a proper check. My usual daily routine is to check the oil and water, then spend 10 minutes staring at the engine to see what there is to see. It’s hard to do that while you have people hanging around waiting to see you off, so it didn’t get one in Pokhara.

The coolant is down by 4 litres. The whole system only takes about 7. This means the leak should be big enough to spot easily, so I crawl around and sure enough its part of my heat exchange system and quick but dirty to fix.

So as I set off I’m feeling pleased that that mystery of the water leak is finally solved and in my head I’m calculating how long before I reach Calcutta and thinking positively about how the windscreen and exhaust could be repaired when I get there.

But the funny thing with the brakes that started yesterday evening is un-ignorabley worse today, and because I’m low on fuel I might as well fix it sooner rather than later, so binding brakes don’t increase my fuel consumption.

I pull over and my good humour is evaporating fast. This part of India is one of the dirtiest I’ve seen, and I’m going to have to crawl around under the bus. I’ve not got much Indian cash, and it’s Sunday so I can’t change any money, but happily I know the brakes well and can save on mechanics a mechanics fee, so I find a good spot and peel off the wheels myself and try to free up the blocked drum, but it’s just not releasing. After almost fainting in the heat, I give up and call a mechanic from across the road. I shouldn’t need to spend any money on parts, just a well placed smack with a hammer. I can budget for a mechanic with what I have in my pocket. Again the language barrier means he doesn’t understand the problem even though by now I’ve developed a creditable skill for understanding foreign conversations, based on context, hand gestures, facial expressions and the occasional English word that pervades every language. It’s like a vague but reliable sixth sense. Frustratingly my hand actions, which to me are clear and obvious, just leaves him staring blankly back.

I’m sick of it and I’m thinking fuck this, fuck this fucking truck, fuck this fucking country, fuck vegetable oil, fuck driving around the fucking world, fuck every Indian truck driver that ran me off the fucking tarmac today, and fuck this mechanic that can’t even understand me.

Deep breath. “I’m here because I want to be” I resentfully mutter my mantra which has become wholly unconvincing since I’ve been in India, but the irony helps me keep sane. An hour later the drum is off and the brakes have been stripped and checked unnecessarily, because the problem is the wheel bearing. Almost certainly as a result of sitting in a damp field for 2 months, near the drain pipe for my acid wee, it is pitted and therefore is ceasing, behaving like a blocked brake, and worse, the side with the etched part number has been scratched off by the rubbing so there’s no easy way of tracking down another one.

A guy comes to my rescue in more ways than one. He speaks terrible English but can understand some of what I say. I’m so relieved to be understood. It feels great. On the way into town to look for a replacement bearing we have to ride by his house to pick up his license and helmet. As I arrive in the little tenement farm, I’m first stared at with a fear that might great an alien landing but then the sister urgently wipes down the newest of the 4 plastic chairs and places it in the middle of the room for me. My hero sits in the second best chair against the un-plastered mud brick wall, and starts to tell the family the story of this treasured find sitting before them. I follow the gist with my sixth sense.

"He’s driven from England to our village ... his bus is like a house inside ... the number on the bearing is worn off." No detail is spared and his excited pace makes time for pauses that build suspense as he eyes each of his siblings and parents gathered in the room and huddled out through the doorway. They listen intently, consuming and savouring every word. The mother pulls her veil over her mouth and gasps incredulously each time the intonation merits. His eldest sister’s wide dark eyes flit between the words coming from her brother’s mouth and me sitting on my plastic throne picking out the details in my clothes and dirty fingernails that illustrate the story. The youngest five siblings vie for position in a silent wrestle outside, eager not to let their fight drown out any of their brothers words. Then the father asks why my driver isn’t fixing the car. “He’s the driver, and he built the truck,” there’s a pause for more gasps “and he’s an engineer.” says my hero, and the father turns his gaze slowly up at me with the respect a beloved king or emperor might inspire, shaking his head slowly at the wonder of the world and what man can do in it.

I’m glowing at the thought of how the story is being retold and embellished by the family to the neighbours and on. I’m not suckered into believing I’m a legend, but it’s motivating and humbling to be adulated, even for just a few minutes. While I’m lost in the frustrating challenges of this journey it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Later, on the way into town, we crossed the River Ganges, the first time I’ve seen the river. The bus has made it (almost) to the Ganges. Not bad for a junk bus that started from Thornton Heath.

We didn’t find the bearing and it looks like it’s a rare size which might need special ordering while I’m forced to camp in a disused petrol station. None the less I’m honestly back to believing that “I’m here because I want to be.”

Digital Displacement

Driving through mountains is a huge frustration for me. I use so much fuel going up, and wear out the brakes when going down.

I’ve been thinking that the perfect vehicle for paragliding should have a system of regenerative braking, which turns the energy from braking back into useable energy to push you along and up the hills.

The only way to do this, that I was familiar with, was to use an electric drive train, where the motor on the wheels can be used as a generator which slows the vehicle down and charges the battery.

Many trains have a diesel electric drive train, in which a diesel generator creates the electricity which drives a motor connected to the wheels. This seems like an unnecessarily complicated approach; when you have a diesel engine spinning away, it would seem to be more logical to connect it to the wheels rather than a generator connected to a motor connected to wheels.

In fact diesel-electric is more efficient, because there are less transmission losses (there’s no gearbox) and it allows the diesel engine to run at the speed where it is most efficient. Diesel engines are very inefficient outside a narrow rev range.

So the obvious answer is diesel-electric hybrid truck, or in my case veg-electric hybrid, with regenerative braking. I could take the gearbox out, and attach a generator in its place, then attach a motor to the differential at the back where the drive shaft would be. The Toyota Prius is able to capture and reuse about 50% of the braking energy.

Unfortunately the components required to control and power manage an electric vehicle are hugely expensive, and fitting them is much more complicated than just bolting on some off the shelf parts. But in theory it could improve the efficiency significantly, and I’d love to give it a try, because if there is one thing this bus is missing, it’s efficiency.

Last month Iain got in touch through Facebook and told me about "Digital Displacement" technology which I’d describe as a “diesel-hydraulic” hybrid system. Instead of a generator, a hydraulic pump is attached to the engine. This then creates hydraulic pressure, which can be stored in a pressure tank full of nitrogen or directed to a hydraulic motor attached to the wheels. The clever part of the system, which has been designed by Artemis Intelligent Power in Scotland, is the fast reacting valves that control how the hydraulic pressure is directed. The valves make the motor much more efficient than anything that’s gone before. The system is computer controlled, so that it acts as a variable speed gearbox. The engine always runs at optimum revs for the power required to move the truck along, and the speed is computer controlled by distributing the pressure to the sophisticated drive motor.

But best of all, the flow of pressure can be revered. The motor can be turned into a brake converting the energy from slowing the truck down into hydraulic pressure, which is stored and subsequently used to drive the car again. It’s much more efficient than an electric regenerative system, capturing and reusing 85% of the braking energy, because moving and storing energy at the high rate a braking vehicle generates it, is easier to do with hydraulic pressure than it is with the high currents generated and the batteries of an electrical system.

It’s a system that’s ideal for vehicles in stop-start driving scenarios, and the best energy savings will be on large vehicles, for instance bin-lorries and busses. Currently the technology has been sold to Bosch-Rexroth who will no doubt trial and develop reliable components first for this heavy vehicle market and then hopefully roll it out for smaller vehicles like cars if the energy and cost savings can be shown to be worthwhile.

There are other advantages over diesel-electric too. The components are lighter, and there isn’t the associated environmental impact of battery manufacture and ultra-capacitors burning out.

Using this gearbox on a large saloon car, Artemis have shown certified fuel savings of around 40%. This is one of those rare technologies that make a massive leap forward. In principle it’s a technology that can be retro fitted to any vehicle, especially trucks. I’ve been in touch with Artemis to ask if they have any components I could trial. The answer was an understandably lukewarm no, but I'm going to persist. This is prototype stuff and I suspect they don't have a license for road going vehicles anymore. I’m trying to get hold of people at Bosch to ask them too but I doubt they will want to let me test out the technology at this early stage, when they have everything to lose if prototype components are seen to go wrong.

The energy storage capacity needed to capture the energy of braking when driving down through mountains is much bigger than that for stop-go traffic so I’m still unclear how big the pressure tank would need to be to make the best use from the slow ongoing breaking energy of my 6 tonne truck descending from the Himalayas.

At the very least I hope the next Biotruck, Biotruck III, will be a Veg-Hydraulic hybrid designed for a tour of the world’s mountains.

The Good, The Bad, and the Oily

India is 5h30 ahead of GMT. Not six hours, not five, but five and a half. It’s a classic example of Indian attitude to the rest of the world. What with a large part of the world living here, what need is there to follow the accepted international norms elsewhere. India can set its own norms.

Some engine parts you can find the world over. I chose a merc for this journey because you can find Mercedes everywhere. Not in India. The dealership quoted me 10 days and €2000 for a set of pistons (a more usual price might be €200). I’d visited Mercedes when I was in Pune, to ask for sponsorship. Their big enthusiasm quickly waned into unanswered calls, and I did think at the time, that the understated sign that said “Mercedes-Benz, India” in that familiar reassuring font and colours, should really say “Mercedes-Benz, but India”.

A merc oil filter is, in most countries, like a dollar bill. Maybe not commonplace, but seek and you shall find. Not in India. They don’t have mercs, they have Tata’s. You want a Tata filter and you have a choice from original (made by Tata), branded aftermarket (made by someone else who knows what their doing), or non-branded (made by neanderthals with a big stick). None of them fit.

By complete coincidence Tata licensed the rights to my OM364 engine from Mercedes years ago, modified it slightly and stuck it in the most common vehicle on the road in Northern India. The 407.

Helpful to a degree, but the modifications affected the parts I needed (like the oil filter) so back to square one. It looked like the only option was to cut down a similar piston so it would fit.
Eventually the speculation about weather cutting pistons down would work was put to bed when Amitoj from Paulco Autoparts located the right pistons (albeit non-branded neanderthal ones) in Agra. The casting quality was terrible, the anodising looks like it’s been done by primary school kids, but they are undoubtedly the right size. Criticism aside, it’s worth praising Amitoj for achieving what in 3 days no other spare parts shop managed, and believe me they tried.

So with pistons in hand the story passes to Deshanka and Sanjay, my mechanics. By this stage I’d already been living in the side street next to their workshop/cupboard for 5 days with no engine in my bus, and jacked up so the shower wouldn’t drain.

Deshanka was feeling the pressure of the other mechanics who all told me he wasn’t up to the job of rebuilding my engine. This need to prove himself made him rush and bodge the rebuild at times, so I watchfully checked almost every bolt he put back in. Good mechanics aren’t the ones that know how to rebuild an engine, they all know that. They are the ones that take their time to think things through, look at the parts and bolts and be assured that they are putting back together according to a design and reason.

Sure enough the timing was 180degrees out and it wouldn’t start. The pump came off, we turned the crank and put it back on. Fired first time. All good. For now. Time will reveal any other rushed jobs Deshanka has done as they work lose, and bring me to a halt. On balance I think probably none.

Deshanka is 27 and Sanjay his apprentice is 22, both from the north of India, migrants to Delhi in search of work. I saw their poverty first hand. No money to put fuel in the borrowed motorbike, only 2 sets of clothes, they didn’t wash before eating and the whole neighbourhood had a cough which I too now have. They slept in their workshop and when the bench was full of my engine parts they slept on the floor with the mice. As soon as they got any cash they got wasted.

When I paid them $100 for 4 days work, they were ecstatic, and promptly spent a fair portion of it on food and beer, for us all, smuggling me into their workshop where the other mechanics couldn’t see us getting blind drunk.

Once again I’ve discovered yet another India. Within the borders of this country is an arrogant nuclear super power, a third world agricultural nation, a paralysing bureaucracy, a corrupt police state, a massive military machine, a bi-polar tourist industry, a hyper-materialistic middle class, a nation criminalised by their poverty and under-education, and an alcoholic urban slum. It’s hard to like or dislike India because all these countries are India. And strangely each one is largely oblivious to the other countries living superimposed over it. The only thing these India’s have in common is the kindness and generosity of their citizens.

I ask a foreign journalist here what the government does to help people. There are schemes to provide the super-poor with work and cheap rice, but on the whole the most an average indian can hope to get from the government is that it leaves them well alone.

I’ve got my passport now, and I’m off. Delhi is less than 400km away from the Nepalese border. One day's drive. But I have to wait till the end of the week to set off. Even a totalitarian Maoist regime seems attractive after 5 months here. Thanks India, it’s been real. After everything you’ve done, there is no way I will ever love you, but somehow, even though I should, I can’t quite bring myself to hate you.

Engine Failure

The engine temperature is slightly high, and the oil pressure is also high. Normally a warm engine would thin the oil and drop the pressure, and I’m low on power. With hindsight its obvious what’s happening. The oil has thickened to the point where it’s resisting the engine from working.

But at the time I don’t know so it could be anything. I stop and change the radiator coolant. No effect. I stop and remove the exhaust filter which might be blocked. No effect.

The temperature is rising and settles just under 100C. I remove the thermostat and clean the outside of the radiator. No effect. I check the connections to the gauges. No effect.

We stop for dinner, and when I drive off again, the oil pressure drops to zero. That’s bad, really bad.

I check the dip stick to see if there is any oil left. It’s there, but it’s turned to a rubbery tar, and is stuck to the dipstick like silicon or chewing gum. I drive on to the next filling station which thankfully sells oil, open the sump and nothing comes out. It’s all gone solid.

Finally it all makes sense. Engine oil reacts with vegetable oil, and somewhere in my engine there is a leak. It’s one of the reasons I check the oil every morning for level and thickness. I’d been worried about it thinning as it mixed in with fuel, but over the last few days I’d been reassured that it looked thicker, and put the thinness down to the variability in morning temperature.

I’ve been changing the oil every 6000km but this time decided to leave it til 10000km as I’m using an engine oil which is supposed to avoid this problem. After 8000km it polymerised. It’s hard to imagine what a mess polymerised engine oil is. It’s heat resistant and rubbery, and it sticks to metal like silicone sealant.

That night I managed to flush enough of it out with diesel. It will dissolve a bit in diesel. I then ran the engine with a mix of new oil and diesel to try to dissolve the rest, but after 500km arriving in Delhi the engine was still full of it, and, at some point it had already caused one of the pistons to cease.

So here in Delhi I’ve had no choice but to do a complete engine rebuild, with new pistons and cylinders. It’s major surgery. You can’t strip the engine back any further than this.

Thankfully it turns out that this engine was copied by Tata and is very popular here, but they copied it with a few modifications so not all the parts are the same. The big problem has been the pistons. The Tata pistons are a little taller than the Mercedes ones.

Pistons aren’t cylindrical. They are very slightly oval. They are cut on an OCUMA (Ovality Cutting Machine). It’s like a lathe, but as they spin the cutting tool vibrates slightly in and out creating an ovality which when in the engine means that that the piston deforms into a cylinder when forces of the exploding fuel act on it.

So unlike most things in India, you can’t get a backstreet mechanic to make a new one. But I can get the machine shop to modify one that is almost the right size.

Shaving 2mm off the top of the Tata piston will create a piston that will fit, but the risk combustion bowl in the top of the piston. When the piston is at the top of it’s cycle all the air is squeezed into the small bowl cut into the top of the piston. The volume of the bowl is critical because it dictates the compression ratio. The cylinder is one litre, and the bowl is about the size of a shot glass, so all that air is compressed down into that space before the fuel is added and for the engine to work properly the compressed air has to be the right pressure.

It’s hard to measure these things accurately but the bowls are almost the same size, however worryingly the new bowl, in the Tata piston, when cut down will be about 5ml smaller, which means the pressure increase will be a bit higher. This might affect the engine in a number of ways. Firstly the Injector pump might not have enough force to overcome the increase in pressure, so it won’t push any fuel into the engine. Secondly compressing air like that creates heat so the extra compression might mean the engine runs hotter than usual. Finally it might be too much pressure for the bearings or the crankshaft to take, and either might crack under the strain.

On my phone's calculator I estimate that with the original pistons the air is compressed about 24 times, so the pressure is 24 times atmospheric pressure. With the cut down Tata pistons it will be about 27 times. I’d really like a syringe to measure the volume properly.

To my mind this difference from 24 to 27 is nothing, and if anything will make the engine run a bit more efficiently, but the mechanics are petrified that it won’t work, and it can’t be tested other than by reassembling the engine which is a day’s work.

The guy in the parts shop looks at me horrified when I tell him what I plan to do. “Modifying pistons is not recommended” he tells me. No shit, Sherlock? Is that right? At first I’m stuck for words. Then I start to think of all the things I’m doing which aren’t recommended. Crawling around under my bus on some dirty street isn’t recommended, riding across Delhi in the back of a scooter without a helmet isn’t recommended, not taking anything for the cough I’ve caught off my mechanic isn’t recommended, and that's just this morning. Driving to India in a 21 year old shitty bus, dragged out of a scrap yard, and fuelled by all sorts of crap I’ve scavenged along the way is not recommended. I think increasing the working pressure of the engine from 24 bar to 27 is probably the least of it.

I think it will be fine, but I’ve got enough people filling me with fear it’s really put the doubt in my mind. So now I want to do it just to see if it will work.

The engine will either not run, not run for long, or I’ll spend the next 6 months being highly suspicious of every characteristic of the way it runs, then forget about it, then in 2 years time I’ll remember the pistons and realise it was all Ok.

The Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics Coma

It’s one of those geeky subconscious thoughts that you have while you are doing something else. Distracted, you don’t even realise your mind has wondered into the subject until the thought resurfaces later and you track it back to what fired it in the first place. The philosophy of machine maintenance.

During a conversation my eye is drawn to the worn truck tire behind the guy I’m talking with. The conversation continues while I’m looking at the construction of the cross matting visible where patches of rubber are missing, thinking about how many plies the tire has, how much rubber is left before the steel inserts pop through, and if the rolling surface will puncture before the cracked sidewall splits over a pothole. It’s a 13 tonne Indian truck which means it’s probably loaded with about 40 tonnes. My guess is the side wall will go first. In fact my guess is that the side wall should have gone a long time ago.

When I was starting my brief career as a manufacturing engineer, Planned Maintenance (also known as Preventative Maintenance or PM) was the newest thinking from Japan. By having a schedule for maintaining your machinery you could pre-empt breakdowns and reduce the lost running time, increasing the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of your line. I was never that convinced that applying PM to every machine was for the best. It meant stopping the lines to fix things that weren’t necessarily broken, and with some machines they’d spend more time stopped for maintenance than they ever would have for unexpected breakdowns.

The secret was to have a good PM schedule, that understood the design of the machinery and the lifespan of the components, but even then, the rated lifespan and load tolerances of components are always underestimated with safety factors so PM schedules are inevitably an overcautious approach. Nonetheless from a commercial point of view having a line stop when you are expecting it costs a lot less than having a line stop when you aren’t, so PM makes good businesses sense.

And then Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics was born. CMD involves having sensors on machinery that give you an indication they are about to fail. For instance you might have a vibration sensor on a bearing that detects the increase in vibration which indicates it’s worn and about to fail. Marry that with a neural logic controller that learns how to predict failure rates based on the severity of the vibration and you have a system that can dynamically extend the schedule for maintenance shutdowns if the machine is running fine.

The dashboard indicators on cars that tell you when to service the vehicle work on similar principles, but they are mainly dictated by time elapsed and miles covered, unless something starts to go badly wrong in the meantime.

I don’t have a PM schedule for the bus other than regular servicing, oil and water checks, and I certainly don’t have a CMD controller in my 1989 truck. So my approach is similar to the Indian truck drivers that listen out for problems and carry enough tools to fix whatever situation might arise. I’ve seen drivers rebuilding engine blocks by the side of the road. I couldn’t do anything that extreme, but I don’t quite have the drive-it-to-destruction attitude that the truck tires here suggest, so hopefully I won’t need to.

Effectively I am the CMD neural logic controller. My ears and arse are the sensors that listen out for new noises and vibration, my right foot detects changes in performance and my hands feel for alterations in the handling. Any new behaviour is worrying, but unlike a well designed CMD system I’m not necessarily able to immediately identify what’s causing the symptom. In Turkey I first noticed a squeak from the alternator bearing. I wanted to change it there and then, but the mechanic I showed it to said it would last for 5000km. That was 8000km ago and it’s not getting any worse. That’s my neural feedback loop, learning how the extremity of the symptom relates to the remaining lifespan.

My journey isn’t paced against a tight schedule. I don’t have to be somewhere at a given time, so I can afford to have unexpected breakdowns which delay me. In fact as long as they don’t happen too regularly I love them when they do happen as it flings me into a new adventure with new people. Heidegger, a German philosopher said our minds function in an auto-pilot sub-consciousness most of the time until things don’t work as we expect and then we have to snap out of our slumber and actually think. Opening your front door is an automatic action that doesn’t require thought, but imagine the key won’t turn. You have to mentally change your plan, from entering your house, to figuring out how you are going to open the door. He called that moment “breakdown”.

Mechanical breakdowns cause me to snap out of my slumber and look again at where I am and what my plan is. I think Heidegger said that these moments of breakdown are the only times when we are really alive. If he didn’t say it, then I do. CMD, and the other engineered solutions that keep things running to the expected standards, and without surprise interruptions, also keep us in a relaxed mental state where we don’t have to think. Kind of like a coma. Maybe knowing you are only one pot hole away from a deadly 40tonne blowout conversely keeps you alive.

Gomti Biofuel

I’ve already blogged about Jatropha and that India is supposedly the world’s Jatropha garden. I really believe in the Jatropha concept, so it was with a heavy heart that I have given up looking for Jatropha oil after contacting the only people in the country who are producing oil. They told me their product is at such a premium it costs $1500/tonne.

Nothing in India is a fixed price so I dare say I should have haggled a bit, but even so, that works out at about $1.70/litre which is nuts when you think Diesel is $0.60. How is that ever going to make an economic biodiesel? They tell me it’s only used for research at the moment; bought up by producers at a premium price to experiment with.

Sounds like crap to me. The expertise for turning Jatropha oil into biodiesel has been known for a long time now. The challenge is how to grow it efficiently. Varieties/strains/crop rotation/land resting e.t.c. so that plantations can produce good yields with low levels of irrigation on marginal land.

Turns out that over the last 4-5 years since people started talking about Jatropha there’s been millions of dollars used to buy up land rights for growing the crops, but no one has done the unglamorous (and un-venture-capitalist-funded) work of actually developing varieties and production practices. The money-go-round fell apart just over a year ago when D1 Oils, one of the biggest players in securing Jatropha land rights went bust. Despite having the paper capacity to produce massive amounts of oil they only seem to have produced a couple of thousand litres that have sat in a warehouse in Tyneside since 2007. I was offered it for this trip at one point.

D1 are now back and smaller and focussing on researching the agricultural techniques needed to get good production from Jatropha. It’s a plant that takes 5 years to start bearing fruit so it’s a long research process.

In the meantime I have struck really lucky in my quest for waste power. At the Indian border a very enthusiastic entrepreneur called Rocky and his family excitedly ask for a tour around the bus. He tells me there is a man in his town of Haldwani who makes biodiesel and I should come and visit.

I do, and Sanjeev of Gomti Biotech explains the amazing process he’s developed to extract oil from the waste products produced by a vegetable oil manufacturer. The waste looks like oily mud and Sanjeev uses his own patented system of solvent extraction to get 20% of it back as oil which makes the then uses to make great biodiesel. It’s a similar process to extracting oil from sewer grease and trap grease.

The fuel is a blend of Soya waste and Mustard waste so it should stay nice and runny even in the cold Haldwani winters. It’s quite dark and it smells pretty odd. Gomti sell their fuel at 3 local filling stations, and people buy it because it’s cheaper, and has a higher octane rating than normal diesel. There’s no pretence at being green here, but actually this process seems really green to me, and could help the fundamental problem faced by Indian Biodiesel producers that there isn’t any waste oil feedstock and many suppliers are making bio from imported palm oil.

Gomti’s fuel has cleared out my fuel starvation problem, which leads me to think it was probably caused by sludge in the bottom of the tank of the Iranian soya oil. I only had a couple of hundred litres left by the time I topped up with 400 litres from Gomti, and their fuel has probably diluted the sludgy remains and the bus is flying along at 80km/h again.

Amritsar

Amritsar is my introduction to India, but 3 weeks on I am still struggling to form an opinion on this country. I love it, but I’m not sure why because there’s an awful lot not to like.

The religious town is heaving with Sikh pilgrims but despite the mass of humanity, it’s clean and calm. I camp right by the temple, there’s a tradition of welcoming visitors which means there is a free hostel with a broken washing machine, and food is laid on 24 hours a day for thousands of worshipers. It’s cooked by volunteers who do everything from peeling the onions, chopping the peppers to stirring the massive cauldrons.

Dinner is served from slop buckets by guys racing down the line of pressed trays laid out on the floor in front of the hungry followers. It’s an amazing set up, which works phenomenally well. The washing up volunteers work around the clock and the unceasing clanging of plates is only drowned out by the piped devotional music. I’m parked right next to them and am woken every night at the 4am volume crank that keeps the washers motivated.

I realise after a very short time listening to Tajinder, a devout follower who is harbouring some Sikh supremacist tendencies, that it’s not religion I have an objection to. My problem is with people who have no doubt, and refuse to accept there can be doubt. Not just in religion, but in any belief. Extremists. Tajinder is a lovely extremist and a pleasure to spend time with.

I’ve also found that India is full of people and systems which only serve to make life a little harder than it needs to be. Civil servants’ role is to interject a measure of complication. The principle extends to anyone with a uniform, anyone with any power, and anyone that feels they have a right to tell me that I can’t park here. The bus is 7 metres long, so it’s not like I have a lot of choices.

The bus was running badly to Delhi, no acceleration, and it felt like fuel starvation. I stripped various parts of fuel system without finding the source of the problem. It would be another week before I discover what was going wrong with the bus, and in the meantime I was destined to see foggy India at 60km/h.

Borderland

After we complete the border formalities to exit Iran we can’t find the way out. I joke to Maartin that this is just a border theme park, Borderland where the rides are in offices with ledgers and stamps. Of course the queue for the most popular rides are the longest. Perversely if there was a Borderland, I think I would go. A week later, as I am leaving Pakistan I discover Borderland really exists.

After the visual austerity of Iran, Pakistan is a treat; barren mountains melt into the lush Punjab plains. Women and men wear colours. After 12 weeks in Muslim countries, I’m keen for some alternative thinking. I’m very familiar with the variety of Islams in North Africa and during even long trips there I’ve never found it oppressive or frustrating (apart from those endless prayer tapes played to wow and flutter destruction). But after the false totalitarianism of Iran my Muslim love tank is close to empty, so psychologically Pakistan has just been a hurdle to get through before I can unwind.

That feeling is cemented in Shikapur by Javed, the son of a wealthy clan leader. He approaches me while I am trying to photograph a cricket match, and I am won over by his well spoken accent, and his government number plate. He invites me back to meet his father, a bed ridden fat man who summons servants by clicking on his battery powered doorbell. By the time we part company at the end of the evening I’ve had enough of Javed, Pakistan and Islam. Apart from waving me over a speed bumps which for the second time in Pakistan destroy the exhaust system, and telling me the bus is safely parked in his street where the stereo’s USB stick is deftly swiped through a sliver of open roof hatch within 10 minute, it’s his pious self-righteous crap about how land owners should govern, and how it’s right to have indentured servants that make him so odious. The naive rich kid with no concept of how lucky his privileged birth was, has a government job spending UN funds to encourage farmers to send their kids to school. I imagine he got the job because of his family connection. In Pakistan you are either a farmer or a policeman, but if you are well connected, the government pay you to pretend to do a job. That’s what the Baloch separatists are fighting against. Not the nepotism itself, but nepotism that excludes them.

It’s Javed’s medieval Koranic interpretation that women are impure because they bleed, right before asking me for a list of porn website recommendations that makes me want to swing at him. Luckily I am too stoned on the Whiskey we’ve been drinking to try fighting. Instead I give him a few gay sites to spoil his evening me-time.

From the border I’ve been escorted through Balochistan, which feels lawless and dangerous, and the protection offered by the geriatric police officers I am entrusted to, doesn’t reassure. I have to help one of them up and down the steps of the bus each time we stop. He may well predate the Raj.

On the road I pass a convoy of local 44,000 litre tankers coming the other way, taking NATO diesel to Afghanistan. Two miles further on, I see the first of two burnt out tanker carcasses. My granddad body guard explains that Taliban fighters come from Afghanistan and shoot out the wheels making them crash and explode. In both trucks the drivers and drivers’ mates died in the in inferno. One of the drivers I speak to tells me they don’t get any danger money, they just have lots of work. Shell’s tankers delivering to Pakistani towns are brightly liveried, so they won’t be mistaken for the NATO supply trucks. Conversely the foreign fighters also stand out in the rural communities, so one attack team had already been caught. If diesel be the fuel of life, let’s burn it.

The route to Sukkur is a 400km detour because the direct road is dangerous. By this I assume they mean more dangerous than Constable Methuselah can deal with. Once out of Balochistan and into the Punjab it’s clear that neither Baloch separatists nor Taliban jihadists cause much concern. None the less the Punjab police insist on giving me a blue light escort for 1000 miles across the whole country to Lahore. While insisting there is no danger, they explain they are there for my protection. Near Multan, the site of a recent surprise bombing, the cops think the escort is as much of a joke as I do. They point to bearded friends in the town giggling “Taliban, Taliban!”, and everyone fall about laughing.

The biggest danger is crashing into their erratic braking Toyota pickups. They are like my own personalised traffic jam. It’s hard to claim eco credentials when you are preceded at all times by a police 4x4.

The escort is not optional, but following them means I am exempt from motorway tolls and I can camp at their police stations, getting an insight into Pakistani law enforcement inaction. [No, that’s not a typo]. But mainly I hide in the bus and recover from a bout of food poisoning that is about as bad as they come. I know in London people pay good money to have a hose stuck up their arse till the water comes gushing out. For less than a euro in Sukkur you can recreate the same effect with a lovely meat stew. I eat only fruit, bananas mainly, while I am recovering and squirt pooh juice into the compost toilet. When the wind backs against the toilet vent, the bus smells of like I have a newborn baby onboard, presumably is the smell of fast digested bananas.

The roads have been the worse yet, but I am surprised how well everything has stood up. The bus is a combination of Mercedes manufactured base vehicle, Reeves Burges fast dissolving metal coachwork (largely replaced before leaving), and finally my Biotruck transformation of the living space and the veg oil conversion. The vibrations haven’t affected any of the Merc stuff. The Reeve Burges stuff looks to be holding up well too, although it would be hard to see the cracks until the sides of the bus suddenly fall off completely. The big letdown has been my stuff. Hose clips not done up tightly enough, or too tightly, a bowl pump that sucks itself shut at altitude, and a mystery lack of power (injector hose leaking or blocked fuel filter?). The old fridge has also found yet another way in which not to work, the fourth since I left the UK.

I’m still in love with the road freight here. For miles I travel along with Benazir Bhutto smiling back at me from the mural of the truck in front. I’m captivated by her faded face and her motherly bosom, and in no rush to overtake. I’m surprised at how slow the trucks are. I haven’t seen a lorry going over 50kmh probably due to the weight of the rainforest used to build the wooden backs. Some even have wooden doors that extend around the old Bedford cabs and look like the rear end of a 15th century Spanish galleon. Often they drive in the fast lane because the left lane is so potholed, so if you want to get by you have to undertake on the broken tarmac.

I forget my hazard lights on for a few miles and no other motorist points out my mistake, then as dusk settles I put on my headlights and every one flashes their lights at me to warn me my lights are on.

In my mind the road leads inexorably to India and finally I’m camped at the border, having missed the early closing time. Another frustrating night to spend in Pakistan. But thankfully I’ve discovered Borderland. There is a big entrance gate, a motel, you can take pictures and the daily show starts at 4pm in the auditorium every day. It could be Vegas or Disneyworld. People travel 30km just to visit, not cross. The fun looks funnier on the Indian side, a much bigger crowd and less Allah. The ceremonial guards puff their chest and high kick at each other, chant for as long as their breath lasts, and blast patriotic songs out of massive sound systems to their respective crowds. The Indians do it all a little better. On the Pakistani side we get a couple of podgy blokes twirling flags, but from the volume of their cheers it sounds like the Indians are getting much more.

On the Iran Turkey border they’d each erected massive posters of their political leaders facing each other on opposite hills. This is the sort of tribal jingoism I’ve never been able to take seriously the reason I couldn’t give a monkey’s about football teams. But I’m curious how this ceremony first started after Pakistan and India’s violent separation in 1947 and how it persists in light of an ongoing nuclear arms race and the recent Mumbai attacks. The ceremony seems like a mutual provocation rather than a way to vent tension. The performers take it very seriously, as do their crowds. The only one giggling at the whole contest is me, despite sitting next to the customs officer who has to stamp my carnet tomorrow. It’s so funny that national pride can rest on who can kick the highest or chant longest. If only COP15 could have been worked out this way.

Afterwards I retrace my steps through Pakistan in miniature and stop a couple as they are about to step across into what would be Afghanistan. “Taliban, Taliban!”. They don’t take my advice and beeline for their car which would be parked somewhere in Uzbekistan. I don’t know what happened to them after that, but I think they made it.

Salam Hoshkele

The reason I’ve always loved overland journeys is that I can see how the cultures evolve between my home and the final destination. At the end of a big trip I find myself in a totally alien environment but I understand the connection between it and my own. Ideas, food, social mores, courting rituals, physiognomy, clothing...

In the south of Iran people already look a little more Pakistanis, and I’ve been eating somosas and curry. I can begin to see how the transition will look.

It’s also a fact of overlanding journeys that people will always tell you that the next place is very dangerous. Usually it isn’t and when you get to it people tell you that where you’ve just come from is very dangerous. The key to a safe trip is knowing when to ignore uninformed warnings and when to heed experienced voices. In practice you can only really do this with hindsight. I met some bikers who came through Pakistan on their way to Europe who told me a little about the route and reassured me that it didn’t feel unsafe.

Apparently there are police checkpoints every 30-40km, you are given an escort, and when it gets dark you stop at the nearest checkpoint. The journey to Quetta is 600km and can be done in a day (on a motorbike maybe, but not in my bus). I’ve also met a Dutch couple travelling in a campervan with their young baby that I’d like to convoy with and hopefully our timetable will coincide

Yazd is a desert town with an adobe medina. It’s even more religious than Esfehan, in that religious laws are more strictly enforced. It’s cute but not stunning, with a few lovely desert paragliding sites. I bounce the bus off road to one of the take off areas, remote with an endless view of the desert. It’s a low ridge that supports soaring. I fly a little, practice kitting in smooth 20km/h winds and as the wind veers round to the side, the 15 or so other pilots pack their wings, crank up the car stereos and invite me to dance to Iranian rap, play on their quad bikes, drink homemade whiskey and smoke Afghan hash as the sun sets.

I camp the night at the spot judging the danger warnings to be a product of ignorance. The next morning 40 police officers arrive as I am having breakfast. They have come to practice paragliding too but without the booze, weed or music. They give me some water and more wood for my fire and also tell me it’s dangerous here. They make it clear they don’t want me to stay a second night.

In town I meet a couple or Tehrani lawyers here for a weekend city break. They are quite surprised at how backwards Yazd is compared to Tehran, in terms of architecture and the way religious laws are enforced.

Perhaps the strictness is the reason I’m getting less lingering looks from women. The Eshveh subtle but unmistakable extended eye contact and discrete Mona Lisa smiles I was being shot all the time in the north have dried up. Instead I am getting a different type of attention. As we pass the city prison a “tour guide” showing me the way to the paragliding sites tells me he’s been in there once. “For pumping” He hammers his chest with his fist.

“I thought it was only the women who got in trouble for pumping.”

“Not with woman, with man. I not gay, but maybe ACDC. Iran gay different from Europe gay. In Iran many men from 16 to marriage are temporary gay. If can’t get woman, then man is OK.”

Dinner Jacket has decreed there are no gays in Iran. Presumably he’s been around and asked everyone? So I’m more surprised by this guys openness than by his admission. It’s part of a fumbled come-on which thankfully goes no further. Iranian men are very tactile with each other and I felt very comfortable with the demonstrative warmth, but after this encounter in which the guide also told me about initiation rapes, sadly the cliché of the frustrated Arab’s conquest over the naive European man is feeding my homophobic paranoia, and I’m feeling less at ease with the everyday physical contact.

A pilot I’m flying with gets a call that his mother has been arrested. She’s a prominent lawyer campaigning for women’s rights, such as the outlawing of Honour Killings, so a father who kills his unmarried daughter because she is gets pregnant would face some criminal punishment. Or the banning of lashes for unmarried women caught having sex. They use electrical cable and horse whips.

The arrest happened on the first day of a long weekend so the family have to wait till the court opens in 3 days to find out why she’s been arrested and where she’s being held. The pilot expects she will be held for a month or so and that the intention is purely to intimidate her because of her work.

In Tehran the planned student demo has turned violent and there is no mention of there even being a demonstration in the Iranian news and I learn about it by text message from Europe. I fail to get to a satellite dish to follow events on BBC Persia so that’s all I know.

I wish I’d gone back to the capital to take some pictures, but the reaction of genuine fear from my hosts in Tehran when I mooted the idea was far more effective than telling me it would be dangerous. I have no photos of one of the most significant moments in global current affairs, but equally I am not being horse whipped in an Iranian prison.

The cold starts are getting harder even when the weather is not that cold, and I’ve finally decided to have the injectors serviced. They could have done with it before I left the UK and sure enough all 4 are working like water pistols spraying a stream of fuel rather than like atomisers injecting a combustible cloud. If the fuel doesn’t come out as a spray it doesn’t ignite properly. This makes the engine hard to start when cold and it churns out un-burnt hydrocarbons in the form of plumes of white smoke. New injector needles which are on their way from Tehran should also make the engine more powerful and more fuel efficient, and at last the journey will stop being dictated by the need for warmth to start the engine. Perhaps I can extend my visa again and stay another month in Iran. With a wood burning stove in the bus I could even head up into the mountains towards Persepolis and Shiraz before backtracking towards Pakistan.

Van Man

If you run a body shop in Van, you’ve got a job for life. There’s no end of vehicles with smashed up fronts or rears driving around and parked up. I saw one this morning that had just had an accident and a few feet away the cow that had destroyed the front of his car was already being butchered by an irate villager.

I spot a Mercedes 309 bus parked by the side of the road in town. Its the first midsized Merc van I’ve seen since Greece, and from 30 feet I clock it’s 16inch rims. I’m still looking for a rim and have travelled all this way with a spare tyre but no rim.

I chat with the owner, the bus looks more like a 508, and I think it was made in Turkey. The instrument panel is regal. He’s rightly proud of his bus which has outlived the generation of Mercs that it started its life with in the mid 80s, all of whom have now been replaced by ford transits.

It’s got dual control pedals and a stool he sits on when teaching bus drivers. The rest of the time it’s a school bus. In the UK buses usually end up as school buses when they are old and knackered, so delinquent kids don’t get to damage anything nice and new. Here in Turkey kids are transported to school in the pride of the nations fleet of Dolmus vans.

He points me in the direction of a garage on an industrial estate where they had an old Merc which they were scrapping and with it a load of old rims they are using as anvils. I find the place but it’s too late, they’ve already ditched all the parts. No one needed them here.

The world over there is a hierarchy in workshops. There is the owner, who negotiates the prices but doesn’t get his hands dirty, then there is the guy that does the work, and at his beck and call he has the workshop junior. When you’re under a truck precariously holding a part in position it’s important to have an apprentice you can shout to to pass you the tool you need.

Haci (Hagi), the owner, has 2 wives, 15 kids, a set of immaculate ford overall, and seems to own a whole street of workshops. Our conversation is like a mime artist competition. His action for wives leads me to think they both have very pert breasts. He insists I eat in the canteen with all the mechanics, welders, and spray painters around a long table. Picture Pimp My Ride Turkey style, “Yo we gonna hook Andy up with a 1984 classic Merc rim for his spare wheel, then we gonna pimp his fuel filter with some cheap after market tat...”

Juniors are usually covered from head to toe in black oil, as they are the ones sent in to do the dirtiest jobs and haven’t yet developed the skills required to keep clean while working. Their little hands, which could just as usefully be holding a pen at school, are very handy for reaching into an engine bay to recover a dropped socket, and as parts are peeled off the vehicle in question they are the ones sent off to the stores to get replacement bit, and usually shouted at when they return with something similar but not quite right.

The junior in this garage, Umit, talks a lot to me, in between making tea and passing tools to his elder brother under the destroyed front end of a Transit, un worried by the fact I can’t really understand what he’s saying. But at one point he waves his fingers like a piano player and in the barrage of words I pick out “address” and “faysbuk”.

In Iran, now only 100km away, they are brimming with Merc parts, Haci tells me. I put off the oil change, rim hunt and replacing the alternator bearings until then.

Hot and Cold

“Gazi Antep has the best mechanics in Turkey. People drive from Van to see a mechanic here.” I’m told. Though presumably if your car can make the 700km drive from Van, then it’s not that desperate for a good mechanic.

On the edge of town I’m shown an industrial estate full of lorry mechanics. The bus looks dwarfed among the 44 tonners, reversing and gliding through narrow gaps with effortless grace.
Tradesmen huddle together outside Europe, which makes them easy to find. If you want a guy to repair your fridge go to the end of town with all the fridge-repairers. If you need a tube connector head to the plumbing neighbourhood.

My temperature gauge hasn’t worked since before I got the bus. I know it’s a problem with the backboard of the dashboard dial. I take it to the first mechanic and try to explain. He tests the sensor in the engine and then points to the dashboard dial; “Problem”. He sends me to a garage a few metres away where they specialise in repairing tachographs and dashboard instruments. Again I try to explain but they check the engine sensor and point to the dashboard dial; “Problem”.

The bus has drawn quite a crowd and the danger with excitable mechanics is that they break something else while fixing your problem. One quiet mechanic does a much better job than 4 fighting over who can undo the tough nut. Any mechanical work needs zen-like calm, and clarity of thought above screwdrivers and wrenches.

It takes 10 minutes to isolate the problem is a blown resistor. It takes an hour to find a replacement resistor. Three of us go through boxes of circuit boards testing resistors and debating what the resistance should be. It clearly says 220Ω on the one that is broken but this seems to pass everyone by except me, and I can’t make myself understood, no matter how hard I point at the faded lettering.

Eventually we find one, unsolder it from the instrument it used to be on, fit it and it all works perfectly, except the needle has been in the off position so long it sticks there. So my start up procedure is now: Ignition, pump accelerator, press start button (repeat until engine starts), sharp tap on the temperature gauge and we’re off.

On the drive back into town the bus warms to 80C before the thermostat opens bang on cue, and it’s unflinching in its German steadfastness at the optimum temperature. Seeing a machine working as designed has a calming effect on me, like having my earlobes massaged.

It even lights up in the dark now, I can’t wait to know the oil pressure at night, presumably the same as it is by day, but like the fridge door light you can never be sure. It’s going to be so cool, not having an anxiety attack at the top of each hill, thinking the engine is about to melt.

In fact melting is the last problem I’m going to face over the next week. I’ve been looking at the temperature map on the BBC website and between here and Tehran it’s going to drop down to 0C. The problem far from melting, is waxing, (or freezing). The oil may well set solid in the tank, then like a ship run aground on a spring tide I will have to wait for the summer before I can go anywhere.

I’m waiting an extra couple of days in Gazi Antep because one of my sponsors here should have a fresh batch of biodiesel ready tomorrow evening, and I want to fill the tank with bio, which should resist waxing. As a last resort I may mix in 5% of petrol. Fossil fuels! I know, but I can’t run the risk of having 1000 litres of oil turn to lard. I need a full tank, because I think in Iran it will be hard to find oil, and Pakistan will be a paranoid sprint with no time for pleasantries. Heating 1 tonne of grease is impractical because it will be coldest at night when the engine isn’t running. I've been meditating on the latent energy of oil waxing, and if there is some law of physics I can bend to my advantage. This is by far the most challenging part of the journey so far for the bus, and as for me, I hate the cold.

The promise of “Tehran 17°C, Sunny” waits over the mountains and like a delusional Fitzcarraldo I venture forth towards my dream.

Mountain High

I don’t think the green issue has ever been big here in Italy in the past. They had a lot of discussions about cleaning up the Po River and the lagoon around Venice, both of which have been quite successful but the Environment (capital E) has never been a big priority in the past. I’m curious to see if that’s changed since the last time I was in Italy, giving a talk at the Euro-chocolate conference.

The drive down from the Mont Blanc tunnel towards Milan goes past several hydroelectric schemes which all look like they were built in the 70s and are probably a symptom of the cost of sending electricity up the valley towards the upper villages.

To take advantage of natural sources of energy requires a bridge or connection between different naturally occurring forces, and mountains are a great bridge with massive differences in gravitational potential energy, temperatures and wind speeds at the top compared with the bottom.

I’ve just spent the week on a paragliding course around Annecy on a rather optimistically entitled “stage de perfection”. My launches and landings are still far from perfection, but I am now living and breathing a heightened sense of awareness of what the air is doing around the mountains, and the clues that the clouds give.

I’d never thermalled before. Thermalling is the comparable to a sailing boat being able to sail into the wind. Far from being a solid mass, on a sunny day the air around us moves in clumps a little like a lava lamp, with the same arbitrary sudden release of upwards moving clumps. As the sun shines of darker ground it creates heat which warms the air above it until it suddenly releases a thermal column, which you can’t see except for clues like the cloud formations above it, birds circling in it, or by reading the ground for possible thermal sources.

On my second day I spent an hour flying my paraglider and circling in thermals where I could feel the lift (my senses are still fledgling), and I only stopped because the sun was starting to get low. Using words like elation and liberating only begins to describe the feelings that flying so freely gives over an area so intricately beautiful as Lake Annecy. Then compound that with the fact that the flight is entirely powered by natural forces harnessed by my paraglider wing, the bridge between gravity and the wind. When I look up at my wing in flight it’s so perfectly shaped, with a fan of support lines neatly focussing in on me, that hanging from it feels like the most natural gentle place to be in the world.

My landing in Chamonix on Thursday in the rain and gusting 25kmh winds after an hour long flight over a glacier was far from natural or gentle but a sobering lesson that am still a learner pilot.

Yesterday I got to Milan and am staying with my dad, my first passenger. On Tuesday we are invited to my uncles place. He’s invited friends from his campervan club so I need to fix a few things before then so I can show the bus off and not be perpetually appologising for things that don't work. The leaking solar collector seems to be fixed (after yet more silicone applied in Zurich) and the composting toilet liquid waste pipe work seems not to leak. Tomorrow morning the lovely seafood spaghetti I just ate may well be its christening.