When I decided to do this road trip I was sure I would do it in the Mongol Rally spirit, meaning I would drive a crappy car with maximum a 1L engine. As so happens I already had the perfect car for the trip standing on my driveway. A 1987 Bedford Rascal with a pop top and a 1L, 4 cylinder engine with 44hp.

But when this trip was getting closer and I did some research I soon discovered that you’ll lose half of the horsepower when you drive in high altitudes, like the Himalayas in northern India.

Some where here it might be worth mentioning why I’m driving this rout. When me and my mate Per did the Mongol Rally back in 2015 I thought that we were going to drive on the 2nd highest driveabel road in the world, the pamir highway at 4664m above sea level. But when I got home I did som more research on this (stupid me) and discovered that it is about 10 different roads that are fighting for the no 1 spot, so at best we drove the 11th highest road, and how cool is that? Not at all cool if you ask me. So I decided that the Kardungh La pass in Kashmir in India is the highest driveabel pass in the world at 5600m. As a comparison Europe’s highest mountain Mt blanc is 4800m at the top. This also fitted my wishes about going back to Iran and spend some more time there and seeing more of India.

Ok so back to the cars now.

So if I start with a car that had 44hp in 1987 (some of them had probably run away by now) and then lose half of them it wouldn’t be enough horses left to pull the car up the mountain. So I had to rethink this hole car strategi, it took about 2 seconds before I decided to take one of my other cars, a 1989 Ford Bronco with a 7.3L V8 diesel.

I baught it 2 years ago as a project car but hadn’t gotten around to fix it yet. So I ordered a bunch of parts from USA to at least get it started and then take it from there. A kind friend of mine said that if I drove that car outside the city limits before the 1st of May (my original departure date) by its own power he would streak through the city center. Unfortunately for me he didn’t have to do it. After countless hours of work just to get it started I finally gave up and sold it the 26th of April. So there I was just 4 days from my plande departure and I was back on square one with no car to do this road trip in. I must have looked at every car for sale in Sweden over a 4 day period. I didn’t even know what kind of car I was looking for, the only thing I knew was that it hade to be cheap to buy since it wasn’t in my budget to buy a car for this trip.

I finally found a car that seemed good for this trip. Although it was cheap to buy it was yet again a project car (I should know better by now), I baught a 2009 Ford transit panel van with among other things a broken radiator.

I plan to do a quick campervan conversion and leave in 2 weeks. Boy was I mistaken about what an effort it takes to build a nice camper.

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