A Quite 2 Day Layover was Planned

I must start this blog with a quick explanation. From here on in you will find some of the spelling incorrect and not all the coma’s and full stops will be were they belong. I have always sent my posts back to Julie my great wife for a quick grammar fix. Today she has left Australia to go to Tonga to swim with the Whales for a couple of weeks and no internet.

 

Yesterday morning the first day of our 2 day layover we all visited a silk co-operative place to see the old fashion way of making silk including getting the silk off the cocoon’s. They also made hand wove garment for sale. The ride out in the taxi was an experience in its own right as our taxi dropped us at the wrong place to start with but luckily he waited till he was sure of the drop off. All was good in the end.

 

The second stop was at the hand knotted wool carpet Co-operative. The biggest carpet making place that I’ve seen.  The carpets were up to 5 metres wide and five people working on the carpet and about 20 carpets under construction.

 

The afternoon was spent looking at shops and banking duties before we departed for a drive too the north into the vast expanse of sand hills forming the Taklimakan Desert. The return too town was just before the peak hour traffic rush that we experienced entering town the previous afternoon.

 

That night most of went too the street food market we had discovered on the way home from a restaurant dinner the previous night. The food choices were many and varied including quite a few dishes that no one wanted to try. Some of us found such great food that we returned for more tonight only to find that not all of last nights stalls had come back tonight. Not to worry we didn’t come home hungry.

 

Todays plan was that Maurie and I where going to meet at Penny at 7.30am and fix the flat tyre from the other day and give Penny a complete check over. As we checked the gearbox I discovered that 2 gears on the countershaft and become lose and started too move on the keyway. After discussion it was decide that it was a lot easier too take the gearbox out and fix it in a big town then the side of the road in the desert. The removal of the box with Mitchell’s help only took just over a hour. It was then off around town with Mitchel, Maurie, Alim and me with my IPad with picture’s of a lathe and a mill too search out a workshop to help get it sorted.  We eventually found a workshop and we have been able to cobble things together in a manner that Maurie and I believe will most likely get us to Helsinki.

 

Maurie’s background is that he owns a large workshop in Mackey Queensland looking after very large mining gear and has a wealth of knowledge and experience in repairs that I have found an invaluable help on this trip.

 

I must also thank the rest of the crew that had to survive the day with out the services of Alim. Also for the cold drinks and nice De-caff coffee in the afternoon as we reassembled the car in the hot afternoon sun.

 

As a back up I phoned my office and thanks to Ryan, by the time we had the gearbox back in the car at 7.00pm, my spare gear box from the shed was packed and collected by DHL and on its way to meet us in Uzbekistan in 9 days time.

 

I’ll have photos of the workshop on a later blog.