Todd plays on a suspension bridge that hangs over an icy river. He and Matt and Nancy jumped in harmony to get this thing to bounce and sway dramatically.

Journal by Todd Borgie, photo by Nancy Olson

The morning started out as a modest driving day from Mandi to Keylong, a meager 219 km, but you had to earn these kilometers…more on that later. I was still on a buzz from meeting the Dalai Lama, so all was good! A 9:00 a.m. rollout was planned, and we were going to have a nice driving day into the Northern Mountains of India, the foothills of the Himalayas.

I rolled out of bed first, as I had some maintenance to perform on the vehicles, Matt and Nancy were real troopers to volunteer to help out. I thought an hour and a half would be plenty of time to complete the required tasks and return to my room and have a shower before departing, but I was wrong.

The maintenance started out with tightening of lug nuts, checking air pressure in the tires, and filling them as needed (the work adds up with four vehicles). The final task was to extract a quart of oil from each vehicle and replace it with fresh oil. One of the sponsorship agreements with Mobil 1 was to not change the oil during the entire 50,000 kilometer expedition. Every 15,000 kilometers, we extract a sample of oil and then mail the sample back home for analysis. Despite some of our best efforts, the oil has been accidentally changed in two out of the four vehicles. When we have taken the vehicles in for maintenance, the nice mechanics often assume we want to the oil changed in addition to whatever else we asked them to do. This happened when we took one vehicle into a dealership for an alignment check, and then another time when we took the vehicle in for an engine service light. Now we have stickers everywhere saying do not change the oil, and one of us usually acts as a sentry in order to protect and maintain our agreement.

Anyway, with two of the vehicles especially, we have watched the oil get blacker and blacker. It was getting to such a stage that Mobil One suggested that we remove a quart of old oil and replace it with fresh stuff, they went on to suggest that we overfill the vehicle, for a reason I am not so sure about. The dusty conditions that we often find ourselves in have contributed to dust in the engines and the engine oil.

Generally, when we take oil samples, we have a little pump that Mobil One provided, plenty of tubing to run down into the oil pan from where the dipstick sits, and little 100ml sample containers that screw directly into the pump. However, the best we could do for containers for oil samples were one-liter water bottles, and these did not have the same size mouth or threads for the pump, therefore we had to fill nine 100 ml sample bottles and pour them into the one liter-bottles (one quart is about 950ml, and one litter is 1000 ml). The process was tedious enough, but then the rain came; uffda! However, after that painful experience, I know how to do it much quicker now!

We extracted the quarts out of the vehicles with the oldest oil first. Unbelievable! This oil is the worst I have ever seen! The oil samples came out like soft-serve chocolate ice cream. Ugh. There were clumps, but I didn’t see any metallic shavings, so that was good news.

With our sluggish way of taking samples, the rain, and that fact that we could do only one vehicle at a time, rollout moved to 11:00 AM. I thank, Nancy, Matt, Neil and Adam, for their help with this process, despite the fact we only got two vehicles done.

I am glad that we were able to put fresh oil in, but leaving the oil in as it is makes me nervous. I hope Mobile One will continue to work it’s synthetic wonders and keep our engines running smooth until we arrive home.

Anyway, we rollout at a rainy 11:00 a.m., but not as rainy as when we were working on the vehicles, I might add. The drive was beautiful! I have always heard that the Kashmir area was amazing, and now we were headed to it.

Once we got on the road, the scenery drastically changed from our Delhi days. The area was not as densely populated; the road paralleled a clean rushing river, and the pedestrian suspension bridges that spanned the rivers were fun to play and bounce on. However, the roads were windy, and the drop offs were abrupt, offering new challenges to driving in India.

As we started to ascend the 13,000 ft pass, the conifer forests and the rocky rugged mountains made me feel almost as if I was in the Pacific Northwest, another factor that increased my homesickness after more than 10 months on the road. As I mentioned earlier, the drive was only 219 kilometers (135 miles), but this took us about 10 hours. As the crow flies, the distance was much shorter than 135 miles due the many switchbacks that gradually lifted us from 5,000 ft to over 13,000 ft.

One of the greatest things about the last couple of days was the fact that we were out of the hustle and bustle. Despite the fact that there were always people asking you for money, the crowds were not as intense as they were in Delhi, and the headache of doing business was much reduced, although the variety of food and services was diminished as well.

It was almost unnoticeable how the auto rickshaws disappeared as we headed into the hills. Although these Vespa-turned-passenger-carriers were a great way to get around in cities, when you are driving with them they seem like traffic mosquitoes. Their agility on the road enables them to buzz around you with great ease. However, when there are so many of them buzzing here and there, you don’t always know where they will end up. They will pass you on the left or right or whatever way they can, another complication on the roads in India. All this to say we have left the headaches of the city behind and now were are in the mountains, with crystal clear streams and snowcapped peaks and John Denver on the radio--a very nice change!

Help support our cause: The LONGITUDE Expedition is the longest journey ever attempted with a focus on Parkinson's Disease. The Drive Around the World team aims to raise money for Parkinson’s Disease research by driving four Certified, Pre-Owned Land Rover Discoverys around the globe following lines of longitude. Readers are encouraged to pledge small amounts of money per expedition-kilometer via a pledge form that can be found on our Parkinson’s page by clicking HERE. One hundred percent of donations received go directly to Parkinson's research, and all who donate $10 or more will be entered into a raffle to win an expedition-equipped Land Rover Discovery.