Maya Classic Rally


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I’m at 38,000 feet en route to Panama City for the start of our drive to New Orleans in an 87 year old car. I haven’t written here since we lost our gears and brakes at the very top of a snow covered  mountain in Japan.  Fear not, that very low point has not put me off rallying. There have been plenty of adventures since then, I’ve just been too idle to write about them,   

I drove a Willy’s Jeep around the far North of Vietnam with a girl friend and loved it so much it’s due to be reprised next year.  The sexy Bristol had a jaunt with some of its friends in Europe from Germany to Northern Spain and I’ve visited Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and enjoyed a fun filled, chaotic and very noisy holiday in the Dordogne with two daughters and six under 11’s. 

I’m very excited about this trip - who wouldn’t be?  It’s such a fab route. I’ve been to bits of it before as we had some family holidays when the children were small to Costa Rica, Guatemala and Belize, all utterly fabulous.  I’ve also visited the Yucatan, with Adrian, which is the only bit of Central America he has seen. Plus, of course, we drove through Texas to New Orleans in the Defender a couple of years ago. I’m more than happy to visit all these places again though and there’s plenty I won’t have seen. 

This same car delivered us from China back to the UK safely in 2010, even though there was a bit of nonsense with the gear box in Central Asia,  the bad one (not the rally, which was fab, but the car) was when it decided to die in Bolivia at 16,000 feet and we drove the rest of the way to Ushuaia in a series of hired 4X4’s.  Not a bad way to travel, actually. It was then resurrected to spend a month in Myanmar with just a small issue that soon got fixed.  So, 6,000 kms from the skinniest bit of the America’s up and around to the Big Easy in a geriatric car - nothing to go wrong there! Please behave, Model A. Watch this space. 

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