2024-07-21 05:15:08
“How do you turn a frog into a comfortable car? You break its engine! And then one thing goes with the other. How to become a regular at a pastry shop for petrolheads, how to organize an international conspiracy and how to drive 300 kilometers a day and enjoy it. The yellow frog he is not giving up and is slowly and uncertainly approaching Mongolia!” Traveler Dan Přibáň writes about the adventures he experiences on his journey with a luaz, aka yellow frog.
When is luaz a comfortable car? When you drive it on a tow truck. It could be a pretty good joke if it weren’t true. But even then, it’s actually funny. It’s just a teeth-grinding laugh. But the most comfortable ride in a luaz is definitely when it sits on the back of a tow truck, you sit in it, and it takes you from Turkmenistan to Bukhara, Uzbekistan, at night. Our escape from totality, which is so bizarre that it can be used as a comedy, is behind us.
Now we just have to sort out one little thing. Somehow arrange for our frog to drive again without a tow truck. But there is still time for that, we still have a hundred kilometers to go and it swings pleasantly, there is no engine roaring or gearbox screeching. Ideal for falling asleep behind the wheel.
A rarity on wheels
The next morning, with our car resting contentedly under the beautifully carved ceiling of the entrance to the hostel that will, we fear, be our temporary base for quite some time, we set out to verify that having a car from the former USSR has in the former USSR some advantage. But we don’t give it much hope, we only saw a luaz during the entire trip, a short distance from Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, and that was the much more well-known non-floating version. And the negatives, the cars from which our machines are based and of which over three million were produced, are like saffron. But we won’t give anything for trying. And so we go to Mošina bazaar, a place we really need at home. As the name suggests, it is a place where things for machines are sold, only the word bazaar here means market.
Even in the market, where you would think that otherwise you can get everything in the world, the expedition was not lucky. | Photo: Dan Přibáň
And it is the market in its purest form. Dozens of stands sell everything possible and impossible for cars and everything around them. Nothing else. Nothing for motorbikes, nothing for tractors, there are other places for that. This habit of concentrating all trades and services from one field in one place is extremely practical.
Patisserie for petrolheads
With shining eyes, we walk through the Mošina bazaar, to which we will return many times in the coming days, so that they will already welcome us here as regular customers. We wander between stalls, shelters and shops and ask about parts for the zapozožka. Sometimes we try luaz, but apparently it’s a complete rarity here. And the villain? Old, very old… we don’t have that. No wonder, Uzbekistan is a country of white Chevrolets, you rarely see old Soviet cars here.
Finding spare parts for the yellow frog turned out to be quite a challenge. | Photo: Dan Přibáň
Chevrolets got here when Daewoo cars started to be produced here in the early nineties, which later went under the Chevrolet brand. The vehicle fleet here is a mixture of cars from Japan, Korea and Uzbekistan, occasionally seconded by a Lada or Volga, which serve here with huge gardens as mules for hard work. But the villain? No way. But we got at least a tank cap for 20 crowns, that’s fine!
International conspiracy
And so we launch the international Slovak-Hungarian-Czech-Uzbek plan. Thanks to our new contacts in Hungary, the country where there are probably the most luazes in Europe, we manage to get a whole new engine and two gearboxes (if we had these contacts a year ago, we would have saved ourselves so much trouble…) and immediately set off for them from Banská Bystrice, our extended hand Lukáš. In the meantime, we in Bukhara are disassembling the engine and transmission that betrayed us already in Iran, so that we can tell him what parts are needed.
In the end, parts for the frog had to travel all the way from Europe. | Photo: Dan Přibáň
Of course, it would be ideal if he could somehow get the engine and gearbox here, but we don’t have the money or time for that. It’s too big and too heavy. When we open the engine, it’s complete African déjà vu. The engine seized on the piston pin (that’s the rod that the piston moves on as it flies up and down in the piston). In 2009, our Trabant engine seized up in the desert just like this before Cairo, and we were solving exactly the same way how to transport the necessary parts there. In Africa, we were saved by the representative of our ambassador, who brought them to us. It won’t work here. We have to come up with something else.
The strangest tourist in Bukhara
We discuss it from left to right, but in the end, the fastest, most practical and, in essence, the cheapest way is for Lukáš to simply fly in with the parts. It probably doesn’t happen to everyone that they ask him if he would like to pack cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, a piece of clutch and some rags and fly to Uzbekistan for a rescue mission in a few days. It happened to Lukáš just now, and a few days later he is already heading to Istanbul and Samarkand. Everything went pretty much without a hitch, we just don’t understand why they didn’t want to take the clutch pressure plate, which looks like a mine, on board the plane. Those airlines aren’t what they used to be!
Despite the technical difficulties, the expedition does not stop enjoying the beauty of the places where they have to deal with inconveniences with the cars. | Photo: Dan Přibáň
Then all you have to do is get on a train that reaches a speed that no other trains run in our country (it can go up to 250 km/h) and Lukáš and the parts are at our temporary base under the carved ceiling. Bukhara has never seen such a tourist, he spent most of his time on the engine and gearbox, which he helped us disassemble and assemble. After a while, our stay in the city was also strange to the tourist police, who came to ask what we had been doing here for more than a week. I guess it’s not normal here. When everything is done, the engine purrs like new, the gearbox shifts like never before and Lukáš sets off for home and we for our longest crossing. We have almost 3 thousand kilometers ahead of us through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan… and then Mongolia will be around the corner.
Like queuing for lunch
We devour kilometers by hundreds. Literally by the hundreds, because at our speed we drive every 100 kilometers for two hours, and after that we have enough in the noise, heat and dust to stop, take a breath and go on another hundred… and another and another and another. Only the Uzbek-Kazakh border will break us from our pace. “That’s for ten hours,” calmly says the Tajik standing in front of us in the queue, which we don’t want to believe is all the way to the border. They are still pretty far away. But it is so. We are moving bit by bit, hour by hour.
Optimism does not leave the expedition even during the seemingly endless wait at the border. | Photo: Dan Přibáň
Standing in line here is reminiscent of an elementary school lunch line. Someone is always trying to overtake, pushing forward. When everything stands still for hours and the line suddenly moves, panic breaks out, as if if everyone doesn’t leave right away, it’s impossible to get to the border. Horns, hollers, zigzags… The local police obviously know it, because they go through the queue and write down the order of the cars. When a few nervous drivers (who signed up a while ago) pile in front of us, everything settles back to the way it was. I’ll let you go if you let me go, obviously doesn’t work here.
Up north
We slowly move further and further, answering the same questions from nearby drivers and random passers-by. From the Czech Republic and Slovakia… yes, from Czechoslovakia, LuAZ, yes, from the USSR, on gasoline, on diesel, no, the hundred and twenty that have it on the speedometer don’t drive, no, we didn’t build it ourselves, yes, seriously it swims… and so on and on, hour after hour.
When we are finally behind the massive gate and finally understand why it is going so terribly slowly. The customs officers search the cars perhaps even more precisely than when we entered China. We grit our teeth at the thought of taking everything out and loading it again. But just like with Trabants, the magic of the yellow circus works. So just one more time from the Czech Republic and Slovakia… etc. etc. And we are in Kazakhstan! It didn’t hurt either. Now up north!
A completely different Kazakhstan
We have been to Kazakhstan several times, it was a land of endless desert and bad roads. But this is something completely different. Hundreds of kilometers of new highways and wide roads. And mountains, beautiful high mountains that stretch on our right hand seemingly endlessly. First on the borders of Kyrgyzstan, then China. “We are 50 kilometers from China and Luaz!” the eyes of our photographer Michal shine. “Well, yes, we are. Where else should we be? China isn’t that far away.
50 kilometers from China. So where will it go next? | Photo: Dan Přibáň
We’ve been there before…” I think. But it’s really something. We’re 50 kilometers from China. Luaz and a completely pointless tricycle! It’s complete nonsense, but no one has tried this before us. It’s something! And we need to allow to be amazed by it. After all, that’s why we travel, to be amazed. We’re 50 kilometers from China! That’s a hell of a thing!
Even slower
We’ve covered almost half of the three thousand kilometers to the next border of Kazakhstan, when the repaired transmission starts to rattle, which it was already emitting, and soon a dark hum is added to it… it was already here. We did what we could, replaced everything we could replace. We did the best we could. We will just go and believe that it will work. Strange noises are heard when we accelerate above 55 kilometers per hour, which is quite enough for a frog that goes at most eighty. And so we slow down to fifty. And suddenly it’s actually pretty quiet around. The engine doesn’t move, the landscape doesn’t move, we don’t move. And we go, we go, slowly and calmly. Sometimes the fastest thing is to slow down.
Video: Yellow Frog Car (March 4, 2021)
So here it is, our machine for the next trip‼ Luaz 967, in some ways the opposite of the Trabant. | Video: Dan Přibáň