Mongol Saga Episode V: Car Work in Poland

The Polish mechanic’s hoisting a slab of metal underneath our car to protect it from rocks and debris once we get on the dirt roads in Kazakhstan and Mongolia.

Two days ago, we were in Lodz, Poland and on every side of us were miles of dismal Polish highway, two lanes and seemingly the entire stretch under some sort of construction.  The city offered respite from the unyielding semi-trucks on the narrow roads, and we were scouring Lodz (pronounced Woodge) in search of a mechanic willing to weld a generic slab of metal underneath our car – a measure greatly endorsed by previous and current Mongol Rally participants to combat the roads in Kazakhstan.  Driving aimlessly around Lodz, our first stop was at a Mercedes service station.  The youngest of the three men in the small office with a poster of a naked woman on the wall spoke English, and though he couldn’t help us (being a Mercedes operator and all), he was enthusiastic about the project and the Mongol Rally.  He prostrated himself on the ground, tapped the bottom of the car and suggested we just tack some thick rubber mud flaps to protect against rocks.  He also pointed out that the gear box was leaking oil and gave us half a carton of gear box oil for free.

Our second stop was at a parts store run by a man who spoke absolutely no English.  But thanks to a note written in both English and Polish by our generous host, Bolek, a giant of a man, 28 years old with a deep Eastern European accent, we were able to communicate our need to the clerk and after a couple phone calls he pointed us to an auto shop down the road a few kilometers. Down the road at another shop with a naked woman on the wall, the portly mechanic read our translated note, frowning at it for what seemed an interminable amount of time, before gesturing for us to pull our car into his garage.  He swooped underneath our car, came back out of his work pit, and shook his head – he could not help us.  But he pointed us less then a kilometer down the road to yet another mechanic.

At the next establishment, we found a man in the very back of the garage, and on seeing us he quickly buttoned up a shirt and teetered to us on splotchy red legs.  He squinted at our note and told us “thirty minutes.”  He made some calls, and some time later he handed the phone to Ryan, and a voice in English said they were going to give it a try with some employees on their way to the shop. Two men showed up, but only one brought a recognizable set of teeth.  The other had a warm albeit hollow smile despite being in his twenties or early thirties.  With them and us both shuffling around in the pit beneath our car, they held up a piece of metal to the bottom of our car and we knew then that the mission had reached a tipping point.

They worked for about an hour before their boss, the first man we spoke to at the garage, drew a diagram of what they were screwing to the bottom of our car, and wrote a price: 250 zloty, equivalent to maybe 80 bucks.  It was a heap by our standards, but we didn’t have enough zloties on us so he wrote down 50 Euro – a bit better deal for us.  We nodded and the men continued working.  A while later the boss came back out and said, “problem.”  He shrugged off any suggestion of severity and pointed out that he miscalculated the Euro conversion and let us know it would be 100 Euros if we so chose to pay in that currency.  We offered American dollars, and he agreed to $80 bucks – still a price we were glad to pay.

After four hours of sitting on a bench, getting water at the cooler, watching blankly at the men working on the car, and reading our travel guides to pass the time, the boss came out and said “Five minutes.”  I get the impression that the only English this man knows is measurements of time.  In a few minutes, he handed the phone to Ryan again, and the same voice in stunted English told him that there was a problem with a fan of some sort – Ryan wasn’t sure to which he was referring – but that it would be another twenty dollars.

The concocted story was so direct it was almost cute to us since we would have gladly paid $100 from the start for what amounted to three men working for four hours on a custom sump guard to protect the front undercarriage of our Nissan Micra.  The final step was to spray paint the whole thing black, and after waving goodbye to the mechanics now stained with the grime from our car we were back on the road north across more of Eastern Europe.