VW Bus Restoration & Rescue in Mexico // Hasta Alaska // S03E01

Hi, I'm Ben. Meet Alaska, the Caribbean explorer and his capito, our Chilean bus. For the next few years, this is our house. The world is our garden and you are our family. We don't know the time of day or where we'll wake up tomorrow. All we know is we're on the ride of our lives, most of the time. So join us and see what unfolds on this epic adventure. So far on Astro Alaska, it's been an enormous adventure. We've seen some of the most beautiful places on earth, learned more than we could have imagined about Latino life and had an absolute blast in the process. But during the two years since we left Chile, we've been plagued by mechanical problems, which has not only drained all of our pennies, but it's also brought us to the brink of throwing in the towel on several occasions. I'm so over this. Mexico, with its plentiful supply of Volkswagen parts and expertise, has for a long time promised the answers to our ongoing nightmare. And finally, we are here. Fed up with the constant struggle to keep our VW Boss on the road. This is getting old. We headed to the promised land in search of answers. Just approaching the border for Mexico now. And it's going to be Volkswagen heaven. The plan? To buy and install a new engine before our free seven-day visas expired. Things were looking great for us upon arrival, with Volkswagens everywhere. And better yet, we found somewhere that we could do the work. But after a lot of searching, we realised that it wasn't the VW Mecca that we'd hoped for. Ben's about to lose his shirt as well. A new engine wasn't an option. And worse, we were still working on the brakes. Should I wash my vagina in the stream? Just dip it in and dip it out. The water looked like that before you put your vagina in it. I didn't look down and said my vagina is definitely not going in there. Because my vagina is precious. Time for the road test. So we headed to the beach to celebrate that our brakes were finally working. That's the good news. The bad news is that we think the engine's not going to make it back to Guatemala. So we're going to take the offer of the mechanic here in Tapachula and we're going to do the engine rebuild here. Meet Los Mexicanos. Us gringos, armed with every manual ever printed and an overly confident approach, struggled to deal with the Mexican can-do attitude. Los Mexicanos had to come to terms with the perfectionist approach of us gringos. We can't forget Alaska and her sidekick kangaroo. And of course Capito, the star of the show. He's the kind of attention-seeking boss whose wheel falls off on the way to the mechanic. That's what we get for giving ourselves a two-day break. We were told two more weeks, but then that's Mexican time. So I'm trying to take the engine out now and I'm really nervous that we're in the wrong place to do this. The guy's really great but I'm not sure he's got all the tools and parts we need. It's not really working out like I thought it was going to. To our surprise, we were unable to find a brand new engine and there was no point in salvaging the old one. Come on, give it all you've got. So after bonding the way mechanics do in these parts, the Mexicans found us a new engine. It was game on. We haven't been using clocks so we didn't know what time it was and we found out that we were actually an hour ahead in Mexico compared to Guatemala. So we spent a month without knowing what the actual time was, which is quite amazing. The only way we do know that the time is actually passing, other than our increasing frustration, is to watch this puppy which has been coming around here every day and slides straight under the door in the morning to play with the other dogs. And now she can't get in. Looks like we've been here way too long. We seldom left the garage. We wanted to work every hour of daylight. However, the weather took control, sometimes stealing half of the day, which turned into weeks, which dragged into months. Going to Mexico to find a brand new engine, we couldn't do that. This engine here is the next best thing. This is a 2001 used engine, but everything inside is from the factory. It's never been rebuilt. There's a little bit of play right now inside the bearings. So I'm going to tear it down, put all the new parts in, and that's going to be the closest we'll get to a brand new engine. I'm absolutely livid with the machine shops here. I've been complaining to them that the valves in the heads don't seal properly because they leak gasoline. What they've done is they've put a little bit of sealer behind the head here so that when I tested it with gasoline, it didn't leak. So of course, it's not going to leak for the first 10 seconds of the motor starting, but after that, the performance is going to be like crap. It'll be too late to take it apart by then. I'm relying on these people to do a decent job so we can put together a motor that will get us to Alaska, and they're just letting us down. I've done some of the cheapest. Just got the whole engine pretty much together, almost ready to go back in, and I've been working in a pretty small area and it's got pretty messy. The real reason Ben messed up was because everyone told him that the tap water was drinkable and he spent the whole day running between the toilet and the toolbox. And I just found these two things which definitely have to be about here. So I've got to take all of this apart again, put these in, put it back together again. But that wasn't the only issue. The Maxim fuel injection engine meant a whole heap of new wiring to figure out. This morning, we took out the entire street. There's no fuses here, so the whole street's electricity. Our maestro's gone away for the week, so I'm left having to do the soldering for the first time in my life. Nice and safe. Fire! Once he had finished setting fire to the garage, it was all hands on deck for the engine's first start. Hopefully this one really does last. Hasta Alaska. Accustomed to a life of change, we felt like it was Groundhog Day. Seeing three sets of chickens born and raised was a reminder that time was moving on. Covered in grease, we celebrated both of our bad days. Hey, Woofie! Woofie, Woofie! Come on, come on! Yay! Happy Birthday! Alaska, do you remember Bibi, our chicken in Ecuador? The one you ate? She ate it. Alaska ate it. I don't know. It just disappeared overnight. No feathers in her teeth in the morning. We watched Little Shadow find his new world and start a tour. Even the formidable rainy season decided it had enough, packed up, and left. We knew our reward was coming. All we needed to do was wait. Hey, I said wait! Sian, bored with the pace of life in the garage, decided to do something about our leaky windows. In order to give our new motor a fighting chance of getting to Alaska, we had to put Capito on a diet. Everything heavy was either removed or replaced. I'm finding it difficult to stay positive and, you know, like, just be happy to be here. We're becoming the windy, whiny, unappreciative gringos, and you can tell everyone thinks that, but, like, three months is a long time. What should be a simple task is a difficult task, and everything we're doing has to be done two or three times. I did it wrong, so now I'm going to have to do it all over again. How many times have you sanded this car, Sian? I don't know, but it's probably been about a month in total, to the point where I have no ******* fingertips left. I didn't even measure it. Now I'm going to go over there and cry. You know, I want to tell people what to do, but I... Why can't we just... It's really disheartening, because every time we ask to get something done, we have to do it again, and, well, for everything. Replace it all again. $20 on paint, that doesn't work, and that's not the right colour, and that just gets played with all day, because you didn't pay for it. We'll replace it. We'll spend $20 here, we'll spend another $16 on rubber, when it doesn't... when he decides to cut it too short. We'll replace a window when it's smashed, that's fine. We'll replace the silicone. And it's no one's problem except for ours, because we're the ones that, at the end of the day, have to spend more time, more money, fixing all the ******* problems that happen, and then we just look like pissed-off, angry gringos. Which we are. There's reason. Get on with it, Sian. There's a lot of ways you can describe this gringo. That picture is a thousand words. At times, we felt like we were staring at a brick wall, but we got ourselves into this situation, and we would get ourselves out. Ah, this is free! We can't pretend that it was easy to live in the can't-be whilst we renovated it. It wasn't fun for everyone. In five long months, we only left the garage for a few short days. But we eventually discovered, no matter how great our determination was to reach our goal, it was essential, for sanity's sake, to steal a few moments from each day for ourselves. We learnt not to lose sight of the big picture, and to appreciate the little details of life around us. To not let problems consume us, and to understand that we grow more in the face of challenges than we do when faced with open roads. We learnt it's best not to get bogged down in the difficulties, like surviving almost half a year without meeting other English speakers, and instead, value the friendly reminder of why we started this journey in the first place, to truly be immersed in other cultures. As we take stock of our successes and failures, we can see that the real achievement in this story is of the three Mexican men who survived the gringos, taking over their workplace, day and night, 24-7. Patience is not the ability to wait, but how you act whilst you're waiting. However, it's just as important how you celebrate when the waiting is over. And, cut! Cut, cut! Coming up in the next few months of our Astro-Alaska adventure, we give our new bus a thorough road test, Latino style. And, well, we have so much fun, you're hardly going to believe it. This place is crazy! We're in Cuba!