A few words about petrol pumps. A petrol pump is an electronic unit which has the job of  defeating gravity and getting petrol from the tank to the carburettor. The petrol pumps in most cars is in the tank, as indeed was the petrol pump of East of Eden when she rolled off the assembly line. In those glorious days, her petrol pump was neither seen nor heard.

Those days are now a distant memory. When we bought the car, it had already been outfitted with an external petrol pump because the internal petrol pump had given up the ghost. An external petrol pump is an all-metal (very important detail, as we shall see later) thingee which usually goes under the body.

In our trip, we have changed the petrol pump, let me see…once in France, once in Israel, once in Iran (where petrol pumps were so cheap we bought two!) and once in Thailand. This final pump – bought in Persia – died in Hanoi. As you can see, petrol pumps have really become a part of our lives.

And so off I went in search of another pump in that part of Hanoi where such things are to be found. I eventually bought a pump, paid twenty bucks for it, and installed it in the car. It worked perfectly. The one thing I hadn’t really paid any attention to was the fact that the pump had plastic end casings. If I had been more attentive to this I would have realised right away that what I had was in internal and not an external petrol pump. The difference is one of degrees.

Degrees Celsius, of course. The petrol pump, no longer bathing in the cooling petrol of the tank was now allowed to heat up and subsequently die. As a matter of fact, it didn’t die. We were half way up a very long climb on a road that hadn’t been repaired since the French left when our dear pump decided it needed a nice long rest. So we let it rest, sprinkled some water on it to help it cool down and within half an hour we were on our way.

These mishaps were troublesome and worrying, but the majesty of the landscape was so overwhelming that it was difficult to get excited about them. We were far from the concerns of the French Legionnaire or the Viet Minh who saw these hills as a battle ground and surely found no redeeming qualities in them.