Big things have small beginnings

We have now got a car!!  After looking for a long time and maybe being a little bit fussy, I can report that we have finally got a car! It's a Suzuki Wagon R+ (I'm not sure what the R+ means but I'm fairly sure it doesn't mean "rally")  I picked it up on behalf of our team on Sunday from a really friendly lady in Emsworth near Portsmouth - it's only got 28,000 miles on the clock and a real beauty.  Thank you very much to the previous owner who was very kind to let us have it for a good price and wished us the best of luck on our mad adventure.  Now it's time to get pimping and make that beast look fit for the desert!

Our team website is now coming on well and hopefully friends, family and random nosey people will soon be finding it and clicking the link to our charity page which is here just in case you are eager to put some money towards a great cause which is only about 4 weeks away!

http://www.mycharitypage.com/AdamOlden/

Car? ...What Car?

We are currently struggling to find a suitably rubbish car for our adventure, although it sounds really easy to buy a car and drive to Mongolia its actually not really! The trouble is, the Mongol government will only allow cars across its borders if they are less than 10 years old, as they are trying to discourage people from dumping old heaps in their country - therefore in resent years the Mongol government have slapped an import tax on all vehicles, this is up near US$6000 for a car that's over 10 years old!  Which means we will have to settle for a Jan 2003 or newer car, which obviously means spending more money on it!  It's not too bad when you think that we will be splitting the costs by four people but at the end of the race, presuming we make it to Ulaanbaatar - we will be auctioning it off (or what is left of it) and donating the proceeds to charity.

Another tough thing to bear in mind whilst selecting a car that you want to drive 14,000 miles 1/3 of the way around the planet, across deserts, rivers and mountains - is, not if - but when we break it - can we get spare parts? Can we bodge it back together again?  Cars that would usually be considered reliable and cheap in the UK are not necessarily cheap and easy to fix in central Asia.  Most European manufacturers don't have a large customer in central Asia and trying to find a Ford dealership in Siberia could come as quite a challenge!  We narrowed our search to a Japanese on Korean manufacturer which only really left us with Honda, Toyota, Kia or Suzuki - of which we had to select a model, the rally rules state that the engine must be 1.2L or smaller - in order to keep an already ridiculous challenge "more challenging"!

Out of the choices left we have decided on a couple of models and now frantically trying to buy something before the deadline for registration which is only about 4 weeks away!

The Beginning

Well it was almost exactly one year ago today that Adam, Hamish, Adrian and Antonio met each other in the sweltering heat of Southern India for the first time (well, Hamish and Adrian knew each other before….. but generally we were all strangers), Antonio was traveling with his lovely wife Giovanna and I was traveling with my friend Anita.

 We were all taking part in the epic Rickshaw Run which was also set-up by the crazy folk at the Adventurists and involved driving a badly made, under-powered, death-trap of a sit-on lawn mower AKA an India made Baja 145E auto-rickshaw from the far south of the massive Indian sub-continent to the far north, around the back of Bangladesh into the less visited and remote eastern states near Burma to a town we had never heard of, in a state that we had never heard of either!

We covered a distance of over 5000km in less than 14 days along with sixty or so other teams who were all racing for the ever-distant finish line, some days involved over 16 hours of driving and I think we can all safely say it was the most stressful thing we had ever done in our lives!

Our daily route typically meant getting up at 4am, driving from 4:30am until 9 or 10pm (some days gone midnight) and living on a banana and the occasional coconut haggled from a street vendor either at a busy junction as we waited or more often than not while we were trying to fix one of the twice daily catastrophic breakdowns.  We used no GPS, only massive maps that covered the whole of India, did not have any support, spares, back-up or way points and were totally on our own when we broke down. Despite the hardship, stress, sleep deprivation and the sheer terror of some of the horrific things we witnessed on the Indian highways and back roads – we did eventually arrive confused, exhausted but so happy to have completed such an amazing journey.

Now one year later we must be mad as we have all teamed up to have a go at the Rickshaw Runs’ – bigger brother: The Mongol Rally – an even tougher challenge with complicated border crossings, missing roads, entire deserts to cross, three or four times the distance and crossing multiple countries that most of us had never even heard of until we started looking at maps!

Planning is a bit more involved than just heading down a line on a map, its more like project management in its own right!

Adam