Like many on this board, I'm an inveterate traveller. I love the thrill of new places, and the excitement of just being in motion. As I'm sure many of you also do, I take pride in constructing elaborate and improbable itineraries, each optimized to within an inch of its life in order to maximize mileage accumulation - or premium travel experience or new aircraft products or exotic transfer points or new cultural experiences or, ideally, some combination of all of the above - while staying within the cruel limitation of my meagre annual vacation allowance. It's a lot of fun, and a great mental challenge.
But lately it's started to feel like it's no longer enough. Call it middle-management malaise or early-onset midlife crisis or just plain wanderlust, but for a while now I’ve been itching to do A Really Big Trip. Something ambitious and unusual and just a little bit irresponsible. A journey that trades in the cosseted comforts of 5 star luxury and white glove service for the more immersive experience of several months of unstructured, unmediated (and frequently uncomfortable) travel and a real sense of adventure. Something that will allow me, when I hit my 40th birthday next year and look back on the preceding decade, to have some counterpoint to the corporate slavery that has otherwise characterized my thirties.
So, after more than a year of planning, dreaming and scheming, I’ve taken the plunge and decided to do the 2012 Mongol Rally. I think I may even be the first FTer to do so (though there’s been a desultory thead (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travelbuzz/636703-would-you-consider-doing-mongol-rally.html) or two on the subject, and someone who tenatively plans to do next year’s event (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/china/1331473-driving-into-china.html)), so I thought I should share the experience with the board.
Hold on a moment. The Mongol what?
The Mongol Rally (http://www.theadventurists.com/the-adventures/mongol-rally) is an annual event in which teams from all over the world drive tiny cars from the UK to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. That's around 10,000 miles – or one third of the way around the planet – on roads ranging from inadequate to non-existent.
It's not a race. There's no set route. And the rules are few: a tiny engine; no GPS, and all proceeds go to charity (even the car itself gets auctioned off for a good cause afterwards... assuming that it actually makes it to Ulaanbaatar, which is far from a certainty). Since its inception in 2004, Mongol Rally teams have raised almost £2 million (or US $3.2 million) for charity, and we're continuing that tradition.
Meet Team Khan-Tiki Tours
My long-suffering other half is used to my madcap travel ideas (after all, he's subjected to them probably every other day). Initially, he dismissed my Mongol Rally suggestions as just another of the lunatic ravings of a travel addict, to which he took his usual approach: just say ‘yes, dear’; humour me; and hope that sooner or later the idea will pass. Nobody is more surprised than he to discover that, 18 months later, the rally is just a few weeks away and we’re fully committed: entry fee paid, car procured, passport bulging with visas, and lease on apartment terminated.
Along with our other teammate (who, like us, is an expat Kiwi) we are Team Khan-Tiki Tours, named for the mighty Mongol himself and the quaint New Zealand custom of the ‘tiki tour (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tiki%20tour)’. By the chaotic standards of the Mongol Rally, I think we’re reasonably well prepared: we’ve chosen our route (a 10,500 mile extravaganza across Europe to Turkey, Iran, and most of the ‘stans of Central Asia, taking in most of the Silk Road and the world’s 2nd highest international highway along the way); set up a team website and a facebook page; drummed up a respectable number of charitable donations; and procured a suitably unsuitable vehicle (a mighty 1.2 litre Renault Kangoo). But I think it’s only now that we’re starting to realize the enormity of what we’ve signed up for…
It’s for a good cause (actually, two good causes) and we’d love your support
The Mongol Rally is an amazing adventure, but we’re also trying to ensure that it benefits others beside ourselves. To that end, we’re raising money for not one, but two great causes, and we’d really appreciate the support of any generous FTers. Plus, thanks to my employer’s charitable foundation, every donation will be matched 1:1. You can find out more at our charities page (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=49), or by reading on.
The Lotus Children's Centre (http://www.lotuschild.org/) is the official charity of the 2012 Mongol Rally. It’s a Mongolian non-profit organization working with vulnerable children and families to provide the basic human rights of shelter, food and education in one of the harshest climates in the world. Lotus cares for up to 150 abused, orphaned and abandoned children at any one time, but with an estimated 4,000 homeless children in Mongolia there still is much to achieve. Please help them to do more by donating at our Lotus Children’s Centre fundraising page (http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserPage.action?userUrl=khantikitours&pageUrl=).
The HALO Trust (http://www.halousa.org/), our team’s chosen charity, is the leading international non-profit organization devoted to removing the dangerous debris left behind by war, particularly landmines. Our chosen route takes us through parts of the world still blighted by landmines, making HALO’s efforts very relevant to us. To date, HALO has cleared more than 8,100 minefields worldwide, and you can help continue their efforts by contributing at our HALO fundraising page (http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/khantikitours/khantikitours).
We’ve already raised just over $4,000, so that’s more than $8,000 once my employer’s donation matching has kicked in, but I’m sure we can do better. Please help us get close to our $20,000 target!
Follow us!
The adventure starts on July 14th, as we set off from Goodwood Racecourse in West Sussex, England. We plan to blog our way across two continents, posting photos and updates where internet connections allow. Admittedly, our tale is likely to be somewhat light on premium class travel (though with any luck I’ll be able to report upgrade success on our AC flights to the UK), but hopefully heavy on entertaining travel anecdotes. If you’d like to follow our progress, you can find our blog at our team website www.khantikitours.com (http://www.khantikitours.com/), or just click ‘like’ on our team facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/KhanTikiTours) to be subscribed to all our updates. We’d love to have you along for the ride.
I’ll post updates to this thread once we’re actually on the road. In the meantime, you might like to check out the state of our pre-travel preparation (http://www.khantikitours.com/?m=201206). Speaking of which, I’d best go sort out my Mongolian visa. See you back here in a few weeks…
janehoya
Jun 16, 12, 3:39 pm
Just checked out your team page and it looks great. Safe travels and I look forward to reading more about your adventure.
SMART51
Jun 16, 12, 5:20 pm
Way to go, good luck be safe will be following you on facebook and flyertalk.
I did donate to both charities.
mad_atta
Jun 16, 12, 5:29 pm
janehoya, thanks for the good wishes! SMART51, thank you very much for your support and your donations ^
Meanwhile, if anyone is curious about some of the planning that goes into an event like this, I'd recommend reading hauteboy's excellent account (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/18724982-post1.html) of the preparation for his trip to Central Asia. That pile of visas is just a small sample of the selection we require for the rally and for our subsequent travel. So far we have the following:
Iranian letter of invitation (LOI) and visa
Turkmen LOI and pre-authorization to transit visa on arrival at the border
Uzbek LOI and visa
Tajik visa and GBAO permit (necessary to drive the Pamir Highway)
Kyrgyz visa
Kazakh visa
Russian LOI and visa (currently in progress)
Chinese visa (for post-rally travel)
Vietnamese visa (for post-rally travel - needed since we're arriving overland)
We're still working on our Mongolian visa, and I've yet to figure out our plan for a Burmese visa (last stop on our post-rally travels), but I'm told they can be procured same-day in Bangkok. Then again, so can most things... ;)
Finally, it appears that I may not be the only FTer doing the rally this year. I think bensyd is also taking the plunge...
Mwenenzi
Jun 16, 12, 6:49 pm
Now that is a trip. ^
I guess you done some research
http://www.pekingparis.com/
www.pekingparis2010.com
http://www.pekintoparis.com/
http://www.endurorally.com/
I had email correspondence with a guy from England who did the PP2010 in a Citroen L15
NYBanker
Jun 16, 12, 10:36 pm
Good luck! I look forward to following this journey/story and will be pleased to contribute.
mad_atta
Jun 16, 12, 11:33 pm
Now that is a trip. ^
I guess you done some research
http://www.pekingparis.com/
www.pekingparis2010.com
http://www.pekintoparis.com/
http://www.endurorally.com/
I had email correspondence with a guy from England who did the PP2010 in a Citroen L15
The 2010 Peking to Paris looks like a lot of fun - not least because it takes a more southerly route via the old Silk Road, as we are planning to do (in reverse, of course). A number of teams take the much more straightforward route straight across Russia instead, which doesn't seem like anything like as much fun to me... though the much, much smaller number of visas required does go some way toward explaining the attraction.
One thing that is quite limiting about the Mongol Rally these days is that they have a maximum vehicle age of 10 years. Previously, people did it in ancient Fiat 500s and Renault 4s and Citroen 2CVs, but those days are sadly past (unless you also want to drive your vehicle all the way home again). It's a pity in more ways than one, because older vehicles were in fact far more suited to some of the horrendous roads that we'll experience along the way, and much easier to fix if they do go wrong.
mad_atta
Jun 16, 12, 11:33 pm
Good luck! I look forward to following this journey/story and will be pleased to contribute.
Thanks ^ I'm an NY banker myself... for another two weeks, anyway. After that, all bets are off :D
RoyalFlush
Jun 16, 12, 11:43 pm
Safe travels! I've followed you on Facebook.
michaelmk
Jun 17, 12, 3:49 am
Amazing! Following your website and FB page. Looking forward to updates during the trip!
bensyd
Jun 17, 12, 7:28 am
Finally, it appears that I may not be the only FTer doing the rally this year. I think bensyd is also taking the plunge...
He is indeed!:D
I'll be one week ahead of you though. I guess I'll be able to fill you in on all the places worth visiting.
WC_EEND
Jun 17, 12, 10:22 am
Best of luck guys, also following your facebook page now
mad_atta
Jun 17, 12, 6:22 pm
He is indeed!:D
I'll be one week ahead of you though. I guess I'll be able to fill you in on all the places worth visiting.
So just to make things more complicated, it turns out that Ben is participating in a rival event, the Mongolia Charity Rally (http://mongolia.charityrallies.org/), whereas what we're doing is the Mongol Rally (http://www.theadventurists.com/the-adventures/mongol-rally). Same same but different!
isaifan
Jun 18, 12, 11:03 am
Very interesting. Best of Luck!
bensyd
Aug 12, 12, 1:55 am
Finished yesterday night. The Mongolian "roads" really belted the cr@p out of our Ford Transit and we passed many other teams who were having serious mechanical issues. We needed new tires every day (we were losing 1-2/day), and invariably the mechanic had several Mongol Rally cars in there, abandoned or having work done. The last ~450km is paved into UB which and I have never been so happy to see paved road in my life. :D I have a new respect for Land Cruisers which really did seem able to eat up the roads that ate every other vehicle on them.
Our Dutch friends that we met in Baku who we were convoying with were so unlucky, they hit a giant pothole about 100km from UB and had to limp in with their car now completely undriveable. We had completely done our springs (they had actually doubled back on themselves, had shocks about to give out, no rear brakes, and a shaking under acceleration which could have been due to a multidtude of things
Having said that, it was a fantastic experience. I highly recommend anyone thinking about doing it going for it. Seeing culture/food/people change as you make your way across is fascinating. The people you meet along the way are all seasoned travellers, very different to the people you meet in your average European hostel! There's a great camrarderie between people on the rally, and you all tend to meet at border crossings (some of them can take up to 24 hours to cross, and at Turkmenistan we had to get 17 stamps from 17 separate booths!)
A few highlights:
- Turkey. The friendliness and hospitality of the Turkish people is something I have not experienced in any other country. We met a couple of British cyclists travelling to NZ from the UK and in their three weeks in Turkey they didn't have to buy more than a handful of meals the rest were given to them by locals.
- Georgia. A real surprise package, something I was not expecting at all. Tblisi felt like a modern European capital and the countryside is so lush and green, similar to what I've seen in Central America (Costa Rica).
- Altai Republic, Russia. How is this place not packed with tourists? So beautiful, I only discovered it by looking at the pictures on Google Maps. Some where I'd love to return to and do some hiking.
Anyway, I don't want to hijack mad_atta's thread but just thought I'd check in.:)
ETA: I have a new respect for Turkish truck drivers. They go everywhere, from Austria to Kazakhstan.
Schmurrr
Sep 9, 12, 2:07 pm
Sounds like an amazing adventure! So tempting, too! :D
glennaa11
Sep 9, 12, 6:41 pm
Sounds like one of those crazy Top Gear challenges.
mad_atta
Jan 20, 13, 1:18 am
So here I am guiltily returning to the thread I started with great intentions all those months ago. I'm determined finally to post some updates for those who didn't follow along on our website. Watch this space.
Finished yesterday night. The Mongolian "roads" really belted the cr@p out of our Ford Transit and we passed many other teams who were having serious mechanical issues. We needed new tires every day (we were losing 1-2/day), and invariably the mechanic had several Mongol Rally cars in there, abandoned or having work done. The last ~450km is paved into UB which and I have never been so happy to see paved road in my life. :D I have a new respect for Land Cruisers which really did seem able to eat up the roads that ate every other vehicle on them.
Mongolian 'roads' have to be seen to be believed. The toll they took on our tiny Renault was incredible in just a few short days... as you can read about shortly. What amazed me, though, when we finally hit that long-awaited asphalt, was the occasional truly horrific pothole in the middle of an otherwise excellent road surface. There was one immediately over a blind crest which we only avoided by the greatest of good luck, and it would have finished our poor, limping Renault.
Having said that, it was a fantastic experience. I highly recommend anyone thinking about doing it going for it. Seeing culture/food/people change as you make your way across is fascinating. The people you meet along the way are all seasoned travellers, very different to the people you meet in your average European hostel! There's a great camrarderie between people on the rally, and you all tend to meet at border crossings (some of them can take up to 24 hours to cross, and at Turkmenistan we had to get 17 stamps from 17 separate booths!)
I couldn't agree more. Absolutely one of the best things I have ever done. And it was fantastically exciting to meet other ralliers on the road, especially when many miles out into the middle of nowhere. I find that still if I see a small car ahead with a big load on the roof, I perk up and think "Mongol Rally team!", only to realise with disappointment that the rally is all over...
A few highlights:
- Turkey. The friendliness and hospitality of the Turkish people is something I have not experienced in any other country. We met a couple of British cyclists travelling to NZ from the UK and in their three weeks in Turkey they didn't have to buy more than a handful of meals the rest were given to them by locals.
- Georgia. A real surprise package, something I was not expecting at all. Tblisi felt like a modern European capital and the countryside is so lush and green, similar to what I've seen in Central America (Costa Rica).
- Altai Republic, Russia. How is this place not packed with tourists? So beautiful, I only discovered it by looking at the pictures on Google Maps. Some where I'd love to return to and do some hiking.
Anyway, I don't want to hijack mad_atta's thread but just thought I'd check in.:)
Glad you did :) And you'll have to read on to see our highlights. Sadly we didn't get to Georgia, though, but having seen other people's photos it's definitely on my to do list...
mad_atta
Jan 20, 13, 1:20 am
Sounds like one of those crazy Top Gear challenges.
Top Gear seemed to be a favourite of many of the teams we met on the rally, perhaps unsurprisingly. Many teams chose to follow Top Gear's lead and drive across the Carpathian mountains in Romania, in search of what TG deemed 'the best road in the world'.
mad_atta
Jan 20, 13, 4:57 am
Getting to the start line the FT way (just don’t tell the other teams)
The Mongol Rally is a huge challenge for all the teams that participate. However, the overwhelming majority of them live in the UK or Europe, giving them the opportunity to prepare their vehicle at their leisure, then drive it to one of the two start lines: Goodwood racecourse in West Sussex, about an hour south of London; or Klenova Castle, near Prague in the far southwest of the Czech Republic. For us, however, there was the small matter of 3,500 miles of the North Atlantic between us and the true beginning of our adventure… which brings us to the only typically FT piece of this report: getting on a plane.
In Ayesha’s case, that involved heading to Germany to deliver a paper at a conference, before joining us in the UK. She’s a non-FTer, holder of a modest SQ Krisflyer silver card, and had booked a cheap one way ticket on SQ’s JFK-FRA service. For the two of us, it was Air Canada via Toronto to Heathrow, hoping our AC Elite status would mean our Aerolotto game of eUpgrades would be successful. This, of course, is a familiar FT narrative: where by taking the less obvious, indirect route, our FT elite heroes bask in the joys of international business class while their envious colleague flies in coach. Besides, everybody knows that SQ never op-ups anybody, anytime, ever.
And yet… somehow, inexplicably, Ayesha finds herself stretched out on the soft leather surface of SQ’s generously proportioned A380 business class bed, supping champagne and contemplating her unexpected good fortune. The Mongol Rally is supposed to be about physical challenge, mental discomfort, and the triumph of endurance over deprivation. Best not tell the other teams then.
After an upset like that, our successful occupation of Air Canada’s slightly less coveted business class seats may seem a little anticlimactic. But as the culmination of an incredibly hectic few weeks – which involved procuring our last two visa, hiring and training my replacement at work, last-minute fundraising and route planning, packing up our apartment, selling or shipping our worldly possessions, and many, many goodbye drinks – the moment of finally reclining with a G&T in seat 3A as AC721 climbed out of La Guardia en route to Toronto felt pretty damn good. Even if AC does insist on using that nasty, nasty Canada Dry tonic.
What followed was the usual routine of my AC transatlantics: an hour or two in the antiseptic surrounds of the Pearson international Maple Leaf Lounge, mostly spent trying to decide which of the pasta sauces on offer was blander and getting outraged all over again by how bad the wine is; a welcome glass or three of the Drappier Champagne from the chipper Canadian crew once on board; a mediocre dinner and most of a movie until the Xanax got the better of me; and a few hours of surprisingly deep sleep that was rudely interrupted by our descent into a damp, grey and chilly Heathrow. An hour or so later, somewhat revived by a long shower, several lousy coffees and a bacon roll in the AC Arrivals lounge, I reflected on the comfort of such familiar rituals in the face of the unknown that lay ahead.
The next few days were a blur of activity: drinks in London, the train to Somerset, picking up our trusty Renault Kangoo from the mechanic who had been accessorizing it slightly for the rally (sadly, not too many 1.2litre cars have full safari-style snorkels as standard), decking it out in its full rally stripes, stars and stickers (which had a remarkably transformative effect), many trips to Halfords and Sainsburys Homebase for essential rally supplies, the fun task of figuring out how to actually fit it all into our small vehicle, and of course many trips to the pub where we attained virtual celebrity status among the locals as the three idiots who were actually going to drive to Mongolia. This was all achieved in near-constant rain, as the UK suffered through its wettest summer on record.
And so it was that we found ourselves driving out of town in a deluge, the streets of Bruton awash with rain and the bridges almost flooded, heading for Goodwood and the traditional pre-departure ritual of camping at the starting line. As the radio confirmed widespread flooding, we contemplated our options: a Glastonbury-style night of mud and mayhem, that would ensure our camping gear was filthy and soaking wet before the rally had even begun, or searching for some more civilized lodgings. As we splashed eastwards down the sodden M27, the weather getting nastier with each passing mile, the Hilton Portsmouth loomed into our view like a damp, grey concrete caravanserei. It was at about that point that I remembered I had some HHonors points burning a hole in my pocket, and that we had 10,000+ miles ahead of us to be cold, wet and uncomfortable. As we ate pizza and surfed the free wifi in the lobby we all agreed: if we were to retain even a shred of rally credibility, no other teams were to be told that we spent the night in the Hilton.
Hence, our official pre-departure blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=760) is strangely silent on the subject of our trip to the starting line. You could say this chapter is an FT exclusive. Let’s keep it our little secret.
mad_atta
Jan 20, 13, 5:17 am
Written July 18th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=777) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
If it’s Tuesday it must be Bratislava
It’s 5:51 when we spin off the jarring Czech highway into Kutna Hora. What happened to the signage? We’re lost, then found again. Its 5:55. Outtatheway Skoda! 5:58 when Alistair pulls on the handbrake and Graeme’s already running up the wet stone path to the ossuary. When we took the name Khan-Tiki Tours we thought of the antipodean twenty-somethings who bus hurriedly through Europe’s sites on Con Tiki Tours. We had thought it ironic but our lightening fast progress across Europe means we’re forced to admit we’re living up to our name.
Now we’re in Bratislava, Slovakia, 2000km from where we started five days ago. The launch in Goodwood was our first chance to meet other teams and compare routes and cars. A Volkswagen Polo clad in white fur distinguishes the Polar Bear team. Also in a Kangoo, Only Fools and Horsepower have mounted a horse’s head on their roof. Rub A Dub Tub sport a claw foot bath atop their vehicle– apparently it really fills with water.
Our colourful caravan started with a lap of the historic race course beneath leaden English skies and from there teams separated, only seeing each other intermittently. We followed the coast to the Eurotunnel train. Once back on the road at Calais, France we drove through flooded Flanders fields glad we had found an overnight apartment rental online in Bruges. Olivier, the owner, met us at 10 pm and shared a beer in his penthouse on the edge of the old town. We discovered he had also lived in New York and returning to a conservative town famed for its medieval buildings is a frustration for the young architect. We’re the first guest he’s hosted, an enterprise he hopes will bring the energy of meeting new people back into his life and city. In the morning he saw us on our way with a brief tour of the old town, pointing out some of his projects along the way.
A quick lunch in Luxembourg and Graeme’s started collecting flags to stick on the car for each country we visit. We ducked past the luxury brand stores lining the main street to enjoy the break in the rain on the corniche and views of the city walls and the town’s characteristic steep slate spires. Back on the road – it wasn’t until 9pm that we rolled into sleepy Rothenburg ob der Tauber for our first night camping. Our tents held up in damp conditions but cooking on a week gas flame was frustrating and slow. What started as pasta ended as minestrone but our first outdoor cooked meal was warm and satisfying. In the morning we spun around the cutesy old town with tourist hordes admiring the traditional German buildings that looked literally like an advent calendar. The sun was bright though the day was cold and we snacked on berries before piling back into the car to drive across Germany into Czech Republic for the Czech out party.
We joined other teams camping on the hillside under Klenova castle. More vehicles to admire, the costumes even nuttier and some already retelling horror stories of breakdowns. We watched cricket in the sunshine before evening arrived and we made our way to the hilltop castle and the Theatre of the Macabre party. A Blondie inspired keyboard guitar player led an excellent local band. A Spanish DJ spun a happy mix in a cave and I met the Fire Fairies, one of two all women teams. They shared the directions to the beach party they’re hosting on the Romanian Black Sea coast in a couple of days. Absinthe coloured the night a technicolour blur of mirror balls and fire dancing.
Waking to the sound of wind and rain on the tent, we packed quickly and wove our way out through sleepy party-goers. No showers. It’s only been one day. I don’t think I smell, yet. Do I smell? No. What if I just can’t tell any more? Geez it’s only been one day. How will I survive a week? No matter. In Prague we found extra tent pegs, changed money, ate vegetables and gave ourselves an hour to enjoy the beautiful architecture around the square and river front. Is this the tourist’s equivalent of the one night stand? We guiltily got back in the car to make it to the ossuary in Kutna Hora by 6pm.
Graeme sprints in through the rain and begs us ten minutes to see the monument of bones from over 40,000 Plague victims. Is that thunder? I run behind Alistair through the cemetery. Why am I running? I never run for my living patients and this time I’m 700 years too late. We cross the threshold and the rain abruptly gives way to the cool still air of the crypt. The attendant shuts the door behind us. I’m suddenly aware of the sound of my breathing and my shoes scuff down the dusty stone stairs. The ossuary features four pyramids of skulls and the ping pong ball shaped hip joints. Each pyramid is five meters tall – sheer scale does emphasize the horror that must have beset communities where half of the town died. But it’s the baroque flourishes that undermine the guidebook’s claim that this is a monument to the importance of life and the universality of death. Ila scallop a six-foot vase in the vestibule, the family crest of 19th century owners of the ossuary wrought in delicate fibulas and a baroque candelabra of skulls boasts ulnas as its bony bunting. We escaped outside for a glimpse of late afternoon sun and were happy to move on.
In Bratislava we checked into a backpackers and Graeme’s warning that the bathroom was the sort of place you expect to wake in a tub of ice minus a kidney didn’t stop us from enjoying the showers. Slovakia’s a blur of castles, futuristic public works projects, dilapidated splendour and that Orwellian cabbage smell. Last night in a Bratislava microbrewery we snacked on cold cuts reminiscent of New York deli food and reassured ourselves that once we make the beach party we’ll slow down.
mad_atta
Jan 20, 13, 5:35 am
Written July 24th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=810) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Transiting Transylvania Transalpina
We need to cross Romania in 24 hours to make the Fire Fairies’ party on the Black Sea Coast. In our way is over 700 km of roads and the mountains of Transylvania.
The Hungary-Romania border is demarcated by the disappearance of the motorway. The crossing was our most difficult yet and underscored that the familiarity of western Europe was behind us. At passport control two fellow ralliers from Australia scuffed their feet in the dust and anxiously awaited the verdict of the inscrutable officials. We dodge roadside hawkers and buy Rumanian Lei but not before calling our curb-side exchanger up on his attempt at a swindle.
It feels like we’ve entered Romania through the back door. The highway is a simple two lanes that passes straight through tiny hamlets. Nonetheless other drivers dart up their imagined ‘3rd lane’ and overtake on blind corners. Pat and Dave, who we met at the border, follow us in convoy. Houses are simple, few have their lights on and we see the occasional locals going about their business on horse and cart. The road is choked with trucks making the long haul across the country and bringing the most visible signs of money – neon signs announce 24-hour petrol, food and bed stops and expressionless women waiting alone or in pairs at the roadside.
The sun sets behind us painting farmland golden. As night falls the plains have become gentle hills. It’s dark and too late to set up camp so we pull into a motel. The boys order from the long list of Schnitzel on the menu and I try and figure out if a cigarette has been dropped in my Carbonara or if it is just the taste of two decades continuous smoking in this room.
The next day we climb the Transalpina highway through the Transylvanian mountains. Alistair pushes the Kangoo around the hairpin bends and steep climbs. He’s curious to see how the car performs at this altitude ahead of the more challenging Pamir highway we’ll encounter in Tajikistan. We stopped above the tree line to puff on the thin air and take photos of the panoramic views.
We make it to Vama Veche on the Black Sea Coast at 11pm. Tired after the frustrating road and an hour in a sweltering Bucharest traffic jam, we were buoyed by the cheers of other ralliers as we rolled past the bar. We pitched our tents on the beach before joining the party. We heard stories of broken clutches, seven-person push starts on the Transalpina and the team that broke their rear windshield – with their own backsides.
In the morning we woke to the sound of waves and sweltering temperatures even though the sun was still low in the sky. Relieved by a quick swim we then found espresso on the beach with our last 15 lei. Thank goodness we dodged that swindle.
The boys are growing beards and my hair’s ever more wild from the salt water. Back on the road aiming for Gallipoli tonight.
mad_atta
Jan 20, 13, 5:46 am
Written July 24th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=820) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
The track to Lone Pine climbs from the sea to the ridge running along the Gallipoli peninsula. It’s midday – the sun glares oppressively from a perfect sky and sweat trickles down our necks and backs. The dense scrub of stunted olives, oak, lavernums, rhododendrons and thorns is home to butterflies and tiny birds. It’s so peaceful here now it’s hard to imagine the staccato of cicadas' cries replaced by machine gun fire.
What’s brought us on this detour to the site of a battle almost a century old? In Australia and New Zealand our generation’s been noted for its increasing observance of ANZAC Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anzac_Day) but neither my teammates nor me are dawn service attendees. Perhaps it’s different to be here, to witness the sites for ourselves rather than to have it interpreted by politicians and officials desperate to align themselves with what is now regarded as one of the defining moments in our young countries’ history.
Instead, thanks to public radio we can listen to recordings of servicemen themselves. Here a New Zealander, Rupert Westmacott (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/witness/rss.xml), tells the BBC of landing at Gallipoli under the leadership of a sixteen year old as bullets fell around them like rain and over already drowned soldiers in the shallow lagoon. He describes himself as a lucky amputee as half the other casualties were simply thrown overboard from our own hospital ship. It doesn’t serve official purposes to remember such negligent military leadership and our own subservient foreign policy that lead to monstrous treatment of our own men and so much bloodshed. Unless, that is, the ANZAC spirit is about battling on under incompetent leadership.
The graves at ANZAC cove remark on soldiers’ bravery, “for God, King, and Country”, “his service nobly done”. Neither God nor the King could lead my generation to war, and we’re perpetually contesting the meaning of the latter. And I’m not sure that’s bad – my throat goes tight reading one direct and personal inscription, “my only beloved son”.
New Zealand historian Jock Philips (http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/anzacday/audio/2516854/jock-philips) researches letters from Gallipoli and notes the shifting identification of New Zealanders from British commanders to their brave and practical Australian comrades as the standoff wore on. This certainly rings true when on our own travels we encounter Kiwis and Aussies ready to throw themselves out into the world and prepared to deal with it on its own terms. Philips also mentions the high regard diggers had for their Turkish counterparts. In our focus on the meaning of Gallipoli for us and our relationship with Australia, we seldom think of its meaning for Turkish people. Ataturk, first leader of modern Turkey and commander of Turkish forces at Gallipoli, said this in 1934:
“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives. You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
It seems a remarkably generous statement to make after defeating an invading army.
Further up the peninsula Turkish families take picnics on a beach where concrete battlements crumble into the sea. We pick our way across the hot sand and dive into the fresh blue water of the Aegean. It’s pointless to compare one generation’s sacrifice to another’s when our circumstances are different. But if someone’s died for our freedom then we had best make the most of it – choose your own path.
Just had a read on your website - what an amazing journey! Truly truly epic! ^
mad_atta
Jan 21, 13, 2:48 am
Just had a read on your website - what an amazing journey! Truly truly epic! ^
Thanks! It was indeed epic :)
mad_atta
Jan 21, 13, 2:59 am
Written July 28th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=829) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Sleeping through the city of my dreams
Hot. Tongue stuck in mouth. Skin stuck to sheets. Why isn’t that fan working? It’s 3 am. Can’t sleep like this. I’m going outside.
That’s the fragment of febrile logic that led me to spend the rest on the night collapsed on an Istanbul balcony. It wasn’t until I awoke at dawn with an urgent need to run to the bathroom that I realized I was sick. Alistair and Graeme came for me at nine and found me drowsy, dishevelled and in no state to tour the city that only last night I had enthused was the city of my Arabian nights-inspired dreams.
In the late afternoon the guys returned with Gatorade and stories of the breathtaking interior of the 6th Century church-cum-mosque Aya Sophia. Alistair described the high vaulted interior as so vast that it was hard to find a vantage to appreciate it from. Dwarfed people speak in hushed tones on the worn flagstones, and crane to see the gold embossed Arabic inscriptions and mosaics. Graeme shows me some amazing photos before I drift off to sleep again.
Woken by the call to prayer I join the guys at dusk on a roof top restaurant. We watch a crescent moon rise over the blue mosque and chat to a Danish Rally team, The Mongol Mavericks (http://www.facebook.com/mongolmavericks). It’s Ramadan but Istanbul doesn’t seem to notice – “Who cares?” says the Turkish man at our hostel reception – as tourists knock back cocktails and shops continue a roaring trade. The next day I manage a walk around Topkapi Palace, the administrative and symbolic centre of the Ottoman Empire, and admire the emerald encrusted daggers, fine swords, and elaborate thrones. I’ve overexerted myself and fall asleep beneath an Elm in a courtyard.
Leaving for Ankara that afternoon Alistair channels his inner Turk and thrusts the Kangoo into barely perceptible gaps in the traffic. I dose in the back seat realising I’ve slept through the much of the city of my dreams. At least there’s plenty to come back for.
Ankara is a shabby overnight pit stop (showers, wifi) before another big drive on empty motorways that seem to be being constructed only minutes ahead of us. Another team, Takhi Racers (http://www.facebook.com/TakhiRacers), have left a message on our blog that they’re also bound for Cappadocia, and we meet Marco and Charis in the small town of Goreme. We stroll around the open air museum, chatting about each other’s plans while visiting the ‘fairy chimneys’. These naturally occurring towers of every conceivable shape were home to a Christian settlement as early as 100AD. The solidified volcanic ash makes a soft peach coloured rock that inhabitants dug out into rooms with adult and baby sized ledges for sleeping. They even dug out Churches with arches and pillars adorned with frescos from 1100 AD. We pitch our tents in a camping ground beneath a couple of chimneys and enjoy a beautiful sunset while taking a swim followed by a simple Turkish meal, during which our host treats us to a performance on his three stringed Turkish lute. At dawn we take a balloon ride over the landscape seeing the many different sculpted rock formations.
Leaving Cappadocia marked our departure from the tourist trail and since then travel has require perceptibly more effort. Campsites are difficult to find and often offer cabins rather than tent sites, or semi-permanent tents decked out with lounge furniture and televisions. After a couple of failed attempts to camp on the Black Sea Coast we had to crash in a hotel on the street where all of Giresun’s old men meet to play cards and drink tea. The next night in Erzurum we camped in an abandoned carnival behind a truck stop and under the flight path of the nearby airport. Now most restaurants are closed except, surprisingly, sweet shops, so yesterday’s lunch was custard and bon bons.
It was at Trabzon that Alistair noticed a 10 cm crack low in the windshield, just under the driver’s wiper. Reluctantly abandoning ideas of a final Black Sea swim, Graeme navigated us to a Renault centre handily situated on a street busy with the clamour of car workshops. Our worries that Ramadan would mean slow service were unfounded. A crowd of mechanics swarms around the car, and within minutes lift the damaged windshield off. Through sign language, recourse to a phrasebook, and the mechanics quoting the price by writing on the dusty Kangoo’s bonnet we negotiate the repairs. I’m starting to appreciate the car’s livery as more than just aesthetics. It gets us attention – especially from car enthusiasts, and we may well be dependent on their help in the future. The mechanics took a lot of interest in the comical concept of a Kangoo with a snorkel, and we take out the map of Mongolia to illustrate the river crossings. Graeme’s been collecting stickers of the flag for every country we visit, so we can point to our journey so far. As we meet other teams, many with four or five people sandwiched into truly tiny cars, we also realise the relative luxury of the Kangoo’s surprisingly cavernous interior. We even meet a team of Brits driving to Mongolia in a hand-made dune buggy, a lashed-together assortment of parts from postwar military vehicles and expired VW Beetles, without even the luxury of a windscreen.
Delayed by the repairs and a detour to Sumela Monastary we drove at night through the Kackar mountains, reaching an altitude of 2400m before descending into Erzurum. And the following morning we climbed the citadel to look out over the dusty plains to the distant mountains. Connecting routes between Persia, Russia and Constantinople the city has a rich history. We visit a madrasa exhibiting the scholarship, weaving and metal work of the area before taking the afternoon drive to camp near the Iranian border.
Dogubayazit is a Kurdish settlement under mount Ararat. The extinct volcano is snow capped and exerts a powerful presence over the town below. The town is ramshackle and slum like and heavily militarised. I counted over thirty tanks and massive barracks. We camp outside the town by a hill top palace in a stand of poplars watered by a mountain spring. We pitch our tents in the mosquito infested site and make dinner shooing away the mangy dogs. We’re joined by Polish motorcycle tourists hoping to ride up Mt Ararat and they help us polish off the whisky, gin and red wine that we’ve carried since Europe, but which can travel with us no further. Tomorrow we’re crossing into Iran which we’re all looking forward to, provided we can make it through the border and its reports of scams, thefts, full car customs inspections and bureaucratic hurdles.
mad_atta
Jan 21, 13, 3:54 am
Written August 4th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=844) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Hi Alice, The WordPress site is blocked here in Iran so hope you don’t mind uploading this post to our blog using the instructions I’ve sent. Facebook is also blocked so it would be great if you could do the sharing too using my log in.
Thanks so much A
PS. Destroy after Reading
Destroy after reading
There’s a three-mile queue of trucks on the Turkish side of the Iranian border and it looks like they’re going nowhere. Drivers rest in their cabs and Kurdish women and children beg and sell food. No signs. No man’s land. We’re nervous about this reputedly hard border crossing – and even though we’ve followed instructions on getting visas, carnet and customs to the letter, anything could go wrong. And border processes are inscrutable, perhaps deliberately so. We’re lucky to have advice passed on from a friend via Alistair’s cousin Penny: the car entry is up past the trucks. We’re relieved as the trucks look like they’ve been waiting for days.
We drive up the wrong side of the highway until we see the green white and red flags, the large Arabic inscriptions, the pictures of the Ayatollah. We pass the first test and work out the un-uniformed person asking for our customs papers is actually a money-changer. We’re relieved when the police inspection of our car turns out to be cursory, having heard other teams have had gear stolen at the border. The police wave Graeme and I inside to passport control but I wait outside and to signal to Alistair where to go when the guard releases him. Alistair stares blankly at me then smiles… and then as he approaches he says, “I was wondering why that friendly local woman was waving at me”. I’m shocked my headscarf makes me that unrecognizable. Wearing a headscarf has transformed me to self conscious and awkward teenager. I’m both convinced it is ugly and perpetually worried it will fall off.
Inside the police introduce Alistair to a tall thick-set man in a flashy shirt and jeans. His giant pecs and biceps are an ostentatious display of protein consumption among the otherwise runty locals. The words Organized Crime flash in my brain. He’s already engaged Alistair in a conversation that’s taking place a 18 inches above my head. “Excuse me, why aren’t you wearing a uniform, who are you?” I squeak from below but I’m not really able to carry my back-pack and look up with this stupid headscarf on. Mr Organized Crime mutters something about “working here” and “helping people”. (“People, good people” supplies Marlin Brando in the conversation happening within my headscarf.) Back up at altitude, Mr Organized Crime begins a well-rehearsed routine about how we have to do such and such and Alistair’s engaged in working out the logistics. Graeme and I have to wait here while Alistair gets taken into a small room somewhere else. We meet a friendly man who talks to us at length about places to visit in Iran. He seems really nice, but borders are such suspicious places that when he says goodbye and leaves the waiting room for one of the offices we wonder if he was profiling us. Later Mr OC returns without Alistair and waves our passports at the Immigration Officer, mutters something and leaves. Graeme spies a Kurdish man squatting just outside passport control.
Alistair returns later, USD$70 poorer, and we discover our passports aren’t even being processed - so much for help. We join a short but slow moving queue and inch our way to the front where we learn that New Zealand isn’t listed in the Immigration computer system. We spell it clearly, we show our visas, half an hour passes. Maybe the computer isn’t working. It’s Ramadan and everyone is tired. Eventually everyone agrees we can be recorded as Australians. The squatting Kurdish man sees his moment and runs through the “sterile zone”, past surprised guards to… freedom?
We need to change money and this time, determined not to be scammed, we go to the bank and steadfastly decline what we think are too-good-to-be-true claims by the money-changers. Wrong again – you have two thirds of the purchasing power at the bank compared to the black market, something we didn’t learn till in Tabriz the next day. In any case we have enough money and get flagged down by another un-uniformed man who requests we drive to three different points to buy insurance, which we do. We slump back in our seats tired, hot, thirsty and disappointed about having to pay bribes. But our spirits rise as every second local shouts “welcome to Iran” as they drive past. The Kangoo eats up the miles from the boarder town to Tabriz. There are bad days on the road but we always get to drive away from them.
mad_atta
Jan 22, 13, 3:43 am
Written August 7th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=849) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Fasting and Feasting
We stumble out of Tehran’s Museum of Antiquities into a small park centred on a fountain. It’s Ramadan, 40 degrees and we’ve set an ambitious schedule of sightseeing for our so-called rest day. We try to cool off in the park while waiting to be picked up. Our plan for a sneaky Sprite in the museum toilets has been thwarted by the museum guards insisting we check in our bags. Had I already read Shahriar Mandanipour’s description of the museum in Censoring an Iranian Love Story (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/06/29/090629crbo_books_wood) I would know this is no place for a lovers’ rendezvous nor furtive drinking.
In the park, armed police guard the gate and adjacent buildings. We find a shady position on the lawn. The fountain’s mist cools the air but I wish I didn’t hear the tinkle of water. It’s too uncomfortable to talk and I can feel a headache starting. I’m so thirsty. Minutes tick by and I start to see what’s really happening in the park. A woman brazenly swigs on bottled water before secreting it in the folds of her chador; young men pretend to wash their face at a tap but furtively throw back big gulps; the teens on the bench seat have a straw into their bag; the man sitting against the back wall has a Pepsi behind his briefcase. Everyone is drinking in spite of the prohibition. Water, water everywhere!
Life in Iran is conducted in the grey zone between the strict rules of the Islamic Republic and what can be gotten away with. We met DIY winemakers, atheists and carpet salesmen who cry “Kia Ora” and close us inside their shop to share tea during fasting times. That isn’t to say the regime doesn’t have a big impact: we also met youths injured by police violence and people whose land and possessions were confiscated during the revolution. As threats of war between the US and Iran (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/world/middleeast/united-states-ambassador-dan-shapiro-to-israel-speaks-of-military-option-for-iran.html?pagewanted=all) resurface it seems important to note Iranian people have lives as rich and colourful as our own in spite of the brutality of their government.
Tabriz, several hundred kilometres from the Turkish border, was the first city we visited. Arriving after dark in a new city, navigating to the centre and searching for accommodation without bookings is tough, no matter how many times we do it, though ever-helpful Iranians obligingly provide alternative accommodation options and directions. This time we’re lucky: the second hotel we try can host us, albeit in separate rooms and passports must be deposited at reception. If I weren’t so tired I’d be amused that requiring such sleeping arrangements has actually increased the chance that mortal sins are committed in the room next to mine. But no time for subversive thoughts, we follow our noses around the neighbourhood sniffing out the best kebab from the street vendors. Young men in T-shirts and jeans walk the street in groups. Women are out with their husbands and while some wear the chador, others wear a headscarf and a long shirt or trench as a coverall.
The following morning we explored the World Heritage-listed bazaar where, unlike Istanbul, we don’t see a single other tourist. Silver and goldsmiths, grocers, wool merchants, perfume makers and carpet shops are busy trading. In corridors of spices I remember the feasting scenes of A Thousand And One Nights: orange blossom, almond, dried burberry, rose petals, pistachio, saffron, cardamom and cinnamon. There are as many stalls selling bolts of fabric or sewing equipment as there are for mass-produced clothes. We buy bread and a sweet almond paste coloured with saffron for the road.
From Tabriz we drive through dry hills, then over a rugged mountain range to Ramsar on the Caspian Coast. The Kangoo reaches its highest altitudes so far, and we find a vertiginous viewpoint to pull over, admire the parched landscape and furtively snack. Fellow travellers wave, admire the car and pull along side us to ask where we’re from and welcome us to the country. It’s lovely but I wish they’d keep their eye on the road. In Ramsar we’re met by Ariane, the daughter of Alistair’s mother’s school friend. Ariane has generously travelled for hours from Tehran to host us for two nights at her family’s Caspian coast villa before travelling with us to Tehran where we stayed with her parents Mahine and Iraj.
Ariane treats us to an amazing dinner of traditional Caspian dishes, including aubergine stew (mirza ghasemi), rice with a savory crust from the pan (tahdig), a salad of fresh parsley, tarragon, coriander and basil and pickles and surprisingly delicious fermented garlic. Conscious of culinary deprivation to come, we eagerly devour everything. Above us a painting of a country scene depicts the tea plantations, which along with rice and oranges were specialities of temperate Northern Iran. Since then the productive land has been nationalised and given to the regimen’s apparatchiks, with paddies and plantations replaced by gaudy real estate developments. We give our own inner property magnates free rein in the first of many hard fought games of Monopoly Deal.
We awake from a much-needed sleep in to admire views of the Caspian from atop the green hills. I’m relieved the guys have been put off sea swimming by reports of pollution as I’d have to swim fully clothed. We happily spend the day by the pool, shielded from the neighbours by a two-story privacy screen of course. The day is punctuated by more delicious food from Ibrahim’s kitchen and we enjoy a thoroughly lazy day. But the beach house was just an entrée to Mahime and Iraj’s hospitality in Tehran, where we head the following day, over another incredible mountain road. Amidst impressive contemporary Iranian art we enjoyed conversation about their lives in Tehran and they heard stories of our travels. Dinner was wonderful Persian dolmas and a dessert of traditional rose water and nougat flavoured ice cream.
The following day we’re racing to see Tehran’s sites in one day. The Museum of Glass and Ceramics houses delicate perfume bottles that predate Christ, and ceramics over seven millennia old. We get lost in the world’s largest Bazaar and found again by a wily carpet salesman whose sales pitch is a theatrical masterpiece. Although we’re tired by the time we reach the Museum of Antiquities, the bas reliefs from the ancient city of Persepolis are incredible, and Alistair is fascinated to find what appears to be the mummified remains of Richard Branson (complete with long blonde hair and beard), which is uncannily well preserved salt miner from the 3rd or 4th century.
Red-lime-yellow, navy-peach-orca, blue-black-orange. The twelve screen prints are the most impressive collection of Warhol’s we’ve seen – perhaps there’s something new to think about Warhol and his studies of iconography here. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s building and collection was developed by the West infatuated Shah. There have been few acquisitions since the Islamic Revolution, and according to guidebooks the collection is seldom on display. Mao smiles softly from each portrait. I wonder if he’s happy here.
mad_atta
Jan 22, 13, 4:08 am
Written August 7th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=874) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Midnight at the Oasis
In Isfahan’s Hotel Totia(tarian) the surly receptionist observes guests on 35 CCTV cameras. Our passports are taken at check in and our car’s plate number reported to the police. The Wifi is patchy and a combination of poor bandwidth and censorship prevents us from accessing our blog. I miss the freedom of my chadoor (Chadoor means both the full length black coverall that Iranian women wear as well as the Farsi word for tent, clearly I mean the latter). But there are no campgrounds in Iran and pitching our tent on the roadside risks a late night interaction with the police that we’re unwilling to risk.
From Tehran we’ve driven south to explore Isfahan, Yazd and the oasis town Garmeh before turning north to Mashad and the Turkmenistan border. We wonder if we’re the southernmost rally team and perhaps the slowest as friends text and post updates from Central Asia.
In Isfahan, the former Safavid capital we explore the world’s second largest square and its attached Jameh mosque. The mosque was built in the 11th century by Seljuks but repaired during the Mongol and Savafid eras and is considered to exemplify the architecture of each period. The mosaics include ancient and Arabic scripts, elaborate botanical designs and geometric patterns. Graeme is in photographic heaven.
At dusk we walk through the bridges that cross the now dry Zayandeh river. We pose for photos within their beautiful arches and watch children play on the steps where once they would have bathed or fished. We meet Ali, a high school student and son of an English teacher who shared his impressive knowledge of Persian history and the development of Farsi. We felt both lucky to meet such an articulate guide and impressed by such a clever young man. Good luck for the future from your Kiwi friends Ali!
After dinner we walk home back through the square. The 16th century polo games played here are remembered in the remaining goal posts and mosaics, but tonight now families congregate to break their fast with picnics on the massive lawn. An 11 year old girl skips up beside Alistair and I to talk. She’s soon joined by a cluster of teens, a man carrying his baby daughter, a couple of old men. The 11 year old has the best English so translates for the small crowd their questions about where are we from, how old are we and inevitably… are we married?
Mirages shimmer on the roadside. When we draw near we see low but craggy mountains skirted in dust but often they’re obscured in the desert haze. The heat raises small columns of dust in twisters. Inside the car it’s like an oven, turning the fan on is as helpful as cooling off under a hairdryer. Graeme, I’m sorry I laughed at your misting fan and now its broken. I try and sit very still and limit how often I lick my lips or peel my full length shirt off my back. I also limit how often I think about how uncomfortable I am… because there are hotter deserts to come.
The drive from Isfahan to Yazd is interrupted by a motorcyclist who pulls alongside and flags us down at Toudeshk. Mohamed invites us to the guesthouse he runs (Tak-Taku Guesthouse) to meet his family. Explaining that we have a booking in Yazd we decide it would be a welcome break from the afternoon heat. We’re taken through the narrow streets of mudbrick houses to one built around a courtyard where pomegranates grow. Persian rugs and cushions are laid in the shaded veranda. We sit and stop for tea and meet the family. The boys talk about cars, roads and travel times while I get to cradle a beautiful 30-day-old baby with lots of black hair and a gold ear piercing. His aunty speaks a little English and we talk a little about families, babies and pomegranates. The guest rooms look comfortable and clean and it’s reluctantly that we leave for Yazd knowing the homestay offers a special experience. Nonetheless we had a pleasant stay in a courtyard style hotel in Yazd and enjoyed exploring the network of tiny mudbrick allys in the still lived in old town.
In the morning we set out to find the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence. We have some sketchy directions from our hotelier but no proper map online or in guide-books. After driving for ten minutes on the wrong road out of town we turn back, try another, then another searching for the ancient construction atop a low hill that overlooks the city. Eventually we find it at N31°49.284’ and E54°21.599’. The wind is cooling but spectacularly dry. It feels sharp in our nostrils and no sooner do we break a sweat scrambling up the hill than the moisture is swept from our skin. A circular mudbrick wall crowns the hill and within its walls is a pit where the corpses of believers were left for the elements to dispose of. Despite the encroaching apartment blocks it is still an atmospheric place.
In the late afternoon we leave Yazd and travel through the pinks, oranges, browns and blues of the desert. To reach Garmeh we turn west as the sun sets and interrupt a herd of camels crossing the highway. We admire how in spite of their awkward gait they glide across the sand hills but not the funky smell.
In Garmeh we relax in a guest house and after dinner our host performs traditional Persian music. First on a drum that looks like a tamborine with small chains taking the place of symbols and then percussing the neck and oponings of two glazed vases. He wishes us good night and retires to sleep beneath a mosquito net on the roof. We make ourselves comfortable on the Persian rugs.
I unpack into the mudbrick alcoves of my tiny room. A pile of mattresses prevents me from rolling down the sloped tunnel in the left wall. I can just lie flat with a screened window at my feet. A hot breeze blows off the nearby mountains and plays with my silk sleeping bag liner. I’m too excited making out the stars in the sky and the date palms to get to sleep. When I finally doze off it’s the day before our longest drive yet.
mad_atta
Jan 22, 13, 4:20 am
Written August 10th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=900) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Hi from the sweltering back seat. Today’s our longest drive so far: 750 km from Garmeh’s Oasis to Mashhad. If like me you break long journeys with mental arithmetic of the distance covered here are Khan Tiki Tours’ stats on today, day 24 of our journey.
Distance travelled so far: 8,380km
Estimated total distance: 19,200km
Day 24. (Including 3 non driving days)
Highest altitude: 2650m (between Rasht and Tehran).
Litres of petrol consumed: 822.35.
Fastest motorway: approaching Ankara from the West - Kangoo cracks the ton (100mph) on looooong downhill section
Best road: the wide empty race strip into Turkey from Bulgaria takes you across basins and over hills. At dusk many of the hilltops bore the silhouettes of mosques.
Tightest fit: through mudbrick lanes in Yazd’s old city
Craziest pursuit: following local on scooter the wrong way up a dual carriage-way
Surrealist moment: following truck clearly driven by chickens in Ankara.
Closest shave: scraped by bus before leaving Bruton, UK
We’ve mentioned previously the fantastic reception we’ve received in Iran and the mechanics are no exception. Yesterday we had a ten-minute pit stop where five guys crowded us at the pump. With sign language we explained our travels and our strategy for overtaking in a right hand drive (the passenger tells the driver when its safe to pull out). Our friends gave us plenty of smiles and the directions to a workshop around the corner where these two excitedly peered under the bonnet before escorting us further down the road where their friend could top our oil up.
The danger of breakdown in the desert was apparent today when we stopped between Khor and Tabas at a massive salt lake. The salt crusted like paving stones, our tyres flattening the ridges but the crystals in the centre were unbreakable. The only signs of life were the carcasses of camels. Iran has given us the chance to try desert driving with the reassurance of good roads and regular petrol stations. Two thirds of the back seat are folded, and we’ve wedged two 25 litre plastic jerry cans of water between the seat and our packs in the back. When I say we, I mean Graeme, the mastermind of our car packing routine – no doubt the fruits of years of Tetris playing. We’re not yet concerned enough to fill our metal jerry can with fuel. In spite of the water’s extra weight our fuel consumption’s been relatively constant. We won’t win the hearts of environmentalists: we average 11 km to the litre.
The roads in Iran are really good. In the desert we get down to single carriageways but that’s fine as there is little traffic. We don’t get charged at toll stops and though there have been plenty of police stops we’ve got by after showing our papers every time. Tehran was a different story, nestled within a web of motorways with no warning of exits and intersections. Locals overcame the late warnings by reversing up the freeway to have another go but we took the safe route and tried for the exit 3 times! The other drivers are quite unpredictable and pedestrians are constantly trying to martyr themselves under the Kangoo.
Most of the time the Kangoo performs really well. We had read reports of Kangoos overheating but so far we haven’t had any such problems. That’s until we hit a hill or a head wind and Alistair swears we haven’t got enough power. How then did we manage to be stopped for speeding in our overloaded 1.2L car I wonder?
We’re perpetually grateful for the excellent work done by Rob at Bruton Motors. In Turkey we did quite a few night drives including on mountain roads so the spotlights were really handy. Other modifications including the sump guard and snorkel probably won’t be tested till Mongolia.
Written August 12th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=885) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Getting deported from Iran (and other slight exaggerations)
We let ourselves pay far too much for a hotel in Ashgabat and settle for dinner at the British pub. After the last 24 crazy hours it’s time to relax. The food, beer and the round of Panadol I dished out for everyone in the parking lot start to take effect: we can talk again. We review what must have been the strangest day of travel we’ve experienced so far.
At sunset yesterday we approached Mashhad, our last stop in Iran. We knew it was a religious site and had laughed when Akbar in Bruton’s Sun pub in Somerset insisted we visit because "five billion people" had visited in the last year. Now, as we creep through the traffic, I’m ready to believe his hyperbole. Four lanes of traffic form where there should be two and the traffic lights take an eternity. When the lights finally turn green families of pedestrians take the opportunity to walk in front with their caravan of prams and wheelchairs. I hear fragments of different Arabic accents – we are inadvertent pilgrims to Islam’s third most holy site. The gold dome of the mosque is visible in the distance but as we approach it the road descends to an underground roundabout. We find our way out, off the main streets into the little alleys that surround the mosque and adjacent hotels. But they too are blocked with pilgrims walking five abreast and wearing Arabic garb. For almost an hour we weave through the crowds, hoping we’re going the right way. Alistair contains the urge to step on the gas and lean on the horn. I’m reminded of the number of pilgrims in Mecca that die in stampedes and am starting to understand how it happens.
We try three different hotels starting with our best ‘Assalamaleikum!’ at reception but are very quickly turned down. Everywhere is full. Graeme jokes we’re in Bethlehem for Christmas. In any case the first hotel smelled of sewage and the second one of a gas leak so it’s probably best to keep looking. Eventually we find somewhere that it meets minimal standards and head out for sHAM pizza where halal mystery meat is scattered on circular pastry. We’re all feeling tired from the longest day of driving so far. Back to the hotel. Time to wash up. Hold your nose in the bathroom. Tomorrow’s drinking water in the fridge. Ear plugs in. Lights out.
When the alarm rings we find this hotel doesn’t exempt travellers from the requirement to fast, meaning no breakfast for us. We scoff down sHAM leftovers and the boys go to the Mosque. After ten days in Iran I’m over the novelty and fun of the veil, and have come to resent it for the inhibiting nuisance it is. I’m happy writing to you, Dear Reader, in air-conditioned comfort rather than seeing another mosaic through a pinhole. When Alistair and Graeme return with stories of being shepherded out of the mosque proper to take an official tour of the library and other secondary structures deemed suitable for nonbelievers, I feel like I haven’t missed much and we pack into the Kangoo and attempt to pick our way out of the labyrinth.
We make good progress out of town along the motorway. When we turn to the northeast we quickly ascend beautiful mountains. As the landscape changed we get the first hints of a different way of life. A few flocks of sheep are visible on the hillside and from a distance we see clusters of tents. Our next stop is Turkmenistan where we have letters of invitation and plan to secure transit visas. It’s another notoriously difficult border but after Iran we’re prepared to suffer bureaucracy to experience a new country and culture. Just an hour into the beautiful mountains and we’re surprised to hit a police stop. We had anticipated a small town to lunch in but it turns out we’re already at the border. It’s just after 2pm. We pull over and rearrange the car, hiding our valuables from light fingered customs officers and splitting our money between us so that no-one can be leaned on for too much cash. We drive on to the hilltop border crossing.
The Iranian side is slow and I wonder if we’ll be left in no-man’s-land at 6pm when the crossing shuts. We’re at the back of a long queue of locals. We’re hungry. We’re hot. Graeme and I start sniping at each other. Alistair starts winding up Graeme. I decide to ignore them and hold my place in the queue displaying kind of goody good behaviour that is in itself annoying. Graeme and I make to the last Iranian police check while Alistair is held with the car. The police inspect our passports, “are you married?,” They gesture with interlocked fingers.
“No, we are friends…”
“This is a problem in Iran… Big problem…,” states the senior, or at least fattest, officer.
“Really?”, Graeme asks, credulously.
“We deport you. Not married,” smirks the officer.
“Okay,” I force my biggest smile and reach for our passports, “You deport us to Turkmenistan”. We share a laugh and I take the final five steps and whip off the stupid headscarf.
Alistair drives the Kangoo through the crossing under the direction of a young officer with North Korean hand gestures. The theatre begins again on the Turkmenistan side when we’re greeted by the golden-toothed grin of a pre-pubescent guard who attempted to extort ten dollars from us, perhaps to pay for more status-enhancing dental work. We pretend to forget the request and avoid paying even though my letter of invitation had the incorrect date of birth on it. In fact they helpfully called Ashgabat to confirm my right to enter. It always pays to expect the best of fellow humans. We passed through the rest of the border without many problems except that Alistair was stuck with the car behind 15 four-wheel-drive tourists who had been at the crossing since 9am. Graeme and I were thirsty and starving when we reconnected with the car as the sun set.
The drive to Ashgabat was otherworldly. The golden sun bathed the mountains as we descended, rapidly gulping back slugs of water to stave off dehydration headaches and eating what scraps of nuts and half a bag of chips we had secreted in the car. We swung into a valley to see the white marble and gold of Ashgabat shining on the edge of the plain.
We follow the yellow brick road to the centre of the city, trying to find what the guidebook claims is the last remaining budget accommodation option in this nouveaux-riche post-Soviet petro-state. Eerily empty grand boulevards span the central city, lined by modern renderings of Parisian light fixtures and extravagant topiaries.
Every ministry is a marble edifice replete with flags, fountains, and gold fixtures. I’m trying to navigate using the Lonely Planet map and the palace should be somewhere here… but there are no street names and every building looks like a f*** palace. Police are on every corner and their directions suggest no we cannot drive in front of the palace. And we’re not allowed to stop for photos so Graeme’s doing his best from the moving car. I’m losing it. I’m so hungry. I don’t think this backpackers exists any more – it’s been bulldozed to make way for more statues of golden horses and gleaming domes. Pull over. Take stock. Agree lets go for a cheap hotel instead. We try three including a couple of dubious ex-soviet affairs but no room. Niet. Not possible. And no negotiation on price because “Government sets price”.
When we collapse in bed its not under the twinkling stars but the sparkle of a thousand government eyes. No matter – it’s a decent mattress and nice linen. Asleep.
mad_atta
Jan 23, 13, 4:32 am
Written August 16th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=907) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Highway to Hell
Few changes are as abrupt as that we witnessed driving out of Turkmenistan’s grandiose capital Ashgabat. The tree lined city streets and irrigated fields of the city fringe rapidly change to the low dunes of the desert. Villages are few and our sense of being under surveillance is replaced by an equally oppressive sense of isolation. On the roadside, sparse scrub has been augmented with foot high walls of reeds – vain attempts to stop the desert from advancing over the decaying asphalt. Alistair weaves around potholes and lumps. Although we’ve covered much of the distance to Mongolia the driving now becomes slower and more challenging.
We were happy to leave the bizarre capital where police patrolled every corner and the heavily censored internet could only be accessed by submitting our passports. Earlier I had been writing in the shade of a tree while Graeme and Alistair drove the city trying to fill our jerry can with cheap petrol. They returned to re-enact the comic scene at the petrol station: Graeme raises the hood and calls for assistance while Alistair furtively pumps into the can. He’s interrupted after just five litres and his best efforts to play dumb and keep pumping lead to the attendant to pull the pump from his hands and gesture at the CCTV cameras with which the government polices the distribution of its subsidized petrol.
On the highway we spy an over burdened Suzuki Alto making heavy work of the potholes. We pull along side Adam, Alasdair and Jeff, a South African Mongol Rally team called Three Zulu Fellas and a Vuvuzela. They’re also on the way to the Gates of Hell at Darvaza so we decide to convoy the rest of the way. Our destination is a crater at the site of a gas drilling rig collapse. With dangerous quantities of methane discharging from the crater, geologists lit the gas leak – anticipating the reservoir would be consumed in days. But such is the extent of the country’s natural gas reservoirs that forty years later the crater continues to burn, and attract Turkmenistan’s few independent tourists.
As sunset paints the dusty horizon alight we’re flagged down by a local who offers to take us to the crater in his Soviet era four-wheel-drive. Parking at his house we squeeze into the 4WD and bounce over the sandy track towards an orange glow in the eastern sky. We’re dropped off and our guide directs us to camp far from the dangerous gassy emissions of the crater and leaves us with an arrangement to return the next morning.
Scrambling over a dune we see the bright perimeter of the crater in the darkness. It’s 70 meters across. Standing downwind we catch fumes of gas and drawing near it’s so hot it hurts to look. Tongues of flames churn in a fiery concrete mixer sized discharge at the centre, and hundreds of smaller flames line the crater floor and walls. I eye the unfenced edge and its precipitous drop nervously and stand back. The boys are brave, and I don’t like to watch our new friend Alasdair planking near the edge. When everyone’s taken their pictures I’m relieved to be turning back when two tiny eyes sparkle at me from the sand. Is it a scorpion? Graeme fixes it in his headlights – worse, it’s a spider three inches across. The guys are crowding for photos of this pale desert dweller and debating if it’s a camel spider. I gulp and stare off into the darkness, staving off the dread and knowing that if I let myself think about the spider my mind will be compelled to think of its hairy body, its scuttley gait, its pincers and its beady eyes. I look out into the darkness only to see they’re everywhere – pairs of twinkling eyes in every direction! In just a couple of minutes I’ve counted twenty. I would have preferred a mind full of scorpions.
A red moon rises over the crater as we cook dinner. The wind grows stronger and grains of sand sting our skin and creep through our hair. We struggle to guard our camp cooker from the wind and keep the sand from our supplies. After shovelling back the gritty food we skip conversation and retreat to our tents. I try to sleep in the heat of my tent as the tent flaps and flutters, each gust forcing tiny particles through the tent and coating my face in dust. Insomnia. Is this the Gate of Hell or the door to Room 101 where Orwell’s fictitious dictatorship would subject you to the the thing you feared the most? Insomnia and paranoia. How did they know about the spiders?
When morning comes we do the best we can to get sand out of our tents and we’re driven back to our cars. Our driver’s house is next to the highway, with a camel, small drove of goats and a water tank that must depend on tanker visits. His smile comes with wrinkles wrought in a hundred dust storms and his face muscles are wasted with age. Whisps of white hair fringe his skull cap and his eyes are both sloped and hazel, reminders of the intersection of Turkic and Mongolian peoples in this region. He invites us into his yurt for a breakfast of coffee and bread. Inside we can discern the design introduced by marauding Mongols that was adopted by the region’s nomadic herdsmen. Two collapsible semicircular lattices that join to form a circular wall that supports a crown, all clad with hides. The dirt floor is covered in beautiful carpets. It’s hard to reconcile such a modest way of life with the grandiosity of Ashgabat. The crater is seared in my memory – it’s difficult to imagine a better symbol of wasted resources.
We left the yurt with the sense that Mongolia was nearer than ever, even though ahead lie thousands of miles of terrible roads and the still unresolved question of whether we should travel through the Pamir mountains in Tajikistan. We struck out into the desert for the Uzbekistan border crossing and the silk road city Khiva.
Written August 19th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=914) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Stalin’s Chessboard
Ghengis Khan was so impressed by Bukhara’s minaret he ordered it be spared though the rest of the city was razed. The monument was also allowed to survive the Soviet era, but perhaps for more ideological reasons. In Imperium the Polish Foreign Correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinsky’s observes during his 1967 visit to Bukhara a teacher leading a class through the Registan’s dungeons to illustrate the horrors of feudalism. The minaret’s intricate brickwork still towers over the Registan and sun baked mudbrick of the old city. Today nobody mentions the Marxist dialectic to the crowds of fly-in European tourists that are so noticeable to us after two weeks spent in countries far off the tourist trail. But nor have worshippers returned to the mosques in the post-Soviet era: Uzbeks join us as tourists, their religion practiced more quietly than the Islam we’ve encountered in Turkey and Iran. The Uzbek cities of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand are rocks around which the tides of regional dynasties have ebbed and flowed: Greeks, Persians, Mongols, Arabs, Timurids, Russians. These past power struggles continue to cast a shadow over peace in the region and, as it happens, our own plans.
First impressions of Uzbekistan are naked boys clustered atop irrigation pipes taking turns at diving into culverts below, their bodies gold in the late afternoon sun. The green backdrop is a relief after the heat of the desert, though Alistair is quick to remind me that these irrigation dependent cotton plantations have drained the Aral Sea. We ask directions to Khiva’s old city from a woman at the roadside while her children play under a hose. She points us on and gives the gift of a gold-toothed smile and a bunch of grapes. We make the turn she described and gasp at the sight that must have greeted centuries of thirsty travelers: minarets silhouetted in the setting sun atop jagged fortifications. I’m sick again, the legacy of a fly blown lunch in Turkmenistan, and can’t follow Graeme on a climb of the old city walls. I find some shade to admire the unfinished Kalta Minor minaret. It’s wide base of turquoise glazed brick testifies to the failed ambitions of the 19th century Khan who wanted a minaret tall enough to be seen from Bukhara.
The next day, Alistair and Graeme bring me bottles of soda and thus fortified we hit the road – the worst yet – for a long, bumpy drive past deserted petrol stations. We’ve pulled up at a few where people rest in the shade of the forecourt but nobody’s pumping. We try to join a long queue of cars at one station but Graeme returns from the pumps reporting no gas and concerned a brawl is about to break out. We eventually strike it lucky and bump along for a lazy hot stay in Bukhara.
We take in the Registan and at midday find Arabic coffee served with sesame halva, walnuts and raisins. The afternoon then calls for a shady spot to drink the weak local beer. In the town square a seven hundred year old mulberry tree testifies to the cut throat nature of ancient trade: over centuries merchants learnt the secrets of Chinese silk production and smuggled worms and mulberry seeds back to their homes. These germinated Bukhara’s industry in beautiful red silk carpets that are still sought after. The trade route is dead but the city continues to draw visitors. We meet Australian fellow ralliers Doug and Dave (of Lyons vs. Yaks), regroup with the Brit dune buggy drivers Glen and Paul again (last seen in Turkey, now with a second engine rebuild behind them), as well as meeting Germans Paul and Maurice who are touring in an astonishingly well equipped Mercedes G-Wagen and Daniel the Australian cyclist who’s already almost a year from home. Over dinner it’s not long before the conversation turns to the situation in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. Daniel cycled through the week before without any problems, and the Germans met someone who claimed they had been there last week. I’m a little fed up with the way our hopes of traveling the world’s second highest highway ride this rollercoaster of rumours. Last night I reviewed the news: on July 21 a government official stationed in Khorog died in uncertain circumstances, the government alleges that he was killed by a local warlord. The government responded by closing the borders and conducting what is euphemistically called a security operation that resulted in an unknown number of deaths.
Stalin engineered a Republic of Tajikstan across ethnic boundaries, and Central Asia is still grappling with the consequences today. Tajiks lost their historic cities of Samarkand and Bukhara to Uzbekistan and gained the Pamir region. The Pamiri minority have sought independence and today it’s called Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast. We have a visa for Tajikistan and an additional entry permit to the GBAO. Our planned route was through the regional capital Khorog and along the Wakhan Valley (also the Afghan border). It’s a challenging road through high passes, spectacular scenery, ancient stuptas where Marco Polo visited and the cross-border market, which is as close to Afghanistan as we can get.
Since the recent killings, foreigners have been evacuated, phone and internet cut and the media can’t enter. The New Zealand, Australian and British Governments advise against travel to the GBAO. I’m nervously playing out scenarios that include death, kidnapping, gunfire and the much more likely situation that our presence is misinterpreted by either faction. For once I’m pleased when the conversation changes to car repairs. We drink a lot of beers, eat the local specialities shashlik and plov and hand over fistfuls of worthless Som when its time to pay.
Samarkand. Samarkand. I repeat the name to myself as we drive. Its sibilance hisses with desert heat and all the mystique of the Silk Road. Just when you think you’ve seen all the mosques you ever care to we find the largest yet with beautiful blue corrugated domes. Alistair’s the only one of us tall enough to clamber to the top of a statue of Timur (Tamerlane) who built a dynasty on bloody conquests and yet commissioned much of the architecture we just admired.
Back in the hotel Alistair searches online for news of the GBAO border opening, and pores over the map, mentally constructing alternative routes. He’s been planning this for so long and it would be a shame to come this far and not cross the Pamirs. We always knew there’d be some risk and those government warnings are unreliable and conservative. If willpower could open the border Ali could do it. Open sesame.
“Let’s see what we can find out in Dushanbe,” I say, evading a specific discussion about routes that can only get our hopes up again. If the border is open I can’t imagine how Alistair and I are going to negotiate this, because his determination to go is matched by my determination not to. He just doesn’t know this yet.
Written August 25th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=924) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Our new friend sits next to me, chatting happily though it must be obvious we don’t understand him. Alistair, Graeme and I have exchanged names with him and used the Russian phrasebook to learn he is a ‘banker’, but that’s the best we can do. Dubious career claims aside, he seems nice enough. He calls the waitress for extra shashlik although we have plenty of the greasy white meat skewers, and he keeps filling my glass with unfiltered water that I’m trying to avoid. Now he’s talking to me about goodness knows what. Chew, swallow, try to smile politely. Then, all too suddenly, his meaning becomes clear when he reaches for my thigh and two greasy shashliky lips start drifting towards my face. I throw my hands up, Graeme says, “No”. We pay the bill and make a hasty exit from Istaravshan’s bazaar.
Travellers either choose their path or decide to see where the road takes them. So far we’ve been plugged into the industry of guidebooks, websites and travellers’ grapevines that advise us on everything from routes, road conditions, petrol prices, scams, border crossings, accommodation and cultural practices. With research and planning we’ve packed in a lifetime’s worth of experiences and sights plus avoided major disasters. But in Tajikistan our plans are uncertain because of the possible closure of the Pamir highway, and information about the countries from here on is scanty. Wifi occurs in rare oases east of Dushanbe. And there’s been a major oversight in our preparations – we don’t have a map of the road-less expanse of western Mongolia that we soon have to cross. Now, out of necessity, we’ll learn to enjoy the freedom of disorganization and being more open to new experiences, shashliky kisses notwithstanding.
The shiny new highway climbs from Khojand’s flat productive orchards into the mountains. Soon our path is blocked by a gang of Chinese workmen at a tunnel entrance who are as surprised as we are. Though completed on our map, the tunnel is unfinished and we’re directed back to the crumbling single lane over the pass. It’s the worst possible surface – potholed, rutted, corrugated, dirt track with a central gutter that makes overtaking the crawling heavy trucks perilous. Overburdened little Ladas packed to the roof with watermelons for Eid festivities share our struggle over the pass. From the passenger seat Graeme snaps photos of the skeletons of the cars that fell over the unprotected edge several hundred meters to the valley floor. After we cleared the barren dusty pass at 3600m we enjoyed a brief interval back on asphalt before turning off on the precarious dirt track to Iskander Kul. Erosion had gouged the soft rock above the road leaving car sized boulders stranded on crumbling pedestals waiting to fall in the next rain.
Iskander Kul turned out to be worth the dangerous drive, a turquoise jewel within a crown of rugged crumbling peaks. At the shore a Soviet campsite’s joyless chalets are concealed by a stand of leafy birch trees where we make our camp. Warmed by an improvised vege stew we sit back, sipping $1 vodka and enjoying our first campfire of the journey, to the pyromaniac delight of Alistair. From the next fire the song of a Tajik man winds through the trees, tumbling over an Eastern scale in phrases elaborated by his friend on a drum.
Memories of the invigorating mountain air were all we carried the next morning when the road to Dushanbe plunged us into the Tunnel of Death (http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav100207.shtml). The wet floor of the Anzob tunnel conceals potholes that threaten to swallow the Kangoo. Giant fans roar ineffectually in the dark and I cover mouth and nose to combat the smell of car fumes. Our headlights illuminate the worried figure of a man peering under his hood. This is not a good place to breakdown. When the snow melts in spring the tunnel is at its most treacherous and every year several people die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Alistair closely follows the 4WD ahead to gauge how deep the potholes are. At one point we sink about a foot into a black puddle but bounce our way out and into the light, having taken eighteen minutes to cover five kilometers.
In Dushanbe the world’s largest flag celebrates this fragile post Soviet state. “Look out for the drug dealer”, Josh directs as we make room for the speeding black Mercedes, evidence that much of Afghanistan’s heroin passes through Tajikistan on its way to Russia. It’s hard to believe we just met Alistair’s colleague’s friend an hour ago. In that short time the American human rights lawyer has offered to host us at his house and called a friend clued up on the security situation in the South to confirm the Pamir highway is still closed. Although media reports describe the conflict in GBAO in terms of the Pamiri people’s separatist aspirations the well-informed people we met all cite competition between the region’s semiautonomous administration and central government over the drug trade as the real motivation for the violence.
We meet Josh’s wife Ursula in their garden planted with pomegranates, cherries, and persimmons, plus a vegetable patch ripe with cucumbers, tomatoes and aubergines. A nutritionist who has worked here and in Zimbabwe, Ursula currently cares for their seven month son Felix and finds time to blog on healthy Tajik food. We sit atop the cushioned garden platform to share Korean takeaways and travel stories.
Though the setting is idyllic, the news about the Pamirs shakes our morale. It’s hard news to accept because the gossip on the tourist grapevine, and the uninformed comments of a few border guards and police had raised our hopes. Hereto we’ve been propelled by our imagined next city or camp-site. The anticipation drove us to pack, fuel up, pull ourselves away from wifi and hit the road each day. Now, without plans, we’re floundering, losing momentum. It seemed all too easy to stay in the comfort of Josh and Ursula’s home and enjoy wonderful cooking and conversation. Also, the car has making a soft thumping sound in time with the wheel rotation, as if foreshadowing possible difficulties to come. We spend half a day in workshops getting the tyres and wheel bearings checked. The mechanic at the Red Cross couldn’t find anything wrong, but we’re difficult to reassure. The coming countries – Kyrgystan, Kazakstan, Siberia and Mongolia are sparsely populated and the climate can be extreme. We’re increasingly anxious about breakdowns.
Meanwhile we’ve reconnected with the buggy drivers Glen and Paul who are staying at a hostel while hunting for piston rings in Dushambe. They relate the stories of the cyclists they’ve met who were evacuated from Khorog during the conflict in the Pamirs. We’re reminded that as travelers we’re lucky to be able to leave such places, whereas the locals remain there living under siege. In a sense I’m relieved that the road closure has taken the decision to go out of our hands.
Josh suggests we leave for Kyrgyzstan through the Rasht valley and visit Janice, an American who is trying to start a tourist operation in the remote village of Gharm. If it worked, we could coincide with Eid festivities. I’ve enjoyed Eid with my Maldivian cousins, so enthuse that it’s basically the Muslim Christmas and we should now share the celebration given the Ramadan-enforced rigours we endured in strict parts of Turkey and Iran. And finally, we’ll be off the grid – none of the guidebooks list our destination at all, with the only available information a dated warning against travelling to the entire valley, issued by the Australian government. Perhaps it is a way out of this sump we’re in. Glen and Paul agree to join us, so suddenly we have both a destination and a convoy.
We drive to the tiny town of Gharm and follow Janice’s instructions to find at the bazaar gate identical twins Hussein (first shop on the left) and Hassan (first shop on the right). Ask for Janice (using the Islamafied pronounciation Ja-NI-ce) and they’ll let her know we’re here.
When we find the bazaar I realize we’ve come a long way from urban Dushanbe. There are barely any women on the street – and the few I can see have their heads covered. Most of the men where Turkic style skull caps but some wear the pashtun style headdress and the foot length coats that I recognize from TV footage of Afghanistan. Fortunately, before I can say “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore”, a six foot something Californian with the blue eyes and sunny disposition to match drives up in a Land Rover. Janice wears a purple three quarter length tunic over pants with a bright matching headscarf and handmade silver jewelry. She greets us warmly but in seconds is engaged in Tajik conversations with the men who had stopped to check out our car. She seems to know everyone.
Janice has been here for six years, initially working with a development NGO but more recently working with locals to build sustainable small industries in honey and tourism. We pitch tents next to the stream at the bottom of Janice’s garden and meet the cast of American guests, aid workers, doctoral students, diplomats who she feeds, hosts, plans holidays for and facilitates a lot of their involvement with the local community. There are at least fifteen herbal teas to help yourself to and everyone’s asked to pitch in with chores. For the second time this week I feel I could be in my own home.
We take a three day break in Gharm, walking in the surrounding hills in the late afternoon, chatting and stopping by houses to see bread being baked in earth ovens. Tajik bread must be the best in the world – slightly more doughy than ciabatta and a little heavier and sweeter. Everywhere we enjoyed a wonderfully warm welcome that would be easy to attribute to Tajik customs but also spoke volumes of the relationship the families we visited enjoyed with Janice. We each visited five or six homes, enjoyed generous meals of baking, fruit and sweets, all preceded by a rich mutton and vegetable soup. I particularly remember the visit to President of the regional bee keeper’s association. Our arrival coincided with that of a friend he hadn’t seen for 30 years because of the civil war. The friend had seen him appear on television to be interviewed about beekeeping and traveled to Gharm so they could be reunited at Eid. When another host learnt I was a doctor he asked me to see his wife, a trust I never expected. Tajik people have the most endearing custom of placing their right arm over their heart in greeting and farewell, and you always leave their house with an invitation to come back again.
With thoughts of how I’ll manage working in another culture next year I asked Janice what she did when she first arrived in Gharm. “Asked locals how I should do every little thing”, was her very practical answer. I’m sure there’s more to it than that – Janice has a fantastic blend of good humour, sensitivity and (this is the point where I abandon any idea I could learn from her example) she plays Buzkashi. This game, which literally means ‘goat pulling’, involves mounted men competing to win possession of a decapitated goat from each other. From Janice’s photos Buzkashi makes being mauled by the All Blacks look tame.
We buy petrol by the bucket load before we follow Glen and Paul out of Rasht towards the Kyrgyzstan border. As we look back at Gharm for the last time, we think we would never had stopped here were it not for Josh and Janice, and a readiness to change plans on our part. We’re now philosophical about the Pamirs being closed. Instead we’ve met so many wonderful people and got a brief but detailed insight into a way of life we would never have understood. The mountains will always be there.
aSiAnRiCk
Jan 23, 13, 4:04 pm
Probably one of the best reports I've read on here .... Amazing!
mad_atta
Jan 23, 13, 8:04 pm
Probably one of the best reports I've read on here .... Amazing!
Thanks, aSiAnRiCk. Nice to know I am not posting these into the void :) Plenty more instalments to come, we're only about halfway to Mongolia...
(And with reference to my last intalment above, for the record I am still absolutely determined to drive the Pamir Highway. Tajikistan/Kyrgyzstan are right up there among the most amazing places I have ever been.)
mad_atta
Jan 25, 13, 11:30 pm
Written August 30th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=939) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Wild wild horses, we will ride them someday
When the sun set it was as if a switch had been thrown. The border crossing had been hot – the guards cramped in offices that also served as their bedrooms and flyblown kitchens. Our details were recorded by hand before the officers laboured up from their seats to lift the barrier arm and wave us through. We crept through no-mans-land, up from the gorge to the shoulder of a mountain that must do more to protect the border than the token military presence. On the Kyrgyzstan side we quickly completed formalities and entered the magnificent Alay valley, drenched in late afternoon sun. A braided river snaked through the flat grassland and snow capped Pamir mountains towered on our right. Clouds skirted Mount Lenin and we were permitted only a short glimpse of the former USSR’s highest peak.
But the warmth had been sucked from the day by the time we entered Sary Tash. In the fading light we saw a collection of shacks protesting the bitter wind that had robbed the dark hills of vegetation. A man approaches the driver's window wearing a bulky coat and fur cap that frames Asiatic features and flushed cheeks from a life spent at altitude. The blast of cold air that enters the car when Alistair opens his window reminds us we’ve climbed to 3000 meters. We’re being directed to a hotel but this spot looks dire. We check in with Glen and Paul the buggy drivers and decide to climb over the pass with the hope of descending to a lower, warmer altitude on the other side. Fortunately the descent is rapid and in the gathering darkness we find a perfect sheltered spot in a narrow valley.
We had left Gharm that morning with flat breads larger than New York pizzas and delicious like Indian naan, so I set to cooking a dhal with Graeme’s help while Alistair foraged for firewood. After our time in Gharm it feels like Glen and Paul are part of the team now. They’re fun and laugh a lot - when they’re not worried about the buggy and its string of maintenance problems. Our time in Kyrgyzstan was spent mostly in the countryside camping and driving from one spectacular vista to another. Although yurts were sometimes clad in weatherproof plastic and we occasionally spotted a 4WDs parked outside, there is much that hasn’t changed about rural Kyrgyz life – many families are semi-nomadic, relocating with their livestock to graze new areas, doing everything on horseback. It’s easy to camp almost anywhere, with locals’ only expectation being a small payment for a horse ride the following morning. Our first morning in Kyrgyzstan an 11 year old patiently waited while we packed up our cars then gestured for me to mount his short horse. Still I needed a boost from Alistair to climb into the saddle fashioned from blankets. I was happily surprised I could remember how to direct the horse and encourage it into a brief trot, an achievement that must have been laughable to the boy. When I dismounted he sprung effortlessly back into the saddle to recline as if on a chaise longue to watch us pack.
We make Osh just a quick stop for lunch and drive on to Jalalabad so that we can shorten the next day’s long drive to Song Kul. On a potholed street in the outskirts the car radio suddenly goes silent, various charging electronic devices chirp in protest, and the power windows are jammed. We’ve blown a fuse. Graeme finds the fuse board and pops a replacement in but it’s short lived and our power outages recur. Then followed a frustrating evening trying to find accommodation. In Jalalabad the one hotel we had researched has burnt down. We stop, find an internet cafe, figure out the Russian keyboards and autotranslating browsers, find a couple of reviews of Hotel Sputnik and drive there. We check in, pay, and five minutes later I’m standing under the showerhead dressed in three days worth of sweat and grime swearing about how a hotel could be named after a space craft and still can’t pump water. The showers don’t work. This eventuality isn’t covered in the Russian phrasebook although how to complain about too much spying is possible.
The next day’s drive was a relief – after an hour we pulled up next to a deep clean lake for a swim. Further up the beach a BMW reverses to leave, backing into the lake. Alistair and Glen realize the driver’s stuck before he does, and he churns the shingle on the shore in vain. Through a combination of digging and tugging on a tow rope, Alistair, Graeme, Glen and Paul manage to pull him out. We take to the road before the Muscovite can get into any more trouble and part ways with the Buggy for the afternoon. Glen and Paul have decided to take shorter more direct route to Song Kul, but we’re not sure about the road quality so decide on a longer way – albeit on a road that’s still described as 4WD only.
It’s dark and we’re still shuddering along a gravel track that winds up a mountain. The altitude tightens a headache around my temples. The altimeter must be malfunctioning because it’s just reading 1600m. Graeme’ downloadable map suggests this is the right road but there’s no way to be certain: no streetlights, road markings, no lights from houses and no moon. Now we wonder are we still on the mountainside or have we reached the basin? It’s impossible to tell. Only meters away the dark outlines of wild horses chase the car. Momentarily they’re close enough to the headlights to catch a glimpse of muscular forelegs and their majestic heads. It’s after 10 pm when Alistair pulls off the road and illuminates the grazed grass that slopes gently down to a strip of black. That must be lake Song Kul.
It’s silent, and other than the cluster of yurts we passed half a kilometre back we know nothing about the campsite beyond the puddle of light cast by the headlights and our torches. I pick a site free of cowpats to pitch my tent and imagine what must be out there in the darkness, and what we must look like, spotlit in the Kangoo’s headlights. It’s too dark to find the buggy, they could just be a hundred meters from the road and we wouldn’t be able to see them. Lightening flickers in the distance while I fix a quick dinner of pasta with the fresh basil and tomatos from Jalalabad’s bazaar. We’ve barely eaten when the storm forces us to bed. In the morning I wake to more thunder – this time hooves shake the ground. I can hear Graeme calling out to a shepherd– they must be mustering right past our tents.
When I climb out to join Alistair making coffee the next morning, the view is awesome. The lake – 3,000 meters up and ten kilometres across – is a thin lens of water set in the gentle sloping grassland. Morning light shines on the yellow green grasslands until its chased away by blue grey clouds. The scale is so much greater than anything I’ve seen before. It’s awe inspiring. The storm forces us to drink our espresso in the car but it quickly clears into a sunny day and we drive around the lake hoping to find the buggy. Instead we find a cluster of locals on horseback and, remembering Janice’s photos of Buzkashi in Tajikistan, we pile out to watch the game. Ringed by massive mountains and a big blue sky, the scene was the perfect amphitheater. Four young men compete over the carcass of a goat. They manoeuvre incessantly, positioning their horse over the goat, forcing their mounts between those of the competition, blocking rivals from doing the same to their teammates. Each time a rider is forced away from the goat he turns his horse, seemingly on the spot, to return to the game. The goat is heavy and the riders crane to lift it from the ground holding tight to their horse with legs and one hand on their horses’ neck. Once it’s lifted others reach to pull it from the successful rider, and they wrestle while galloping across the field of play.
We’re impressed by the athleticism but eventually drive on, unsettled that we haven’t found the buggy anywhere near Song Kul. That day we drive to the former soviet resort town of Cholpin Alta on Lake Issyk Kul and we check online but still no news from Glen and Paul. There is a real possibility they’re lost or broken down in the isolated roads around the lake. It puts a damper on the evening, and though there are plenty of bars and karaoke haunts serving Kazakh tourists we struggle to get into the spirit of the town. The next day will see us drive to Kazakhstan – and further on from where we last saw our friends.
mad_atta
Jan 25, 13, 11:45 pm
Written September 3rd, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=939) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
The Singapore of the Steppe
Border crossings are novelties for island dwellers, even when you’ve done 12 in the last 7 weeks. Whereas geography defines where islands begin and end, land borders are more arbitrary. You catch tantalizing glimpses of the next country before you cross over and you can’t help but imagine your next destination. At Kyrgyzstan’s Issyk Kul, Kazakh tourists enjoyed Russian vodka and disco until the need to vomit brought them out onto the streets. We dodged drunk drivers and said farewell to Kyrgyzstan and its heart-soaring mountains.
The border wasn’t busy, but nonetheless managed to be chaotic. Vans of women emptied out into a special lane carrying oversized plastic stripe bags of rip off designer labels, children’s clothes and velour bedspreads. This is how Kyrgyz run small businesses in importing Chinese goods to their wealthy northern neighbour. We join the choked line of cars and trucks and we're swamped by touts but wave them and their promises of a fast crossing off. An hour later there’s the first hint of movement in the queue. Alistair turns on the engine. But one of the touts is blocking our way, standing between us and the next car, trying to wave through a Mercedes sneaking up beside us. Things happen very quickly. Alistair guns the engine, roaring into the gap and beating the tout at his game of chicken. I cringe in anticipation of crushing both of his legs but Alistair was fully in control. We’ve held our space but it’s not over yet. He’s mad, slamming his fist on our hood then the passenger window. Lock the doors. The guy in the Merc is glowering next to us. How much did he pay I wonder? Then there’s a commotion behind us and everyone is running. We’re boxed in… but it’s okay. Someone else is having a fight and everyone is piling in. Our infraction against the border mafia is forgotten and the police have appeared. We’re waved through the barrier arm and shepherded through immigration like sheep in a race. At customs a troika of babushka’s body parts are crushed into the small of my back but she seems impervious to my evil glances. Eventually the crowd clears and we make our way through and into an evening of golden grasslands onto Almaty.
We stayed in leafy Almaty beneath its backdrop of towering snow-clad mountains for two days. It seemed a nice enough city but we spend our time doing chores rather than seeing the city. I spent a hot morning walking the streets looking for a laundromat while the guys had the car serviced. And then we resumed our search for the elusive map of Mongolia, but six bookshops and a mall that could have been in London or Singapore could only offer globes and high school atlases. In fact, we struggled to find the map of Northern Kazakhstan that we needed to decide how best to travel North to Russia: the eastern scenic route on bad roads or the long but smoother western route through Astana.
We chose the western route out through the steppe. Dry, scruffy grasslands stretch infinitely. The horizon is the farthest I’ve seen it on land. It’s so vast. I imagine it once populated by herdsmen and yurts. The day wears on, punctuated only by petrol stops. In the mid-afternoon we aim for the largest nearby town, hoping for lunch. There must have been five hundred houses here. Many are only piles of rubble, bricks and concrete not yet over grown with the scrub of the steppe. Was there an earthquake? Or a bomb? Surely not. Only a handful of houses show signs of inhabitants. Bright washing hanging gaily on a line clashing with the destruction. Sometime, recently, this town ceased to exist. It has been erased.
We drive on and there’s a café thirty minutes later, but so fly blown we elect for a lunch of Sprite and ice cream. Back on the endless road with its stream of northbound big rigs and SUVs. There are no yurts, no livestock, no grazers. No signs of life. The lack of mountains numbs my imagination and the only conversation is Alistair’s colourful commentary on the skills of other drivers.
By late afternoon we need to break the monotony and strike down the first possible access road to Lake Balgash. Following the dirt track over a small hill we’re hoping for some variation in the landscape. Perhaps something green. But clearing the hill we see the path to the water blocked by barbed wire and radioactivity signs surrounding an abandoned factory. We drive past several similar factories, not mothballed but with broken windows, decaying signs, crumbling smokestacks. A Soviet industrial ghost town.
We plan to use the hour of remaining daylight to drive to reach Balgash township where there may be better chance of a lake-side campsite. Traveling east we so often reach our destination with the setting sun behind us. So the smoke stacks of Balgash stand in stark opposition to my memory of the minarets that announced our entry into the beautiful cities of Turkey, Iran, Uzbekistan. A monument to the Soviet space programme in the form of a rocket takes aim at the plume of smoke that hangs over the township, obscuring the moon. We make our way through the miserable grid of five story concrete tiled apartment buildings where the cluster of satellite dishes on each balcony is the only sign that communism ever ended. Even the hospital scarcely has any lights on. We find smaller cottages at the waters edge but there’s rubbish everywhere, above ground sewage pipes and no obvious campsites.
Deciding to cut our losses we return to the highway. It’s dark now but we can still see the escarpment to the North that Alistair pointed out on our way in. Perhaps behind it we will find some shelter from the highway noise. But as we draw closer its clearly a slagheap. So we drive through the darkness and eventually find a track that just takes us far enough from the highway not to be seen, though we can still hear the muffled roar of trucks. Dinner cheers us up.
The next morning’s drive sees more signs of industrialization. Pylons march out across the steppe, and there’s more cultivation. Grain elevators boast shoddy signage in the square 3D fonts one instantly associates with communism. The Soviet program of agricultural and industrial development was called the Virgin Lands program, as if nothing happened or existed here before and there was nothing to lose in unchecked industrialization and nuclear testing. The landscape is vast and bare, but it’s not nothing. Study it long enough and you notice the changes in its contours, the distant cones of small volcanoes, and the surprisingly variable climate that sustains small creatures. And people lived here, albeit a hard nomadic life, for centuries.
Our guidebook tips us off to the unsigned memorial. Two-foot high stone crosses, grouped in threes, spaced out across a sloping field. The more distant hills are higher and yes, that’s where the watchtowers were, and in some cases still are. We read the memorials to the Germans, Greeks, Rumanians, Bohemians, Azerbaijanis, Poles, Chechens and Japanese political prisoners forced to labour and usually die in the Karlag (Karaganda Gulag). I imagine the mine a sooty stain on the snowy steppe and the misery, surveillance, starvation and exhaustion. It is somehow unsurprising that such monstrous treatment of the environment is paired with monstrous treatment of people.
The Russian influence is stronger as we drive north. At every meal stop plasma screens flash fleshy images of women in time with Russian pop lyrics. Were the music videos I enjoyed at home this raunchy? After six Muslim countries I’ve forgotten. The capital Astana is wealthy with big cars choking modern motorways, billboard advertising and well-dressed employees walking to work. I eye their high heels and styled hair and remember what it felt like to go to work. Hotels charge by the hour so we can treat ourselves provided we check out early.
We find a place and quickly head for the city center. Well, kind of. Nurhzol bulvar is the impressive mall planned as the city center but if you look through the nest of skyscrapers and cranes you see the Steppe isn’t far off. We walk through the lines of modern glass plated buildings, the palace and all its surrounding futuristic architecture. Constructed by the government in an attempt at nation building post independence from the USSR the city feels incredibly artificial. But perhaps that’s a country’s only option when its natural and cultural heritage has been destroyed. I watch a group of high-school students practice a dance routine in front of the House of Representatives to the Mission Impossible Theme. We join families including many pregnant women, to ride the lift to the illuminated Bayterek tower topped by a golden sphere. We were frustrated in our attempt to catch a good view of the city but the locals had a different goal in mind. They queued to place their hand in the golden cast of President Nazarbaer.
Having failed to find any local character we opt for dinner in a shopping mall chain restaurant. If we stay another day we have to register with immigration officials, a process that could take all morning. We’re increasingly ready to admit that the search for hidden gems in Astana may only yield yet more all too public monuments to its extracted mineral wealth. Tomorrow we’ll go to Russia.
mad_atta
Jan 26, 13, 12:25 am
Written September 5th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=968) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=951).
Espresso in No Man’s Land
It had looked like the perfect campsite. A wooded valley, a river, even a picnic table. But now, at the bottom of the short but steep access track, I’m regretting that we ever came here. Alistair’s attempting to drive the Kangoo up the hill for the third time but at the crucial corner the wheels spin on loose shingle. He gives the engine plenty of revs, but you can see one of the wheels has lost contact with the uneven track. Ignorant of our rising anxiety, a cow wanders serenely down the track, littering it with fresh dung as she contemplates the river. We wait in frustration until Alistair launches another attempt, this time hoping our overloaded front wheel drive will gain better purchase in reverse … but it’s no use. We stand abjectly near the Kangoo seated in the pool of mud at the bottom of the hill. We’re stuck.
Our travels in Russia had begun wonderfully. A quick entry from Kazakhstan and we sped into Siberia. Our preconceptions of a frozen wasteland melted away. Late summer in Southern Siberia is temperate and colourful: golden fields of wheat interspersed with hamlets of wooden bungalows. The late afternoon sun streams diagonally under heavy clouds, illuminating the bony white bark of birches and their bright leaves. At sunset the first turn we took off the road led us to a small lake where we camped surrounded by shrubbery and plenty of firewood. We snacked on corn fritters and enjoyed the warmth of a campfire.
We drove on good roads to Barnaul with increasing confidence in the motorways, modern service stations and the shops. Russia is by far the most developed country we’ve been in since Europe. Barnaul is the last city in which we can reliably get the car serviced on our route, so we stop for a couple of nights. We learn our buggy buddies Glen and Paul had got lost and sustained a lot of damage to the buggy while taking the short cut to Song Kul in Kyrgyzstan. However they’re back on the road now, albeit many days behind us. Also at our hotel are a team of British motorcyclists but they aim to progress faster than us, hoping to cross into Russia on the weekend. Barnaul is friendly and we take in a few of the sights as well as the heavy sour cream and dill laden food, while the boys rejoice in finding tonic for the first time since Istanbul.
Leaving the gin-soaked delights of Barnaul behind, we drive south east and enter the Altai region, climbing slowly through its wooded mountains. This is another semiautonomous region, home to Altai people who farm cattle in splendid isolation. Calves and foals can be seen in paddocks though some of the leaves are just starting to turn. Perhaps it’s the length of the winters that compresses all the other seasons into a few sunny months. We don’t miss the concrete housing blocks of soviet cities and admire the elaborate eaves, called wooden lace, that adorn even simple homes.
Having left Barnaul on Friday morning we have the whole weekend to camp along the 750km road to the point where the road meets the Mongolian border. We spend two nights in the Altai region enjoying camping under the trees, with more big cook ups and camp fires. It’s a lot of fun. On Sunday morning we awake at our riverside spot late, knowing we have to make it close to the border that day. That’s when we got stuck.
After discussing whether we’re too heavy, too weak, or our spindly tyres too lacking in traction we decide the answer is probably all of the above, and settle on the following plan: take everything out of the car that we can, replace the front tyres with spares that have better traction, and put on chains. If that doesn’t work, we’ll need to be towed. In the sunshine we unpack the backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, food, 50 litres of water and 25 litres of petrol. From the roof we release the ratchets strapping down the tyres and spare parts. We jack the car, change both tyres and place the chains. Alistair tries again. And fails. And again, this time he makes it! But it’s not over. We’ve now chewed up the track with our tyres and all the contents of the car needs to be lifted up to the roadside. But I can’t lift the spare wheels, they’re steel and too heavy. So I roll one up the hill through the mud and cow dung, getting a good coating of both all over my hands.
Three hours later we’ve finally got the car packed including strapping the roof rack back together. We’re relieved to be back on the road but there’s quiet as we digest what this means. We just struggled with what should have been a manageable hill. In Mongolia sealed road is scarce, and there are frequent river crossings. Also, with the buggy well behind us, we’re going to be doing this on our own. We’re all realizing what it means to cover 1700kms of such conditions in a tiny, under powered car. On Sunday night we camp at the top of a massive basin. The sun gradually retreats over the mountains letting the shadows claim the basin for themselves and the cold wind. There are flecks of snow on the surrounding hills. Each night is progressively colder, and there have been reports of snow from teams further ahead. I’m already sleeping in thermals, a hat, down sleeping bag and my puffer vest thrown over top. Each night I hope tonight won’t be the night I have to pitifully ask the guys if I can join them in their tent to keep warm.
We wake early to pack up camp and I’m surprised we achieve our target of being at the border at 8:30 am to join the line of cars waiting for the border to open at nine. Half an hour later there’s movement… and everyone but us gets through. We’re sent away, back to the township for the unsigned immigration stop we missed. We double back, then return. Another wait. 10:00 we’re in Russian immigration, customs, car formalities… it’s 11:20 when we start the drive through the 25kms of no-man’s-land. It’s clear but chilly, the only mark in the sky are the eagles that survey the ungainly marmots below. We need to get to the Mongolian side before their famed two hour lunch break. There’s a lot at stake – the car importation requires electronic transactions to be completed before we can pass through. Poor phone and internet connections mean the process is slow, and if we’re not processed within the day we stay at the border in a holding pen over night. The plaintive status update of a preceding team was, “in the holding pen, getting snowed on”. I hope that won’t be me. There are other horror stories of teams waiting over two days.
We are desperate to get through but we’re already well behind time. We begin the dance steps of our final border crossing: getting hosed down with insecticide, standing in sawdust, passport check, some car documentation (but not customs), passport control… Another hiccup: a problem with my visa that can only be fixed by US$2, and no, not those dollars. They need to be new dollars. Crisp dollars. For heaven’s sake.
Back outside at the car the custom’s check was started, and then abandoned, perhaps for lunch. Alistair’s told we just have to wait, we’ve done all our processing. It’s almost midday so we go to the fenced off concrete holding pen, unfold chairs and make espresso and sandwiches. In the sky I see wisps of cloud; mare’s tails. Nothing to worry about if we get onto the next town tonight, it’s at lower altitude.
At 3pm Alistair gets called back to the office and is asked to complete the request for the import duty to be paid. We had thought it was already through but it turns out it wasn’t done before lunch. It takes forever over, on an internet connection that perpetually times out. We guess the odds of staying the night on a freezing concrete slab on the mountain. Alistair says 90%. I’m too annoyed to guess but he’s probably right: unless the money is released in the next two hours we won’t be going anywhere. The clouds are coalescing now and I change into my puffer vest. At 5pm things are looking bleak. Minutes tick by.
The boys play cards and I’m reading. Finally a customs officer emerges from the building announcing that we can go. We pile back into the car and head for the gate, only to be turned back for incomplete paperwork. Alistair reverses so fast the car whines like a startled mare. We skid to a halt outside customs and he dashes in. It’s 5:45 and we’re the last car here. Thankfully they haven’t shut yet. We get the final signature and we’re in Mongolia – spared a night in the cold but all too aware of the long difficult road to Ulan Bataar.
mad_atta
Jan 26, 13, 12:43 am
Written September 12th, 2012 by: Ayesha. Go to our team website for the original blog post (http://www.khantikitours.com/?p=982) and complete photo galleries (http://www.khantikitours.com/?page_id=31).
Suspense and Suspension
A tiny thirteen-year-old clings to Anna, an Australian Social Worker who is volunteering at Ulaanbaatar’s Lotus Children’s Center. Inkma has a winning smile and introduces herself in surprisingly good English at the first opportunity. She puts her rough little hand in mine and purposefully leads me to the dirt basketball court. She winds down the hoop to a height suitable for her short stature and awkwardly dribbles a basketball that dwarfs her tiny hands. Can she really be thirteen I wonder? She points, “you team, me team.” I’ve just been challenged to a round of one-on-one. Game on.
t’s easy to forget just how lucky we are to have made it to the finish line.
When you cross from Russia to Mongolia the tarmac stops abruptly. The road is more a series of dirt tracks through the grassland. They wind in and out of each other, occasionally striking out in a different direction. In the driver’s seat Alistair’s faced with endless decisions – this trail or that? He’s constantly seeking the best surface to avoid water, potholes, corrugations. Often at a speed of about 60km/h the vibrations from the corrugations is reduced, but speed and comfort comes with the risk of bottoming out in a pothole. “It’s like a video game,” he says.
Having entered Mongolia at high altitude, we pass through a broad valley surrounded by snow capped mountains. Eagles soar in a perfect blue sky and the light is white, bright and hard. Distance is hard won on the terrible dirt roads but every so often our efforts are rewarded by another amazing vista of grasslands and mountains. We spent our first night in a Olgii hotel having only just made it through the border crossing. The townships are dusty, basic and even the hotels struggle with regular water supply. Mongolians don’t seem completely won over by western style housing, and many choose to live in yurts on the edge of town.
That night we had noticed we were missing a hubcap, and from then on the car developed a new problem each day. The next day’s drive to Khovd took us through a beautiful endlessly flat valley on rough roads. Dust crept into everything. The car door mechanisms became sluggish, opening only after several attempts. The abrasive dust took its toll on everything – print came off the covers of books and batteries, the plastic on chargers was ground down. When we pull up the windows there are tide-marks from where the dust rubbed between the glass and the window frames.
Still, we’re enjoying the beautiful country. In Mongolia, figures shimmer in the distant mirages well before you can make them out. A column of dust announces another vehicle. Is that person on a horse or a motorcycle? Is it a herd of cattle, or sheep, or camels? If it’s camels you smell them even before you can make out their humps. We stop to photograph a caravan of camels drinking at a puddle before driving on to camp.
After Altai township we enjoy some wonderful nights camping on the steppe under big starry skies. One morning as we packed a flock of sheep were driven past by a sheppardess. Her grey streaked hair, lined face and rheumy eyes make me guess she’s in her sixties, but she nimbly dismounted her horse. Maybe the weather has aged her or maybe farmers just have to work here well into old age. As always it’s hard to communicate but we try giving some food in case we’ve slept on her land, and Alistair pulls out his iPad to show some photos of New Zealand. His family sheep farms were met with a big smile.
The drive to Bayankhongor took us over the largest river crossing. There are plenty of tractors parked up at the river-side and locals offering to tow us across. We wade through the river checking out the crossing points – at worst its about 14 inches deep, but swift. We plot out a possible path but it’s going to be tough. On the one hand we have a snorkel to keep water out of the engine and there are tractors nearby to rescue us. But we remember video footage posted by a team who were towed across that showed the interior of their car flooding in this river. If we get stuck all our gear will be wet so Alistair and Graeme strap the packs to the roof rack. We debate putting the chains on to increase our traction, but decide against it. And at the last minute we revise our route, realizing we had planed to cross against the current and that we’d probably loose power midstream. We’ll try without being towed.
I wade across and watch with my heart in my mouth from the opposite bank. Alistair strategy is to get as much momentum as he can before hitting the deep. The Kangoo charges into the river spraying water in the shallows. Soon the water is up over the wheels, the river claims all the car’s momentum and … the engine goes silent. I’m meant to be videoing our triumphant crossing but I almost drop the camera. They’ve stopped? It must have been just a second, but somehow the car crawls forward, slowly riding up and out of the deep. Thank goodness. Alistair and Graeme look pale but triumphant when they climb out next to me on the bank. If the deep part was one foot longer they wouldn’t have made it. It isn’t until later that Graeme notices we’ve lost the licence plate in the river. We drive on to Bayankhongor relieved to have made it and to be dry. Alistair mentions something about the car feeling like it’s floating – perhaps the suspension? But we don’t think anything of it.
We stay in Bayankhongor where we spend five minutes inspecting the town's feature – dinosaur sculptures. The next day we drive on now encountering segments of road under construction but it’s never really good enough to enjoy more than twenty minutes of asphalt. We make camp on a hillside over looking a beautiful valley – but pay the price for the view with the windiest night yet. The next day’s driving takes us through low hills when the car suddenly emits a throaty roar. It’s a sound every kid from provincial New Zealand instantly recognizes: the muffler’s gone. Well – as the mechanic in Arvaikheer says, it’s the “soft chimney” that connects the engine to the exhaust.
We thought we had car problems before but now they’re much more serious. Each day Mongolia’s roads nibble away at the Kangoo. The suspension is definitely failing and we bounce up and down three or four times after each dip in the road. In the back seat you fear the big potholes where we slam down on the bump stops and the items on the parcel shelf are flung into the air. It’s OK when the toilet paper, jumpers and pillows land on your head, but the shovel and vodka bottle are more worrying. I feel like I’m at sea – dwarfed by the open scenery and tossed about in a storm.
Even though its just 400km on mostly sealed roads to go, we’re all anxious about whether we’ll make it – even the seal features occasional deep potholes that could put an abrupt end to the rally. We limp on to make what distance we can in the remaining daylight but nature puts an end to that plan with a wicked electrical storm visible in the distance. In these wide open spaces I don’t like the idea of camping near the forked lightening. We drive off the road into some nearby hills and make camp.
It’s cold and the guys jack up the car to check the suspension while I cook. With the rear wheels removed, we can see sand has got into the suspension to cause friction which has burnt through the sleeve that covers the hydraulics. By the time dinner of dhal and crunchy rice is ready they’ve decided to try endure the bumpy ride to Ulaanbaatar rather than change it tonight. We sit out watching the horizon as the storm flickers in the distance. Before we turn in we hear movement in the darkness. Casting our torchlights into the darkness we illuminate the eyes and muscular figures of wild horses. They circle our camp, restless in the lightning storm before riding over the crest of the hill. This could be our last day on the road, I’ll be relieved to have made it to Ulaanbaatar, but I wonder if I’ll ever feel this free again.
The Kangoo powered through the last day under grey skies to Ulaanbaatar. Crawling through the city’s slow traffic provided an anti-climatic end to our slow journey. We arrived at the finish line and got a push onto the podium. At that stage we thought we were the last team in, but we still had plenty to celebrate that night. We’ve taken the time to see a lot of the world on this trip. Alistair toasts, “we did it our way… and in our own good time”.
We had already disposed of our Kangoo by the time we visited the Lotus Children’s Center outside of Ulaanbaatar. We traveled to the orphanage in a taxi that ran out of petrol, got towed through the crowded streets to a petrol station, drove for an hour, got lost, and finally arrived in the late afternoon. The adventure never ends. Another team is also visiting in their Kangoo – and it’s swamped by children. There’s six in the front seat alone, others hang out the windows, jump on the back seat, now some are climbing on the roof. There’s a sense of happy pandemonium that seems a fitting end to our journey: more chaos in cars.
Finally it’s time for a big thanks to all our supporters. We’ve raised almost £10,000 from friends and family, with the help of funds matching from the Macquarie Foundation. Also, the trusty Kangoo will be put up for sale with the proceeds to go to charity. Even though we’re horrified by the damage the car sustained crossing Mongolia, it’s all fixable and is still expected to sell for more than we paid for it in the UK. It was great to visit the Lotus Children’s Center and see where much of the funds will go. The Center cares for orphans many of whom have developmental disabilities or conditions like epilepsy. It looks warm and clean and the children attend school, but their life is still pretty hard. Anna tells us of the challenges of getting appropriate medication for the children that need it, and finding ways to an independent life outside the center as they grow older. We gave the teddy bear from Bruton School for Girls to a little girl. Inkma and I played Basketball on dirt yard. I taught her lay ups until she pulled five goals ahead and I realized I was getting my arse kicked. We gave her our last Khan Tiki Tours T-shirt. She couldn’t stop smiling and hugging me. She pointed at my own T-shirt – and said, “the same.”
“Totally, you’re on the team now”. Thanks again to all our many supporters, it’s been great sharing our journey with you.
I´ve been following your blog the whole time and was deeply impressed by the stories, the locals you´ve met and the landscape you pictured very well.
Thanks for sharing this report.
mad_atta
Jan 27, 13, 6:06 am
Impressive!
I´ve been following your blog the whole time and was deeply impressed by the stories, the locals you´ve met and the landscape you pictured very well.
Thanks for sharing this report.
Thanks! ^ Posting all this was actually quite self-indulgent, as it allowed me to happily relive the experience... and without the pesky task of actually having to write it all, since my teammate Ayesha did that (I was too busy doing almost all the driving.... and it was a lot of driving!).
I'm itching to do something similar again soon.
travelkid
Jan 27, 13, 8:13 am
Thanks! ^ Posting all this was actually quite self-indulgent, as it allowed me to happily relive the experience... and without the pesky task of actually having to write it all, since my teammate Ayesha did that (I was too busy doing almost all the driving.... and it was a lot of driving!).
I'm itching to do something similar again soon.
Did you meet (m)any repeated Mongol rally drivers?
AFAIK there are two such rallies, so why not do the other one?:D
mad_atta
Jan 28, 13, 4:53 pm
Did you meet (m)any repeated Mongol rally drivers?
AFAIK there are two such rallies, so why not do the other one?:D
We did meet a couple of repeats - one was re-doing it because they had only made it part-way last time, due to bad luck and vehicle problems. Some people decide to have a second go and take a very different route - I can see some appeal in doing that (I'd love to go through Georgia/Armenia for example, and to see the (remains of) the Aral Sea, plus of course I have unfinished business vis-a-vis the Pamir Highway).
We did meet a few people doing other rallies: the buggy team that we convoyed with for a while were doing the Mongolia Charity Rally (http://mongolia.charityrallies.org/), and we ran into a few teams doing the Silk Road Rally (http://www.silkroadrace.com/home-page) from Milan to Dushanbe. However, I have to say that I think the Mongol Rally is the way to go, provided the entry fee and relatively restrictive vehicle rules aren't too much of an obstacle. The fact that it's so much bigger means that there's much more chance of meeting up with and potentially convoying with fellow ralliers along the way - even if you're moving relatively slowly, as we were - which really does make it a lot more fun. Plus, the parties are great! ^
Overall, however, I think I'd like to go back to the places we missed as discrete, separate trips rather than doing a re-run of the same or a similar rally, and instead to go somewhere entirely different for another large scale road trip. In the meantime, one of the other, smaller scale events that The Adventurists run, like the Rickshaw Run (India), Mototaxi Junket (Peru) or the Bajai Rally (Indonesia) might just be calling my name...
BTW, I was intrigued by the comment you left on hauteboy's Central Asia thread (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trip-reports/1354757-central-asia-stans-iran-not-iraq-balkans.html):
My main problem summer 2012 after driving 7500km to Mashhad, Iran near TM, was being denied TM transit visa at local consulate to my local agents disbelief. Well well, drove back to Europe making alternative plans. Eventually flying Aerosvit from Kiev, Ukraine into FRU, KG.
On reading that, I wondered whether you were also doing the Mongol Rally? It sounds like you might have been there at quite a similar time to us?
k_malm
Jan 28, 13, 8:50 pm
That is amazing!! I never knew it existed. It is awfully tempting to add it to the bucket list. Great job and thank you for posting!!!
travelkid
Jan 29, 13, 2:40 am
BTW, I was intrigued by the comment you left on hauteboy's Central Asia thread (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trip-reports/1354757-central-asia-stans-iran-not-iraq-balkans.html):
On reading that, I wondered whether you were also doing the Mongol Rally? It sounds like you might have been there at quite a similar time to us?
June 2012, no rally. More FT style racking up hotel points, and die hard driving.
No camping gear or anything near. Only thing we brought in such regard was a 2$ inflatable matress which obviously was useless:D Replaced by a 50$ matress at IKEA outside Budapest. Old ambulance, MB 316cdi Sprinter.
Club Carlsson promo was great for all their brands, as we utilized the 50K promos in Sofia, Istanbul and Ankara. And Bucharest on the retreat with a mix of IC pointbreaks.
As well as pointbreaks on first stop in Bratislava, and points as a diamond at Hyatt Belgrade.
When we didnt get Turkmen visas, we did the holy site tour in Mashhad, and decided (after considering all options incl via Afghanistan) to go back. Started same evening and non stop for 24h to Turkish side of border (1850 km?). Overnight in Dogubeyazit, Turkish border town, battling whether to do an unlicensed go for Mt Ararat, but pushed on another non stop 24h thru Turkey to far eastern ocean side at Bosphorus, from then on spending a few nights at each stop.
mad_atta
Jan 29, 13, 2:55 am
When we didnt get Turkmen visas, we did the holy site tour in Mashhad, and decided (after considering all options incl via Afghanistan) to go back. Started same evening and non stop for 24h to Turkish side of border (1850 km?). Overnight in Dogubeyazit, Turkish border town, battling whether to do an unlicensed go for Mt Ararat, but pushed on another non stop 24h thru Turkey to far eastern ocean side at Bosphorus, from then on spending a few nights at each stop.
That's an epic couple of days driving! (Reminds me of a MR team we met who, upon arriving in Ulaanbaatar just in time for a massive finish line party, turned around the next morning and drove, nonstop, all the way back to the UK. Admittedly they took the 'easy' route past Lake Baikal instead of bashing back across Mongolia, but still that's 7,000 miles in 7 days, just the two of them, in a Renault Kangoo with a massive horse's head on the roof. Apparently they just "wanted to get back home".)
So where were you originally trying to make it to before your Turkmen visa was refused? Your vehicle doesn't seem like the kind of thing you would generally choose to drive unless you had some bigger plan in mind...
That is amazing!! I never knew it existed. It is awfully tempting to add it to the bucket list. Great job and thank you for posting!!!
Thanks! And you should totally add it to the bucket list. I've done some FT profile raising this year, so I reckon you could raise some serious sponsorship money from this board if you put your mind to it...
travelkid
Jan 29, 13, 2:59 am
Our plan was to leave the car in Kyrgyzstan, then fly on to southeast Asia.
We had visas for UZ, and had agreed to pick up KG visas in Tashkent.
Used Valis homestay in Mashhad, and he has helped hundred of people with their transit visas, and only a very few failed. I have no idea what made it. Maybe something they googled on our names, or that one person was ethnic Kyrgyz?
mad_atta
Jan 29, 13, 3:16 am
Our plan was to leave the car in Kyrgyzstan, then fly on to southeast Asia.
We had visas for UZ, and had agreed to pick up KG visas in Tashkent.
Used Valis homestay in Mashhad, and he has helped hundred of people with their transit visas, and only a very few failed. I have no idea what made it. Maybe something they googled on our names, or that one person was ethnic Kyrgyz?
That sucks. We tried to do a lot of our visas independently, but for a few of the tricky ones (Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) we used The Visa Machine (http://www.thevisamachine.com/). Not particularly cheap but at least it avoided scenes like the one you experienced. On the downside, we spent literally months beforehand sorting out visas, it was a colossal pain in the proverbial.
travelkid
Jan 29, 13, 3:19 am
That sucks. We tried to do a lot of our visas independently, but for a few of the tricky ones (Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) we used The Visa Machine (http://www.thevisamachine.com/). Not particularly cheap but at least it avoided scenes like the one you experienced. On the downside, we spent literally months beforehand sorting out visas, it was a colossal pain in the proverbial.
We used Visa machine for UZ, and they were supposed to fix TM too, but failed. We started planning early April to drive late May though:D
Got second passports, online research, and finally hoped for Vali in Mashhad.
PLanning was rough, as we had Asian adventure true FT style for a few weeks in April/May as well, with EY F, CX F, JL F, TG F etc.
chicagodesi
Jan 29, 13, 12:58 pm
Awesome, amazing trip report, you guys should really compile this all in a book and sell it on Amazon.. wonderful narrative, felt like I was there with you along the journey.
myefre
Jan 30, 13, 9:33 am
Fascinating report, thanks for sharing. Next we need a Mongol Rally Do. It would be awesome to have a convey of Flyertalkers driving across Central Asia. :D
mad_atta
Jan 30, 13, 2:11 pm
Awesome, amazing trip report, you guys should really compile this all in a book and sell it on Amazon.. wonderful narrative, felt like I was there with you along the journey.
Thanks. This trip definitely lived up to the quote in your footer - plenty of unpaved roads along the way...
Fascinating report, thanks for sharing. Next we need a Mongol Rally Do. It would be awesome to have a convey of Flyertalkers driving across Central Asia. :D
It would be a serious stretch to get a whole lot of FTers to travel 10,000 miles by road. I can hear it now: "Show me the MILES!!" Unless we could somehow get it linked to a major FFP as a sponsorship tie in...
DeanB
Feb 26, 13, 4:20 pm
I keep meaning to have a go at the Mongol.... I did a Rickshaw Run across India a few years ago (Shillong to Goa) and that was an awesome adventure but nothing like the scale of this.
Congrats guys - inspiring!
(Of course, the other hardcore option would be to keep going from Mongolia, back into Russia & Northeast through Siberia, across the Bering Strait to Alaska, and down to Nevada in time for Burning Man....)
mad_atta
Feb 26, 13, 5:36 pm
I keep meaning to have a go at the Mongol.... I did a Rickshaw Run across India a few years ago (Shillong to Goa) and that was an awesome adventure but nothing like the scale of this.
Congrats guys - inspiring!
Thank you! You should give the MR a go. It was an amazing experience, and much more achievable than you would think, once you wrap your brain around the enormity of the idea. The worst bit is dealing with the bureaucracy and planning beforehand. The rally itself was a breeze by comparison!
(Of course, the other hardcore option would be to keep going from Mongolia, back into Russia & Northeast through Siberia, across the Bering Strait to Alaska, and down to Nevada in time for Burning Man....)
OK, that *is* hardcore. Euan McGregor and Charlie Borman would be proud.
sparkchaser
Mar 20, 13, 4:52 am
Amazing trip report. I'm looking at doing The Mongol Rally in 2015.
mad_atta
Apr 16, 13, 7:32 pm
Amazing trip report. I'm looking at doing The Mongol Rally in 2015.
Thanks, sparkchaser. You can probably already guess what my advice is re the 2015 Mongol Rally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Do_It_(Nike)
:D
fwh
Apr 16, 13, 9:11 pm
Amazing report!
bensyd
Apr 23, 13, 9:18 am
Mongolian 'roads' have to be seen to be believed. The toll they took on our tiny Renault was incredible in just a few short days... as you can read about shortly. What amazed me, though, when we finally hit that long-awaited asphalt, was the occasional truly horrific pothole in the middle of an otherwise excellent road surface. There was one immediately over a blind crest which we only avoided by the greatest of good luck, and it would have finished our poor, limping Renault.
There was a double pothole about 100km from UB. When we hit it we thought it was going to be a double blow out for sure. We got through but our Dutch friends we were convoying with totally ruined their suspension and our grand entrance into UB became a 10km/h limp.
Our tire changes would have impressed an F1 team, we timed one at 5m34s (and that includes having to chock the jack up because the shocks and springs were so destroyed the wheel was fully extending when lifted).^ Admittedly it was 11pm raining and cold.
mad_atta
Apr 23, 13, 6:08 pm
Amazing report!
Thanks, fwh!
There was a double pothole about 100km from UB. When we hit it we thought it was going to be a double blow out for sure. We got through but our Dutch friends we were convoying with totally ruined their suspension and our grand entrance into UB became a 10km/h limp.
Our tire changes would have impressed an F1 team, we timed one at 5m34s (and that includes having to chock the jack up because the shocks and springs were so destroyed the wheel was fully extending when lifted).^ Admittedly it was 11pm raining and cold.
At least you made it! You would have been gutted to get all the way to the sealed road and then end your rally almost within sight of UB...
We met up with one team at the finish line who were driving a tiny Vauxhall Agila, and who met some friendly Mongolian truck drivers at one of the big river crossings, who offered to let them load their little car into the truck (which was returning empty to UB having delivered supplies to one of the western towns) in order to make it across the river. By the time they reached the other side they had made friends with them, so they then got drunk with them (vodka is never very far away in Mongolia), and wound up leaving the car in the back of truck, and the rally members drove the truck for the next few hundred miles while the truck drivers just drank vodka in the passenger seat and took it easy. It sounds like everyone was happy, and a great time had by all.
Anyway, they hit the sealed road in due course and eventually decided they should unload the car so they could drive the last 50km into UB under their own power. However, upon opening the back of the truck, they discovered that their poor vehicle had been bounced around so savagely in the back of the truck, thanks to the horrendous Mongolian 'roads', that it had virtually self destructed - the suspension was almost completely broken, and parts of the body work had collapsed. They somehow cobbled it all together with gaffer tapes, paper clips, hair ties and whatever else came to hand, and made it to the finish line...
As for us, to this day it amazes me that we made it all the way without a single puncture. Kangoo power! :)
bensyd
Apr 23, 13, 7:23 pm
As for us, to this day it amazes me that we made it all the way without a single puncture. Kangoo power! :)
That's impressive.^
The worst bit about Mongolian roads is the variation, that you can have a very nice (dirt) road that can easily handly 80km/h then you'll hit 40-50kmh where you can't realistically go above about 10km/h. :mad:
Oh and we had to have our suspension replaced in Romania by some backyarder with a spanner. I was very impressed that it held out.