July 12, 2009

AAAAANNDDD…we have a car!

Filed under: Car, Rally Prep — arun @ 10:03 am

Yes…finally…!!

Yet another roller coaster ride…we never managed to stick to our original plan of purchasing the car in England. We did buy a car…in Holland…but even that didnt work out in the end. So, after all the confusion, we have a car now…and this one is final. Say hellow to our partner in this trip, a Peugeot Partner!! Ta-daaahhh!! :)

The car!!

Its a little bit unorthodox as its a delivery truck kind of vehicle…although it has a smallish engine at 1360cc, 70 PS and petrol powered. The advantage with such vehicles is, its built to take heavy loads and strain on the suspensions…which might bode well for a trip of this kind. Disadvantage, slow, heavy, might consume a bit of fuel. The engine is a relatively new one…50000kms done but the car itself has 160000 odd kms behind it. I bought it from a romanian guy sitting in a caravan with an internet connection! A bit shady..but had a good gut feel…so went haead with it anyway.

Things to be done with the car now:

  • Oil change, oil filter change
  • Servo fluid refill
  • Some gaskets on the top of the engine to be changed
  • Changing the exhaust pipe holders
  • Buying some spare wheels, tires
  • Getting a new air filter, fuel filter, toolbox etc
  • Protecting the sensors

A bit more has to be done…but in short, this is it. The car is in pretty good shape otherwise….

Thanks for all the help Jose!

Filed under: Team — Tags: — arun @ 9:54 am

Well, it was sad that Jose had to drop out. His father is not doing too well and he has to take care of him. We pray that all goes well with his father! Who knows…maybe we will get together again next year for another trip! ;)

Visa Update

Filed under: Rally Prep, Visas — arun @ 9:51 am

Hey guys..

Its been a while we know since we wrote anything here…but its been quite a roller coaster ride.

Raja and Rajesh who applied through the adventurists have all of the critical visas except Russia and Azerbaijan which they are scrambling for now. Dingeman has everything under control from his side…just need to get the turkmenistan, uzbek and kyrghystan going this week and azerbaijan we will hope to apply for in TBlisi. As for me, my package never reached the adventurists and i lost a month and a half with not a single visa done. But thanks to my wonderful teammates, we are trying hard to get all going through a pan-europe visa application effort. I already have mongolia, kazakstan and turkey in the kitty. In a couple of days, hope to have uzbek, kyrghystan and turkemenistan. Russia is something which needs to be get next week…lets see…fingers crossed.

May 6, 2009

Vaccinations

Filed under: Rally Prep — Jose @ 9:11 pm
So well, just an advice for anyone doing this trip.

There are lot’s of diseases out there which can ruin your adventure, sot i’s good idea to find advice on vaccinations. Fortunately, here in Spain there is a very good international health service (Centro de Vacunación Internacional, http://www.msc.es/sanitarios/consejos/vacExt.do) run by the Health Ministry. One can easily browse their web and find some advice, although they always reccomend to visit them. I had gone a couple of times in the past for other trips and I remember the office in Madrid being terribly bad organized. Waiting there for 4 hours, queing in the stairs… But now you can request an appointment. This time I didn’t have to wait so long.

The list of recommended vaccines is quite long:

Tiphoid fever
Hepatitis A & B
Rabies
Tetanus-Diphtheria
Influenza
Japanese Encephalitis
Summer-Spring Encephalitis

I only needed to get two of them. The other either I already have had taken or are not considered dangerous for the trip.

Should you need to take some, get advice as soon as possible, as some need to be taken long before departure to be effective and if you need to take some at the same time, you may end ill. And prepare money, vaccines are not cheap!

Team T-Shirts!!!

Filed under: PR and Publicity, Team — Tags: , , — arun @ 9:00 am

Yoohoo!

They are finally in…and they look awesome! Check it out. We got the following sizes…

  • Mens, size M, L  — White Background
  • Womens, size S, M — White Background

So do contact us at mongolrally.rustics@gmail.com to grab one of these babies before they run out…!! :)

The official Ts!

The official Ts!

April 14, 2009

The un-route!!

Filed under: Rally Prep, Route — Tags: — arun @ 8:16 pm

We wanted to avoid Russia and Ukraine as much as possible right from the start…its not cos we wanna get friend in the friendly Kazakh deserts but more because of the fact that it would have been too easy in Russia (its got decent roads all the way up to Mongolia) and as a result would have been more boring than watching the weather updates being in a place like Chennai (its either summer or mild summer all year long!!).

Anyway, after a bunch of discussions and many a cuppo coffe later, we came up with this of course…it might change a bit at the last moment, but for the time being, we are working with this route in mind.


View Final Route in a larger map

Interestingly once we knew that the Adventurists are offering the visa machine also for Kyrgyzstan, we jumped at it and changed our route. Of course, the really interesting bit on the route starts from Serbia onwards and gets real interesting in Turkey. I had been there in 2007, is an awesome place no doubt! :) My Turkish friend here is already giving me warnings about speeding in towns as its supposedly a BIG offence!

I am hoping of course that the Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan bit works out finally…although we do wonder how Georgia would look like right now after last years clash with Russia. Interestingly that happened right during the time of the Mongol Rally 2008…and yes, some teams were dodging missile fire as opposed to the more sedate pothole!

Anyway, the countries we would we passing through are

  1. Europe : England
  2. Europe : France
  3. Europe : Germany/Netherlands/Belgium/Italy – depending on last minute decision on the route (our aim being to get to Prague on 20th July for the BIG party!!)
  4. Europe : Czech Republic
  5. Europe : Serbia
  6. Europe : Bulgaria
  7. Europe/Asia : Turkey (Talks are forever going on if Turkey would find a place in the EU!!)
  8. Asia : Georgia
  9. Asia : Azerbaijan
  10. Asia : Turkmenistan
  11. Asia : Uzbekistan
  12. Asia : Kyrgyzstan (latest addition)
  13. Asia : Kazakhstan
  14. Asia : Russia
  15. Asia : Mongolia

Of course, this doesn’t mean we will stop here. Once we drop the car off for the rally people to sell it off and donate the proceeds to charity, many of us might head on further to other places. Some being China, India, back to Europe through the Trans-Siberian rail…etc etc… :)

Ah well, may the wind blow exactly behind our car throughout… :)

April 4, 2009

Visa machine…

Filed under: Rally Prep, Visas — Tags: — arun @ 1:18 pm

Yeah…the visas…the concept which is now proving to be a thorn in all the wrong places!

Visa Machine from the Adventurists

Visa Machine from the Adventurists

Since many of us are not living in the UK, we could not avail of the famed Visa Machine…which is a glorified name for the visa service which the adventurists run. Or at least so we thought…after some emailing around, we found out that apart from the visa for Azerbaijan, the remaining is not restricted to just UK residents. Hmmm…got some potential to avoid a whole lot of trouble. But i am just wondering how it will all figure out with my German work permit etc…not to mention the brilliance of the Indian passport in making the border officials eyes open wide and stare at it for an extra long moment! The Indian passport leaves lot to be desired when one wants to do some REAL travel…but “na ja, so ist Leben” as we say in Germany.

But its definitely worth giving a shot at. Not too fond of these man made concepts…grrr! but still, lets hope i get it.

April 1, 2009

Communication!

Filed under: Rally Prep, Team — Tags: , — arun @ 11:35 am

Well…imagine me shouting at the top of my lungs into the heavens with nothing but a couple of now startled pigeons pecking around for titbits in the middle of the brownish green lawn of the early spring…the pigeons are now bored with long sentences and have wistfully turned their attention to a rather stubborn acorn!

Anyway, we being quite a unique team spread all over the bloody world…except Raja and Sangeetha, no one else is in the same country as the other. And there is a high probability of us not meeting before the rally. Infact some of us would jump into the car DURING the rally! :) So…communication is VERY important for us to get our stuff done…

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!! Listen to mmmeeeeeeeee!!

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!! Listen to mmmeeeeeeeee!!

As i was saying…communication is the key people. We have had a first successful team wide skype call…went very well. Although skype itself left much to be desired before we switched back to text chat…which actually worked very well. :) I do hope we continue in the same vein though…cant shout it out more clearly that! ;)

March 29, 2009

Which car?

Filed under: Car, Rally Prep — Tags: — arun @ 11:09 pm

Well, we did talk a lot about it…Jose was looking in Spain, I was looking in Germany…we were initially entrusted with the responsibility of buying the vehicle. But thanks to the new rules, we had to dish out quite a bit of money up front and of course, we live in financially very interesting times right now….so we didn’t make too much progress on that.

It was then that we realised the treasure trove that is the UK. Possibly due to the fact that the English prefer to drive their vehicles on the “right” side of the road, cars there were amazingly cheap! Of course, an additional advantage possibly being easier paperwork for the rally as the adventurists are experienced with UK vehicles a bit. So we shifted focus there…of course, Raja took on the responsibility of finding a decent car for us. We checked out big vans initially…and the rally people were quite interested in such a vehicle. I can imagine why that would make a hell a lot of sense for a place like Mongolia rather than a smallish car which might not be able to carry lots of stuff.

I did come across something called an LDV in our used vehicle search. It was a monster of a vehicle…18 seater thereabouts…and pretty cheap. Of course, reliability was at rock bottom is what we found out much later…but was quite interesting to know about this anyway. :) We also looked at the smaller cars as prescribed in the site…possibly 2 of them for the whole team…that remains to be seen.

What almost was...

What almost was...

Anyway, we have currently shortlisted a couple of vehicles….once we have something bought and shacked up in a garage, we would let you know!

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