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!! 
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….
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...
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!
