Route : Esslingen, Germany  >>> Milan, Italy – Rally launch >>> Chioggia, Italy – Tomato beach club
Approx distance : 850kms

Well..here we were finally. Rajesh, Dingeman and Kristie rendezvoused at my place in Esslingen, Germany. Rajesh arrived a couple of days ago to give the Turkish visa a shot at Stuttgart…but didn’t really work out. We even knew the passport officer there through a friend (which btw is a freaking coincidence..i mean, how many bosses do you get who has cousins who are passport officers at the Turkish embassy in obscure places like Stuttgart!!)…but anyway, he was not too responsive. We had to rush around a bit in the raging rain for finding spare tires and Raja’s seat of honor in the next day but eventually we were all good to go. After a cool evening at Juleps cocktail bar on our last night, we woke up at 4am and set off.

The Rustics!

The initial enthu was palpable…people were overtaking each other…shouting out loud…giving good competition to top gear magazine wrt car to car photography! Rajesh was getting comfortable with the DSLR cam. I didn’t have all too much sleep the previous day…but the enthu was keeping me going. Apart from a coupla hiccups at the swiss italian border, the ride was traffic jam free. We froze our asses off in a bit in swiss where we had to go through a mountain pass where it was snowing…but as soon as we got into the Italian side of siwss, sun sun sun all the way! Infact the italian side of swiss was so unlike the rest, we sorta thought that we were in Italy and did not tank-up the cars (fuel being a bit cheaper we thought in Swiss..!!). We used a navigation system to get to Milan…we had until 3:30pm to get there and we barely hopped in at around 2:30pm.

The launch was surprisingly a small and cute affair…around 20 cars including the Fire Truck from Team Dragon fly…interestingly i was in touch with this team as they happen to be from Germany. Tons of Fiat Pandas, as expected…made me feel a bit happy that i chose the right car initially for this. Kristie and Dingeman had to smuggle themselves in.. Some totally clueless teams whose standard response to any question was “dude, we have no idea whats going on…”. But you know what, that was going with the spirit of the rally..so smiles all around.

The Party at Chioggia!

Then we moved quickly to put up the stickers on the car…Kristie had our names and country flags printed out which was cool. Our car got the tricolors of India…looked cool in the green background. But at the end we could hardly cover up a fraction of the surface (um…there was a lot of it!) and our car looked decidedly plain compared to the rest…The Suzuki was looking mean, lean and uber-cool though. Since they are not officially registered with the rally, we thought they might not be let in…but no problems.  We also picked up a bundle of clothes from Soyombo, which was an Italian NGO interested among other things in humanitarian affairs in India and Mongolia. Anyway, the actual launch happened…and a Swedish team started following us to get to Chioggia. Most of us were headed to a party which the crazy team full of Vespa riding dudes were throwing…but Milan is not really an easy place to navigate in…we went around in so many circles that we lost the Swedish team! They were, thankfully, not too sore at us when we met them later in the day.

A nice drive through the italian countryside until we reached Chioggia, Santamarino Lido. Our italian language skills were obviously at its best…basically using ones hands to express oneself!! Yeah, we reached the place alrite…but the vespa guys were conspicuously not there…but the rest were around. Found a camping spot, walked around a bit…enjoyed the beach a bit. Dinner was served at around 9:30pm…meat and more meat! Got to interact with a bunch of teams then…was cool. Then i could have dropped right there and slept on the table…so we made back to the camp and slept off after a rather satisfying day!