August 19, 2007 by dunny.

Life in Ulaanbaatar recallibrates your awesome scale.

We woke up yesterday and sent Andy off, then Anth from the Pandas, the Yaksi Taxi chicks, and me grabbed some Mongol grub and went off to the black market.  If you’ve never seen a Central Asian black market you’ve never really experienced organized chaos.  I have no idea where they get the goods but it’s basically a long line of huts that all have the same shit and will bargain to the bitter end to eek out one more dollar.  Anth’s bag got picked.  The Yaksi’s got their bags slashed open.  We were poked and prodded and pushed and yelled at for the whole 3 hours.  The only way we figured we would triumph was to just be cocky annoying white devils and act like we owned the joint.

So we bought pink suits.

The Rally “black tie” never saw such glorious assholes.  The site for the nightclub is http://www.mongolia-nightclub.com and I think they have pics of the party.

Managed to find Gans and Enkhe last night.  It’s amazing how every moment in this town is OK.  Everybody knows everybody.  There’s no planning or worry, they just knew the Rally party was happening and wandered in to see if I’d showed up yet.  They wanted to do lunch today to make some countryside plans and Gans just said “Dave’s place around noon.  It’s Mongolia so it’s probably between 11 and 1.  We don’t have solid time here.”

Oh, and whoever sees Andy first tell him to mail the Chariot keys back here so I can sell her instead of leaving her in the middle of Sukhbaatar Square to be molested.

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August 19, 2007 by dunny.

Alright folks, unfortunately we haven’t had any internet (or phone, shelter, good food, or civilization) in the last week so this will be a long post.  But holy shit it will be awesome.

Last yall heard we were in Almaty and that time’s were good.  Here’s what really happened…

We were stuck in stop-and-go traffic, which the Chariot has never enjoyed, trying to get to the center of the city.  Carl Tuvan of the Hobos needed to stay overnight and sort out his Russian visa then fly to Semey where we would pick him up.  The Chariot was a little pissed about this delay though.

She was running out of gas and starting to overheat.  She finally decided she’d had enough and blew the reserve tank off the radiator completely off and started smoking.  Then the alternator started to die and the battery juice ran low.  It was like the last stand of the Chariot of Awesome and we were just into Kazakhstan.

Well we decided to just milk her along until something died and fix it.  We managed to drive her through a good portion of the desert and crash on the side of the road with optimism peaked.  Got a jump from the Hobos in the morning and kept on truckin.  This is where the adventure started.

Basically we couldn’t stop driving or she stalled and needed another jump.  Starting the night before we had been changing drivers while going 40mph down crap roads in pure darkness…not because it’s a good/stupid stunt but we thought we had to.  We inched along like this until we were about 100 miles south of Semey in the middle of absolutely nothing when the alternator bit the dust.  Dead.

We weighed options for a while (scrap the car and catch a bus, look for abandoned cars to gank an alternator, trade it for donkeys, etc).  Finally I took off with the Hobos to test out the nearest town while Andy took off the dead alternator and lubed it up for one possible final push.  This was kind of similar to the water pump in that we knew exactly what was wrond and how to fix it, but much much worse in that we didn’t have a replacement and there was no semblance of civilizations for miles.

Great.  We got one more jump and just booked it.  Keep in minds the roads in Kazakhstan are like a pice of Swiss cheese and we couldn’t ever take gas off (brake or clutch and it stalled immediately).  So there we were going 50 in constant life-before-your-eyes style with moments or airborn glory and skid-outs and heart attacks.  We still stalled 7 times.  It was raining and none of the accessories worked b/c the battery had no charge, so I had to manually wipe the windshield with the spare wiper blade as I drove.  I had to pass a truck on the shoulder and ended up in the grass for about a half km.  Somehow we got her to a town and pulled into a gas station.

There we found a kid who spoke a little English who found a guy who took us to his random friend’s shack right there in the middle of nothing.  We pulled up and stalled in the back yard of a chubby Kazakh named Donabek, who was busy rebuilding his humble home with his family.  He had a huge smile and and equally huge gut.  We liked him immediately (we kind of had to b/c we were separated from the Hobos at this point and completely relying on the man).

We pointed to the alternator.  He took it off, fished out a file and some wrenches, then went into his shed and pulled out an alternator brush from a motorcycle engine that was the same model as ours.  Luck?  Nah, just awesome.  Together the 3 of us rebuilt that alternator and got the Chariot humming like new.  We gave the family some gifts and were off.  What a difference 4 hours can make.

And Master Theobald, you have some competition.

Right, so we decided to get to Semey and make a gameplan, but the last stretch of road was still like driving on a cheese grater, so finally we just crashed on the side of the road again.  We woke up a few hours later about 10 feet from the Semey welcome sign

We filled up and decided to rally on to the homeland.  It took about 5 hours to get through the Kazakh-Russia border.  All the legends of bribe-seeked Russian border guards never took form and we slipped right on through.  We pushed on to Barnaul, exchanged some cash, and talked to a few truckers to find out the route to the Mongol border crossing (about 3500 km away!!).  So we were off, first for Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, with no map or compass or convoy.

The first half of the drive through Russia was pretty sweet…nice highways, no traffic, Chariot running well.  A couple days of drive, cook on the side of the road, sleep on the side of the road, drive, drive, honk, drive had us pretty confident.  We pulled over at sunset one night (forgive me for not knowing days, they all ran together after a while) to cook and a trucker pulled up to see if we needed help.  Great guy…ended up giving us biscuits with fresh Siberian honey and some tea…but then he broke the news that soon we’d come to a 200km stretch with “road no exist.”

My friends, that is a complete understatement.  The M53 motorway through Siberia is the worst road on the planet.  There were potholes bigger than the car and 5 feet deep.  There would be good pavement spots for about a half km, then there would be a hole the size of Rhode Island.  Plus, it was pouring rain.  The Chariot really came into her own over the next few days…popping into 4 wheel drive and following a truck in pitch blackness in a thunderstorm through mud as high as our tires, all while trying to avoid debilitating holes.  It took 2 solid days to drive this stretch and get to Irkutsk and we took about 12 gigantic wallops in potholes.

We got to Baikal at night and had a look…it’s beatiful but we had no time to stop.  We were working our way through town and by stroke of awesome ran into a couple other Rally teams (Bad Idea from New Jersey/California and Prancing Pandas from UK/South Africa).  They had come down from Scandanavia and were pushing for the border that night.  Hello 3rd convoy, the best yet.

We drove through the night and were approaching the Mongol border at sunrise.  The scenery was brilliant.  It was really amazing.  The Chariot had started making some noise that night but we were so close we didn’t care.  Then, with the border in sight, something exploded.  OUR DRIVE SHAFT SHEARED COMPLETELY OFF.  It spun the broken piece around so hard that it cut through the floorboard.  Had I had my left foot on the clutch and not propped up on the seat, it might have been cut off.  We were smoking.  We almost killed the Panda with metal parts flying out from under the car.  The Chariot was dying.

She was taking us to Monoglia though, dammit.

We tied to the Panda which pulled us the last few km to the border, where we pushed her up to the Russian gates.  Here, we spent the next 6 hours sitting and waiting for “many many documents” that the Russians insisted we had to have.  They prepared whole packets of papers with cover sheets and everything that, after all that time, we just handed back to them and drove through.  Well, we pushed the car through.  But still.

On to the Mongol border.  They knew we were in the Mongol Rally.  They had a list of cars with all of us on it.  They saw our papers.  Seems pretty straightforward that we could skip on through and head to UB, huh?

We were there for 30 hours.  First, they decided they’d close customs early so we’d have to stay the night.  We all took turns arguing or yelling or laughing or making fun and finally just walked into town for a hotel and a bar (we could go into Mongolia, just the cars couldn’t).  We turned it into a killer party, though, so no worries there.  Just another border adventure…the 20th so far, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

We woke up and after 5 hours of document processing were through.  We found a tow for the Chariot and jumped in with the other cars (Andy in the Panda, me in the Micra).  It was a 300km drive full of drinking and screaming and 70mph hand-offs and even and off-road demolition derby in which both cars lost their doors, headlights, and a semblance of quality.  Andy jumped out at one point and rode a bull.  Well, he jumped on and fell off.  Then he chased another one around for 10 minutes and jumped on, but the bastard just sat there.  It was awesome, to say the least.

So, where are we now?  Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.  The Chariot is resting at the finish line.  We made it.  Andy went to the airport this morning for his trip home, and I’m headed off to the countryside in a couple days with a Discovery Channel cameraman.

What, yall expect anything less?  Here’s to being awesome.

Skip, out. (SkipLizard Homepage)

P.S.  Andy will put up his recap at some point, and I will keep blogging.  The drive may be over, but the adventure is definitely not.  Mongolia, here comes awesome.

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