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Team Mongolmania donations have now closed. If you've missed out, you can still donate to our charities through their websites.
Thanks to all that supported Team Mongolmania on the 2008 Mongol Rally. Overall 2641 pounds was donated, with 1971 going to charity, and 670 toward our rally costs. That's a fantastic effort by all involved.
Proof that the money has been passed on to charity will be posted on this website shortly.
I know I said there would be no more posts on the Mongolmania Blog. However as donations kept rolling in, and I had time to think in UB, I began to think about how the Mongolmania Suzuki never crossed the finish line. How could I admit defeat when I still had a roll of duct tape and some cable ties? The plan started to take shape when I met a fellow SJ driver at the pub who had a spare SJ410 radiator on the roof rack of his car.
We had to return to the Suzuki on the 25th to sort out our belongings and write a list of bits and pieces to donate. We can’t carry much so all of our tents, cooking equipment, tools, ropes, air compressor and jerry cans were all donated to charity. The rally has been tough on the equipment, from vibration and from dirt, and most of our stuff was pretty wrecked. We’d only been at the car for about 10 minutes when a massive storm appeared from nowhere. The temperature dropped, there was a howling wind, and it started to rain. It wasn’t pleasant, and it was kind of a fitting end to the Suzuki. In the end it took us to a lot of places, but it sure did complain about it.
I wake at around 5am to the sound of beating pots. It seems the truck stopped last night at some sort of Mongolian truck stop. It consists of 3 Gers. The people who ride in the cab of the truck, the driver, his wife, and the 3 girls have all spent the night in one of the gers. The blue truck is gone now, and we don’t see them again.
The ladies who run the truck stop are now cooking a Mongolian truckies breakfast inside one of the gers, and they knock on the car window and invite us in. As you can imagine, I am unbelievably famished, and enjoy some tea, a bowl of boiled rice with lamb, two lamb ribs, and then the best...a lamb schnitzel fried in some sort of batter in a big wok. The truck guys each take a plastic bag of these schnitzels with them, but we have to be mindful that we have about US$10 of local currency between us. Breakfast costs us around $1.50 each, so that helped.
Read the rest of "We arrive in UB...eventually, and not so triumphantly"...
Regardless of our wheel bearing issues, to have any hope of making it to UB today, we need to start early. We leave the campsite at 5am, and it’s already really light.
I stop after 2 miles and check the bearing. It’s a fair bit hotter than the right, but it’s not that bad. I decide to check it after another 5 miles.
This was a bit of a lack lustre day. We continued to push across deserts and sandy plains on the south road. Choking on dust, and rattled to pieces, we did find the road marginally better than yesterday, but it still had it’s moments.
We’re up and on the road easily this morning. Perhaps our bad mechanical run has finished?
We learn today why the southern route is known as not exciting. The green hills give way to desert (or similar), it starts getting hot, and there aren’t many people to talk to. The road gets filthy dirty, and so does the inside of our car. For some reason we’re now taking dust in through the right hand side of our car as well as the left, and it’s the Aral Sea experience all over again. We do cross one small creek though, and we stop to have a bit of a wash. It’s only about 15cm deep though, and it’s freezing. There is a canvas roofed truck stopped as well. It’s the bus to Ulaanbaatar. We end up shadowing it all day. It seems to stop often for no reason at all, and we chat to them here and there I get a phone number of a guy who is a student of international law in UB, just in case I need some accommodation.
Another freezing cold morning, but at least the gale force wind has dropped overnight, and the fly is still on my tent. The tent fly’s on our Eurohike tents are hopeless, having stretched really badly in the windy conditions, until it’s impossible to hold them away from the tent inner.
We’ve decided the only way the bodged rear spring will make the rally finish is if we reduce the load it has to carry. We’ve already placed everything heavy in the car on the right hand side. We jack the car up and replace the wooden block between the chassis and the left hand side of the diff.
I wake early and write some hand notes for the blog. It’s cold in the Ger, and it gets colder as the man opens the skylight. Eventually he closes it again and lights the copper stove. We are served more tea and fried bread (it’s cold, but fried previously). We are also served some really hard cheese. The flavour is so strong it has to be gnawed a little piece at a time. I retrieve the bag of Joyce’s presents from the car, and we give each child a car. I give the man some Australian coins for his coin collection (it sits in a frame on the wall), and he takes a metal silver pen, which he proudly hands above his bed. We give the girl a hair care set, which is a brush, a comb and a hair clip in a plastic case. She immediately has her mum get to work on brushing her hair and putting the clip in.
It’s cold this morning, enough so that we need our thermals! I struggle starting the car. With no choke I have to remove the top of the carburetor and choke it manually, warm the engine, and then put it together. We have around 400 miles to the Mongolian border, and we’d love to get across today. That would see us one day ahead of our schedule. The roads to the border are supposed to be good bitumen, so we have a good chance.
Supporting rural communities to mobilise resources, meet their economic and social needs, and to provide a better quality of life for rural residents.
Helping people to help themselves and their community in the Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan - the poorest country in the region.
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