The Mongol Rally Guys

The change we noticed after crossing the Kazakh border (and even at the border itself) was pretty drastic. All of a sudden we had people waving at us, kids saying hello, and an all-around general friendliness that was somewhat lacking prior to that point. It was a nice change. We headed off towards Atyrau, Kazakhstan and stopped at a truck stop on the side of the road for food. As we couldn’t read the menu each of us picked a different number on the menu and hoped for the best. Collin and I got fried eggs, spam, and a bowl of hot grits mixed with meat–not too bad! After we finished eating another team pulled up at the truck top, one from Italy. They were making a documentary on the rally and had left a week later than everyone else and had already come this far. The five teams took off towards the east and were soon left in the dust of the Italian team–they had to keep up their crazy pace I suppose.

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We headed towards Astrakhan, the last major city in Russia before the border. Again, we were routed through the city, this time during rush hour. Outside of the city we ended up going over an interesting floating bridge where we had to pay a toll to cross. We were stopped for the fiftieth time by AK-47 welding border security guards because of our lack of a front license plate. After a brief explanation of how we don’t have front plates in Michigan, they let us go. Note to anyone planning on doing the rally with a US car–make sure you have a front license plate. It’s quite a pain getting stopped all the time.

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Sorry for the lack of new photos guys, but the internet is much too slow to get anything online! Will continue to have postings everyday, and will probably be able to upload new pictures when I get to Almaty, Kazakhstan in a bit more than a week or so.

Thanks for your patience!

Instead of heading in a diagonal line towards Kazakhstan we decided to go south and then over so that we could see Kalmykia, the only Buddhist province in Russia. Situated in the middle of the jut of Russia that contains Volgograd, Kalmykia is a mostly agricultural province with an extremely high Asian-population. As we headed out of Volgograd the change was immediate. All of a sudden the people were Asian and there were plains and livestock everywhere. It was a big change from Volgograd. I’m not sure as to why there is a Buddhist province in Russia, but it’s there!

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Previously known as Stalingrad, Volgograd is a large, patriotic city in between Ukraine and Kazakhstan. We didn’t have much time to explore the city, as we wanted to be on our way to Kazakhstan by that evening. One thing we definitely couldn’t miss though was the giant Mother Russia (Rodina) statue looming over the city. We drove up to the hill it was perched on and marveled at the scope of the thing (larger than the Statue of Liberty). There was also a gold-roofed Orthodox Church as well as various memorials to those that had died in World War Two (along with Russia’s version of the Eternal Flame). It was all very surreal and a reminder of how much influence communism had on the country for 70 years or so.

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We continued on the Russian side towards the city of Rostov-Na-Donu. Again, the freeway took us a circuitous route through the city, and we almost got lost a number of times. After we got out of the city we eventually came upon another team of four Brits doing the rally. We followed them for a while and when we stopped at a gas station we talked a bit and decided to convoy to Volgograd, as that’s where we were all heading.

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We were behind schedule and had to try and catch up. To accomplish this we decided to drive straight on through the night and try to hit Volgograd, Russia sometime the next day.

In Ukraine freeways don’t go around cities as much as right through them. And not directly through them–they take you in a confusing maze of paths through each city. This resulted in us getting a bit lost almost every time we hit a mjaor city. Signs would often disappear (see previous post), and we would be left circling city streets trying to find where the highway started up again. This is even harder to do when it’s dark out, which was the case for our entire drive through Ukraine.

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Odessa is a nice mid-size city situated along the Black Sea. There aren’t many tall buildings in the area, and most of the streets are lined on either side with oak trees, so it gives the city a small-town feel. After we woke up the first evening we went outside to do some reconnoitering of the area. We were situated near the center of the city, just two blocks from the central train station. We headed east to check out the beaches, as I had heard good things about them. Following that we had dinner at a kebab/sushi place (interesting combination, but it works!).

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It was midnight and pitch black outside at the end of the border ordeal. We were tired, hungry, and dirty. We were also very relieved and very thankful that we had gotten across into the country.

We had looked at a map the day before and saw tat Odessa was approximately a 300 kilometer drive from the Moldovan border. Should be doable in about three hours I thought. Well, I was expecting on doing most of the traveling in daylight. I was also expecting road signs and roads that didn’t look like they had gotten blasted to pieces during some recent conflict. Upon driving that first stretch of road past the border I could only think of one thing: the Ukrainians must really not care about anyone getting in and out of Moldova from their country. Massive pot holes everywhere…simple massive. A semi truck in front of us was having quite the rough time with the roads and we were doing our best to follow its path at a leisurely 5 MPH.

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So, keep in mind this is all in sweltering heat–not even the commander’s office had air conditioning. We hadn’t eaten much more than some granola bars and dried fruit over the past twenty hours. Neither of us had gotten more than a couple hours of fitful sleep in the car. We were low on water. We were dirty from road dust. We just wanted to get through this stupid checkpoint and make it to Odessa before nightfall to check in to our hotel.

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Why couldn’t our car accompany us in? Why, we didn’t have a passport for the car of course! It turns out that all cars registered in this section of the world receive a card that allows them to drive through other countries. As the car is a US car and also registered in the US, and because this ‘car passport’ doesn’t exist in the US, we didn’t possess one.

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Here’s where the fun begins.

So we completed our one mile tour of Moldova and entered the Ukrainian border check point. To our surprise we see not one but three other rally cars waiting there. As there is a line about ten cars deep I go over and talk to the guy in the nearest rally vehicle. Their teams were from the UK and he sad that they had been there almost six and a half hours, as one of the three cars in their convoy had some vehicle registration papers that didn’t seem to match the numbers on the car. Oops! Each one of them had had their car’s contents inspected and had been fined for numerous offenses, including having money stowed in the vehicle ($15US fine). He was just waiting on the final paperwork to be finished before they could head off.

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Things are getting a bit tougher.

First off, the good part: Romania. After driving all night we entered the country a bit before sunrise. I was lucky enough to watch the sunrise over the hills while driving towards the east. This was the first stretch of land where you really felt like you weren’t ‘in Kansas anymore’. A very agrarian society to this day, we were traveling through villages where people were leading their cows to pasture, and horse-drawn carts were sharing the road with cars. We had origially planned to travel to the capital, Bucharest, but as we were already a bit behind schedule we decided to sick to the northern part of the country and push on towards Moldova.

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It was a long drive, but we made it from Kutna Hora to Budapest in about eight hours. We checked into a very basic, no-frills hotel, and did a bit of sightseeing on foot around the city. The next day, we visited the castle overlooking the Danube River, much as we had done in Prague, and ended up doing quite the circuit around the city. It had gotten much warmer outside during the previous day or so (up to 36C-39C), and we were sweltering the entire time the sun was up. We headed back to the hotel, took a shower (one nice thing about having communal showers is that you can use it after check-out if need be), and headed out around 9:00PM on the longest stretch of driving yet–a grueling 24 hour stretch from Budapest through Romania and Moldova and on into Odessa, Ukraine. We had decided to leave at night to save us from having to spend money on another room for the night and because it would be much cooler outside.

Leaving the city at dusk and traveling down two lane ‘highways’ (the proper highway ended at Budapest), we were treated to the sight of prostitutes at almost every intersection, dressed in bright clothing (apparently so that they would stand out in the dark and you wouldn’t hit them with your car…which we almost did a couple times), often standing in the middle of nowhere.

Pictures have been posted in the gallery.

It was a leisurely ninety-minute drive to Kutna Hora. This town situated east of Prague was famous for its silver production and craftsmanship along with its churches. The church we came to visit, the Sedlec Ossuary (a.k.a. the Church of Bones), was closed by the time we got there, so we went over to a local campground and stayed there for the night.

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Kristi, Jarrett, Collin, and I drove a couple hours to the city of Prague and checked into a hotel room there. When I parked to check into the hotel I noticed tat the other roof mount on our roof rack had also been cleaved in half. I had no more rope, so I took some duct tape and patched it together. ow that we wouldn’t be carrying any extra passengers we would at least be able to take some of the weight off of the roof rack–that should help.

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