Having already had the ‘mother of all drives’ from South Africa, combined with the fact that I had absolutely no money at all, I decided to approach the idea of a road trip from a different point of view.
There are various driving adventures out there using cheap cars - the Mongol Rally and the Plymouth to Dakar Rally are the more well known - and these organisations put expeditions/adventures within the grasp of the average person. I had actually signed up for the Mongol Rally and got everything ready to go but my team mate, at the last minute, was denied time off work….. so I went alone, missing the event all together.
A Nissan Micra worth £200, a small handful of tools and my rucksack full of camping gear…. nothing else.
After saying goodbye to family and friends I drove like a man possessed. Some days racking up 16 hours of driving. My 1 litre engine pushing me along at 70 miles an hour on the motorways.
I wrote an article for a friend on his blog about some trouble I had getting into Russia….
Are you missing pages from your passport?
By day five I was whizzing around the Moscow ring road…. a twelve lane free for all. I had some of my finest driving moments on that motorway! FIVE DAYS and I was in Russia!
Driving across the largest country in the world is very surreal after driving in the UK for most of your life. Signs for the next town are in the hundreds of kilometres (I saw a sign advertising a town over 2000 kms away!!!!)
One night I drove through the night on an adrenaline and trance music fuelled binge, the roads were winding, the car behaving superbly, I was buzzing….. up ahead I saw a faint orange glow, thinking I was approaching a city I started checking the maps, I was a little confused, the next city wasn’t that close! Pretty soon the orange glow turned into a small orange circle on the horizon…. the sun was coming up. I was driving due east and had crossed 7 time zones, my body clock was seriously messed up.
I eventually hit the Mongolian border another five days after passing Moscow.
8000 kilometres/5000 miles, 7 countries, 8 time zones in 10 days on my own, sleeping on truck stops in my car, eating junk food. My body and mind were an absolute mess!
Luckily the formalities at the Mongolian border were a lot smoother than the ones at the Russian one. With a massive sigh of relief and a huge smile I climbed back into my little beast to continue my journey…….
To be continued…….
The idea of a cheap car rally’ was what got me interested in the first place but the more I read up on Mongolia the more I was sure it was the place for me to explore. It is a beautiful, vast open country, with mountains, deserts, forests, plenty of wildlife, history and culture. It is also cheap and not over developed. I will definitely return there one day.
