Camping... the morning after

I woke at 4am with a blinding heading (not I hasten to add through any sort of alcohol consumption as this was in great moderation). I sat up and snot just fell out of my face. I lay back down onto one of the many stones that we'd failed to move before we set the tent up. God it was bloody freezing. I lay there for a few more hours until dawn broke properly and took my hurting back, painful head and streaming nose out of the tent to go and make a mug of tea. Camping sucks.

We both sat in the car with the heaters on and wondered what the hell we were getting ourselves into. This was just one night in Bournemouth. How would we all manage when there was hundreds of miles of nothingness in every direction?

Grabbing our freshly baked break rolls from reception on the way out (yes, more slumming it) we headed back to Yucels.

Before heading back home we popped into town and dragged ourselves round a camping shops (Blacks) and ooed and ahhed and the exciting lightweight metal sporks and the dazzling number of types of compasses. Looked like it's about £100 for a sleeping bag in which I won't freeze to death in the middle of some desert.

A browse through a bookshop lead me to read an interesting fact about Mongolia. Apparently you get bubonic plague there between July and August. A shame really as that's when we'll be there.

Camping 101

I like the Great Outdoors but I like to admire if from the other side of a window. But this attitude isn't going to help when we're going to be taking six days to cross Mongolia which doesn't - if I understand the situation fully - have a huge number of supermarkets along the route.

A bullet had to be bitten and a first experience of camping had to be undertaken. Now I'm not for one minute saying that a nights camping in Bournemouth is going to compare but surely it all helps.

Worryingly we packed the whole boot with stuff. Bearing in mind this was just for two people, for one night I think we may have to re-think our strategy when we've added a third person and we're off for thirty nights.

I think it's fair to say that our complete lack of navigational ability was highlighted when we tried to find the campsite. Firstly it was about ten miles away from Yucels house. Secondly we were using GPS. Even with this two things in our favour we still had to phone through for directions. Really, this wasn't a good omen.


Having arrived we got the tent pitched with relative ease and set about getting some dinner. Having discounted the possibility of snaring a rabbit or eating a raw squirrel it was decided that the most sensible course of action was for Yucel to heat some water to boil pasta and then mix some Dolmio sauce with it.

The first casualty of camping is excitement and standing in the middle of field lost its novelty pretty much as soon as we'd eaten. It was getting dark and so grabbed the torch and wandered up the lane to see what was there.


Twenty minutes later we were sitting in a pub with a couple of pints in front of us, our hands smelling of lavendar and patchouli oil from the campite bathrooms and we were wondering whether we were really roughing it. It was obviously a close all.

It's a sign

It's a sign. The rattling on the car turning into a very nasty sound ker-chunk on the drive home this evening. I pulled over onto the M4's hard shoulder and phoned for recovery. You see that's the kind of thing i'm not going to be able to do in the middle the kazakhstan desert.

One of the suspension springs (if that's what they're called) had snapped.

News from the inside

Simon Demler who'd completed the race this year met me in the GW Pub in Swindon and helped me out with various hard-won bits of advice.

Kit

Get a petrol camping stove and not a gas one as gas is a nightmare to find.

Deet insect repellant

Themarest mattress

Foldable camping chairs

Route

The Altai Mountains have surprisingly good roads.

When over the Mongolian Border you should head for xx. When you see the first town then this IS NOT IT. DO NOT VISIT THIS TOWN for it harbours ner-do-wells. You'll know when you've reached the proper town as it

Car

Weld a plate to protect the sump

If possible / necessary then raise the suspension

Comms

A CB radio can be great

You can get a WorldSIM card to put in an old phone and it makes phoning from remote locations a lot cheaper

Camping

I have to say that between us it's probably fair to say that we're not really the outdoor type. Certainly Yucel and myself pretty much spend most of the time in front of a computer. This is hardly the training necessary for finding yourself in a desert. To ease ourselves gently into some early preparations we're going to go and pitch up a tent down near Bournemouth.

Foreign & Commonwealth Office

The FCO is good for reading up on travel advice before you go. You can also register where you plan to be and then if you do need their assistance they've a heads up.

http://www.fco.gov.uk/

Looking into the route in more detail

325 days to go...

The Route

Of course it's subject to change should we find out that a particular route is difficult for some as yet unthought of reason but the very, very rough plan is.

England > France > Belgium > Germany > Chekoslovakia > Poland > Ukraine > Russia > Kazakhstan > Russia (again) > Mongolia.

The First Meeting

Three hundred and twenty sevens days to go.

Yucel drove up from Bournemouth to talk about the venture. No sign of Jason but it's early days.

In Jason's absence we've agreed the quickest and safest route is to drive pretty much in a straight line. Initially from Calais to Praha (Prague) for the Rally Party and then East and keep going East. It seems much easier than the Northern Route which would take us through mountainous regions that our small car would struggle with, and the Southern Route which would appear to take us perilously close to war-torn regions. Yes, the middle route seems the best plan of action.

Having agreed that this is best and with my newly purchased map of Europe to hand I started to plot would should be the easiest part of the journey. From Calais, where the ferry lands, to Praha - where the party will be taking place (though it must be said that the exact location hasn't been agreed).

I have the European Maps for my Tom Tom GPS and it happily plotted out the route for me and said the fastest route should be 677 miles (through tolls) and would talk about ten and a half hours, which presumably excluded the time taken to cross borders. Well that all seems fine.

Having roughly allocated jobs to everyone I have been designated the Navigator. I can only presume this was done with tongue firmly in cheek as I am notoriously bad at getting from A to B. This of course is why I have my GPS. For the rally however GPS systems are rightly frowned upon as they go against the spirit of adventure.

So there I sat with my printout from the GPS as a starter. I looked at the route. R0 > E40 > 86 > B14 > 89 > E49 > D5/50/23 < E48 etc.

With UK roads, as bad as I am I understand that there are A roads, B road, M for motorways, etc.

I've never driven abroad and though I have been driven through France I didn't really pay a great deal of attention - what with my being ten years old and on holiday with my parents. The one thing I belive I know is that A stands for Autoroute. As for B, E, etc. It's a mystery. I shall have to go and look it up.

~~~~~

We've decided to go camping next weekend to try our tents (no this is not something we normally do - I like the sofa).

More planning

Three hundred and twenty nine days to go.

Jason is looking into possible cars. Yucel is... well, i'm sure he's doing something. I shall start thinking about money. Money in both the £1,000 minimum the team needs to raise for charity and also sponsorship to help cover some of the costs.

Too early for research?

Which route?

The plan is to go in convoy with my brother and his girlfriend. This means of course that we need to agree on the same route.

We'd both pretty much thought the Southern route was preferable to the Northern route.

I printed off a few simple maps last night, since my geographic knowledge is rubbish. I mean, awful. Really, really dreadful.

A couple of days into the rally all the teams meet up in Czechoslavakia and getting there should, in theory, only take about twelve hours or so from Calais. I've picked the the Chzech capital (Prague) as my starting point for deliberations.

The two basic ideas are this:

The Northern Route: Pretty much a straight line heading east through Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and then into Mongolia.

The Southern Route: Slightly more complicated. South-East from the Chzech republic through Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria and into Turkey. Across the border into Azerbaijan and then up the coast into Kazakhstan and then into Mongolia.

The Southern route is definitely more driving, but takes us right between Georgia and Iraq - neither of which are looking particularly hospitable right now.

Oh. My. God.

Ok, so i've signed up for the 2009 Mongol Rally. I'd really fancied it, but wasn't sure I was going to through with it until the last day.

So here we are. We are now committed and are seeimgly hurtling towards 18th July 2009 and the start from Hyde Park. Mongolia here we come.