Overland to Mongolia
Knowing nothing about mechanics or off-roading didn’t put off Scarlett Mansfield from overlanding to Mongolia with her boyfriend . . .
Adventure-loving woman drives to Mongolia despite knowing nothing about mechanics or off-roading
“STOP! BRAKE!” I scream.
“I’m trying, the brakes aren’t working,” retorts Harley, my boyfriend.
Before we can even think of grabbing the handbrake, our Freelander has shot back and hit a small brick wall. We narrowly escape plunging off the bridge and into the shallow water below. Assessing the damage, we discover we have shattered the back window and lost the door handle.
In this moment, stuck in the middle of the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, we realise we know very little about Land Rovers and off-roading in general. Later, reading our handbook, we learn that while reversing up a ravine we should have used minimal throttle. As soon as our tyres hit the tarmac, our harsh acceleration caught up with us – the wheels kept spinning and the brakes failed to slow the car.
On the bright side, this misfortune led us to purchase a second-hand mismatched dark green door from a local rural family. Unbeknown to us at the time, this acquisition led to an invite to spend the night at their house. We spent hours enjoying homemade wine and whisky with a police chief and his family who did not seem to understand the word ‘no’ as he poured shot after shot into our glass.
A short while ago, in the middle of my round-the-world travels, I asked Harley if he wanted to drive with me from the UK to Mongolia and back during his summer break from university. “Sure. Why not?” he responded. And so it was set in stone. With less than a month at home to prepare, we needed to get visas and my 2002 Td4 Freelander adequately prepared after six months of neglect.
I have owned a Freelander for two years now and never really appreciated it properly. Growing up, my life consisted of nothing but Land Rovers. Before I was born, my father, Duncan Mansfield, reached the finals in 1989 and 1990 to represent the UK at the Camel Trophy competition. Flipping a Mini Moke in Lanzarote, however, meant Bob Ives led the British team to victory instead. Soon after, my dad set up his first Land Rover parts company, known today as Britcar UK, which also caters for Jaguar, too. Now you know why I have a wheel cover bearing its logo.
Though you think this would be a great help while touring the world, it turns out they cannot magically send us parts we need in record time or fix our problems over the phone. Alas, in their absence we turn to our trusty Haynes manual, Youtube tutorials, and local Land Rover community pages on Facebook – in fact, the latter is how we found that secondhand door. “You’re going to drive to Mongolia in that?” asked my dad. “Sure, why not? You’re always preaching about Land Rovers to me and constantly took me off-roading with my three sisters as a child” I replied.
At the time, the challenge of a 16,500-mile trip in a 16-yearold right-hand-drive manual car, with 160,000 miles on the clock, didn’t even strike me as anything to worry about. We had one spare tyre, a can of tyre weld, four 5-litre jerrycans, cable ties, a spare fan belt, a hammer, and a pair of pliers. “What else could we possibly need?” I would often question as we passed Land Rovers equipped with the entire kitchen sink on their roof rack.
I will admit, we later bought a £8 screwdriver and socket set from a Bulgarian supermarket after realising we had forgotten to bring even the most basic tools. This purchase only came when we attempted to fix our windscreen wipers. Though, as previously mentioned, we knew nothing about Land Rovers so failed to even fix this simple problem.
“What are you still doing here?” a Turkish man ends up asking us, noticing we have been stuck in the petrol station for three hours.
“We are waiting for the rain to stop,” we dumbly respond, pointing to our
“I was amazed at how effortlessly the Freelander towed the Nissan Micra to safety”
broken wipers.
“One second” he replies (or at least we think he says this, he only speaks Turkish). Sure enough, a second later his friend arrives and within two minutes he has fixed our problem. We thank him greatly and finally set off on our way once more, cursing our stupidity and questioning if it is too late to turn around.
Our next challenge comes after crossing the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. Thanks to a typing error, we import our ‘Land Lover’ and enter a different world. The sheep, cows and stray dogs that once darted in front of us while winding through the stunning Transfagarasan Highway in Romania seem a distant memory as a stubborn camel steps out in front of our car, forcing us to grind to a halt. We put on the hazard lights to warn our new British friends behind us. Travelling in a beaten-up Nissan Micra, these two lads have picked up a couple of hitchhikers and have asked to convoy with us, worried they may need to be towed as their engine struggles to reach above 60 mph.
Moments later, we start to notice a pull on the wheel and swiftly pull over. On closer inspection we find a small stone has pierced a hole in our tyre and we can audibly hear the air escaping from it. Despite insisting that this is something we could actually deal with ourselves, Max, our new buddy, with a few months at Halfords under his belt, expertly changes the tyre in a time that would make a Formula One pit crew blush. Before we know it, we are on the road again.
Reaching the town of Beyneu, the road suddenly disappears. In its place, a sandy dirt track littered with sizeable rocks confronts us. For the next 200 km, our Freelander tears over potholes and battles banks of sand designed to stop cars using the half-finished perfect tarmac road that follows alongside this abysmal track. For the first 100 kilometres, the Micra puts up a devastatingly good fight, but eventually meets its match.
At this point, I come to realise why Land Rovers are revered by so many. Though a Micra can hardly be compared to our beast, I was still amazed at how effortlessly the Freelander towed it to safety and how well it handled any