Drive more than 10,000 miles to Mongolia in a car that looks like a Highland cow, taking in terrible roads, dodgy border patrols and the Gobi Desert.. what can possibly go wrong?
CHARITY RALLY TRIP OF A LIFETIME WITH FOOD POISONING, POTHOLES, FIERY CRATERS AND A DRAMATIC RESCUE
This year’s Mongol Rally saw 350 ill-equipped one-litre cars set off from Goodwood race track across Europe and Central Asia’s pothole-strewn roads to Mongolia.
The annual charity fundraising event has seen madcap motors make the 10,000-mile trek from the UK since 2003.
Sunday Mail journalist Graeme Donohoe has just returned from taking on the tough challenge for Race Against Dementia in a car decorated to look like a Highland Cow.
Here’s how he got on...
As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but sandy wilderness on the horizon.
The rescuers had followed a long oil trail to find the panicking motorists stuck in the middle of nowhere.
It had the makings of a front- page story – stricken Scots pulled out of a life- or- death situation. Unfortunately, the driver at the centre of this drama was me.
There had been no warning. No lights had lit up on the dashboard. But suddenly our car lost power and we were forced to a grinding halt.
A check under our stricken motor revealed it was gushing oil. Our sump – the vehicle’s vital oil reservoir – wasn’t just damaged, it had been obliterated on one of the unforgiving desert’s many sharp rocks.
There was no signal on our mobile phone and it hit us that we were in big bother. Thankfully, the spirit of the Mongol Rally is that every team helps others in need.
I will never be able to thank Germans Nikolaus Bery, Lilly Wittgenstein and Donatus Schaumburg enough.
Their ancient VW Polo towed our cow car Morag’s sorry carcass 150km – or a painstaking nine- and- a-half hours – across the desert to the nearest town, Khvod. Norwegian team Andreas Rygg and brothers Hallvard and Tormod Santory and solo Australian traveller Gavin Malloy also stayed with us on the gruelling rescue mission.
Without our saviours, we might have suffered the same fate as the many animal bodies scattered across the dusty plains – their skeletons picked clean by hungry scavengers.
The Mongol Rally’s motto is: If nothing goes wrong, everything has gone wrong.
The cow pat most certainly hit the fan for Team Jackie Moo-art on more than one occasion as we took on the challenge of driving a third way across the planet from Scotland to Mongolia. Destroyed wheels, food poisoning, a catastrophic visa blunder, a Russian interrogation over narcotics and a bullet found in the car, four days stuck on a ferry…we had to overcome a few problems.
The dramatic end came 8500 miles into Morag’s epic five-week journey.
We are brokenhearted we never got Morag – kindly supplied by Peoples Ford – to the finish line party in Ulan Ude, Russia, but we gave it an almighty shot.
Most importantly, we have raised a lot of money for Sir Jackie Stewart’s charity Race Against Dementia – and there is still time for you to donate at www.teamjackiemoo-art.com.
The trip had started so well with Morag
beating 350 fellow participants to be crowned the Mongol Rally’s “Best Pimped Car” at the Goodwood race track launch party.
Our route took us through 19 countries – the UK, France, Belgium, Holland Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey
Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan Russia and Mongolia.
There were exhilarating highs such as conquering some of the planet’s most dangerous roads, including Romania’s notorious Transfagarasan, hailed world’s best road trip by Top Gear.
Driving around in a fluffy Ford Fiesta that looked like it was auditioning for a
An international rescue mission had been launched involving Germans, Norwegians and an Australian towing a broken- down Scottish car 150km from the Gobi desert to safety. Mail man on his panic after breakdown leaves him stuck in barren wilderness
part in a new Dumb and Dumber movie gave us an idea of what it must be like to travel in the Popemobile.
Probably every third car that passed us would whisk out a mobile phone as if they’d seen something unbelievable.
And even police officers proved to be desperate to be snapped with Morag.
The first time we saw the flashing blue lights in the rear-view mirror was in Romania and we feared the worst. The officers marched over from their car but the tension was broken when one of them said: “We just wanted a closer look at your car. It’s so cool.”
Our journey was besieged with bad luck from the Azerbaijan capital Baku
onwards. We lost a day after a visa mix-up meant my co- driver for the second half of the trek, Jasper Bundy, was barred from entry.
I then lost four days stuck in limbo on a farcical ferry trip over the Caspian Sea from Baku to Turkmenistan.
Calmac have their critics but at least they operate to some sort of recognisable timetable.
It took more than 27 hours hanging about Baku harbour before I even got on the boat, which then became a floating prison for a further three days.
The four-day ferry hell and eight-hour border check must be Turkmenistan’s message that foreign visitors are not welcome. The country lets in fewer tourists a year than North Korea. It says a lot about Turkmenistan that dentist- turned- dictator President Gurbanguly Berimuhamedow wants to f il l in one of the world’s most spectacular sights…the Gate To Hell.
The 69m-wide fiery gas crater 160 miles north of Ashgabat has been raging for almost 50 years after a Russian oil exploration attempt went spectacularly wrong.
We lost a further two days struggling to find Ford parts when Morag was forced to limp over 10 miles on just three wheels into Bukhara, Uzbekistan, after losing two wheels in one day on the country’s pothole-strewn roads.
After losing a further day to a bout of food poisoning in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the clock was seriously ticking as to whether we’d make the finish line before our Russian visas expired on August 19.
A gruelling 44-hour drive – more than 1500 miles – from Bishkek through Kazakhstan and Russia to the Mongolian border was a desperate bid to claw back some lost time.
But our effort was scuppered by a chaotic border crossing that took us 30 hours to travel just 30km.
The free-for-all wasn’t helped when I ended up interrogated by Russian border security forces for three hours after a spent gun cartridge and narcotics were found in Morag. All hell broke loose when a Russian held up a gold ammunition case found beside the driver’s seat. Our only explanation is it must have fallen out of the pocket of one of the people who posed for photos sitting in Morag.
I also now know that painkiller cocodamol is highly illegal in Russia after it was found in my first aid kit.
Desert driving in Mongolia was loads of fun before our dramatic rescue.
Morag was towed on her sad final journey to a mechanic’s yurt on the outskirts of Khovd, where a St Andrew’s flag was flown in her honour.
RIP Morag.