The Epic Journey
About 5 years ago we embarked on the longest, biggest and the most challenging drive of all when we decided to drive from Stuttgart to Pune; from the German headquarters of MercedesBenz to their Indian headquarters. Here is a throwback to the biggest drive of them all
EPIC is probably too mild a word to describe what we had undertaken: drive the GLA, the smallest SUV in the Mercedes-Benz range, from Stuttgart to Pune through 11 countries. It’s not the countries that are daunting – it is the terrain. The highest mountain ranges in the world and we are doing this in peak winter. The Urals, the Tien Shan, the Kunluns, Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, the Tibetan plateau and if that was not enough, anyone heard of Siberia? Simply put: Icy roads with a front wheel drive vehicle. We weren’t so sure. We were not even able to calculate the distance we would be driving – not on Google Maps, not on any other map. Border crossings: a big challenge. Getting into Russia and China we were sure would not be easy. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were an unknown quantity.
The journey of the GLA and the support car, the GL, as the GLS was then known, thus, begins in Germany but the western European bit is a stroll as we pass through the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia before heading into