How to Drive from London to Mongolia’s Ulaanbaatar in the Mongol Rally | Ohio Today
After our car broke down in Mongolia, we drank vodka mixed with fruit preserves.
This story was originally published in Ohio Today magazine.
I assumed I was too old for comfort-deprived road trips. I spent my Ohio University years crisscrossing North America, eating beef jerky and sleeping in suspect, serial-killer campgrounds. At 29, I was content to work as a desk-bound, New York magazine editor and writer. Then I stumbled across a website asking: What if you want a bit of unknown in a world full of health and safety measures? What you need is the Mongol Rally.
Every summer, about 200 teams with fanciful names like Starsky and Clutch and Prancing Pandas raise more than $2,000 for charities, such as Mercy Corps and Send a Cow, which provides farmers with livestock. The do-gooders then drive from London to Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, in crappy cars like broken-down taxi cabs and ice cream trucks, which are then donated to charity—if the cars and their pilots survive. In the Mongol Rally, there are no GPS systems. No roadside assistance. No mechanics allowed. The reward for slogging across 8,000-plus miles of engine-killing mountain ranges, fording flooded rivers, bribing policemen and surviving parched deserts and bandits is a measly beer. Luckily, I really like beer.
I also liked the unknown. What wilds awaited in the vastness separating Krakow and Moscow, Samarkand and Tashkent, London and Ulaanbaatar? I got up from my desk chair and resolved to get in a Mongol Rally car and find out. By last March, fellow OU alum Andrew Coslow and Flash-developing friend Mims Wright filled out my rally-team roster. We named ourselves Mr. Dinosaur (“because stupidity isn’t extinct,” I reasoned) and acquired visas and immunizations. On eBay U.K., Andrew bought a white 1994 Subaru Justy for $590—less than my monthly rent.
For good reason. Upon arriving in London, we realized rust crept around edges, the radiator looked mice-eaten and the engine was covered by dark, congealed oil. When we fire up the ignition, the car growled like a lawnmower and blew exhaust willy-nilly.
We took our car to a mechanic.
“You need a radiator, spark plugs and exhaust,” he said, examining the Justy.
“Is that all?” Mims asked.
“Where are you driving?”
“Mongolia.”
“You could also use some luck.”
*****
The Rally commenced in a cacophony of honking horns, and in days we devoured France, Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic. Poland and Lithuania disappeared in a blur of roadside kielbasa stands. In Riga, Latvia’s ancient Baltic Sea capital, we welcomed our fourth Mr. Dinosaur member: a sandy-haired Brit named Jon whom we pitied after his Jeep’s engine exploded.
“Guess my welding job didn’t work,” he said, climbing into our cramped jalopy as we motored toward Mother Russia. After passing a nine-hour gauntlet of snarling German Shepherds and Cyrillic paperwork—“What does this house symbol mean?” wondered Andrew—we discovered our exhaust had ended its relationship with our muffler.
“No problem,” said Jon. Like MacGyver, he reattached the exhaust with a plastic zip tie.
Our repaired Dino-mobile roared across spottily paved Russian roads lined with smoked-eel stands. We zipped through Moscow, with its tank-ready 12-lane roads, and aimed south past swaying sunflower fields and grazing cows.
“It looks like Ohio,” Andrew said fondly, as daylight and Russia dwindled. At the Kazakhstan border, a stopped man with bad orthodontics ferried us across a moat separating the countries, depositing us in a land unlike Borat’s: Camels wandered the brown, dying countryside. Tumbleweeds blew. Paved roads dissipated into dirt tracks.
“I think,” Andrew said, “the Rally just began.”
***
Fun fact: Kazakhstan maps present straight paved roads, not the rocky, dirt moguls courses apparently ripped apart by land mines that we inched across at 12 miles per hour. Compounding matters, our muffler finally bid adieu in a knee-deep sand drift. We camped in dust storms. Passing trucks sent up choking clouds of sand, forcing us to wear bandanas like bandits. Ever resourceful, Mims tied a strip of his ripped paisley boxers around his mouth.
Dusty Kazakhstan disappeared and was replaced by dusty Uzbekistan and its foie gras–smooth asphalt. In Moynaq, we clambered aboard rusting boats dry-docked by the receding Aral Sea, then sailed toward Silk Road town Samarkand, where we photographed mosques, drank sour goat milk and got pulled over for speeding.
I gave him $10, and he made the ticket ‘fly away,’” Mims said, flapping his arms.
Dusty Uzbekistan relented to Kyrgyzstan’s snow-kissed mountains. Lower elevations were decorated with gurgling rivers, sturdy trees and wavy green grasses, a buffet to roaming horses, goats and sheep. The beauty was short-lived, as we soon re-entered Kazakhstan’s jagged roads. Exhaust umes leaked into the car, turning the backseat into a suicide parlor. Into Russia we wobbled, then across Siberia’s breathtaking Altai Mountains, where wood-house settlements looked like old Colorado mining towns. Finally, on the trek’s 27th day, we reached the Mongolian border. We’d traveled nearly 8,000 miles, and we’d only lost our exhaust and muffler.
“I think we can make it,” Andrew said as we entered the automotive death row masquerading as Mongolia.
The “roads”—rocky, unpaved, rutted paths carved by Jeeps and off-road vehicles—stretched across the horizon in a dozen directions. Signs were nonexistent. We hoped to drive the 1,200-odd miles to Ulaanbaatar in two days. By day two’s end, our mileage numbered 180, equivalent to my Tylenol intake. Mongolian roads were washboards: Drop below 20 miles per hour, and your sanity’s rattled away; go faster, and car’s shaken apart.
“G-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-o faster,” I pled.
By day three, we lost our suspension, front stabilizer bar and rear stabilizer bar. Our radiator thrashed like a moshing punk, spurting green fluid. We subsisted on greasy dumplings called buuz, made from unrefrigerated goat carcasses, and vodka. We slept on brittle, prickly plants.
And on our fifth day in Mongolia, our 32nd overall, we blew our last tire. Team Dinosaur was tired and testy. Sitting in the car made our backs ache, muscles soft as veal. Tempers flared. Testy silences reigned. What 8,000 miles couldn’t do, Mongolia had accomplished in 500. On little more than rims and faith, we aimed for tiny Altay, 50 miles away, hoping for a miracle.
We found one: an English-speaking gentleman from Mongolia’s Ministry of Finance.
“We need to put your car on a truck,” he said, examining our sad, sagging Justy. His secretary helped us locate a truck driver willing to carry us as cargo for 300,000 Mongolian Tögrögs (about $275), a spare tire, a jerry can and our tent. The only catch? The truck carried goat skins.
We drove the Justy to a goat-killing warehouse. Severed legs sat in stinking piles. Our hulking truck, its wheels the size of NFL offensive linemen, was loaded with wet, salted goat skins, onto which we drove, our tires spinning out on wet fur.
“My vegetarian girlfriend will never forgive me,” I said, as we departed for Ulaanbaatar.
A few bumpy nights later, lights filled the dark horizon: Ulaanbaatar, a neon oasis filled with grey apartment buildings sticking up like bamboo. We had covered nearly 9,000 miles in just about 35 days. It was time to accept our reward. Lots of them. Mr. Dinosaur went to the finish-line bar, located near a hulking Genghis Khan statue.
“Prizes, please,” I told the long-tressed bartender, wiping road dust from my mouth.
She filled mugs of cool, amber ale, which we hoisted above our heads like shiny trophies. Then we drank our prize, then another, and another, until, fittingly, we were as wrecked as our car.
