The Final 72 Hours

With just three days to go until departure day, we realised that we had made almost no progress on the car or even a general plan since our inaugural planning meeting in a pub almost three months earlier. One of us didn’t have a driving licence, one no passport, and one no visa. We started to panic.

But as with all sticky situations, we prioritised what really needed to get done before we could head off, and went to a vinyl shop to get the British Leyland racing colours printed onto Noah. We also bought a new radio, a rollable blackboard, and installed some unnecessarily large speakers.

When it finally came down to addressing the many mechanical failings on the car, things got off to a difficult start. While changing something that is apparently called the ‘thermostat housing gasket’, while not entirely sure what it did or even exactly where it was on the car, we managed to bend a piece of metal that appeared to hold the engine in place. Nothing that we couldn’t fix with a large hammer though. To fit the new rear brakes we thought that, although we were fairly confident of where to locate them on the car, the procedure would probably involve more than duct tape and a spanner, so we sent Noah off to a professional. Even this went disastrously, however, when we got a call from the mechanic at 8pm the day before departure day, saying that the thread had come off some vital nut and that because we’d been foolish enough to purchase a car that no one has encountered since the last millennium, there are zero spares of anything. Fortunately, they managed to track down someone who’s brother knew someone who’d met someone in a pub in 1995 who apparently had a spare of this mysterious nut, and so a couple of hours later Noah was back home.

With one day to go we then worked until the small hours fitting our homemade roof box, which has the aerodynamic qualities of a large cow strapped to the roof. There is a certain irony that the extra drag will almost certainly cost us more fuel than we will be able to carry in the jerry cans for which we built the box solely to carry. When I say that the roof box was homemade, I mean we botched it together out of some wood we found behind a shed, some leftover conservatory roofing, and a piece of artificial grass. In essence we have completely ruined what was a very pretty car, but it will at least provide an excellent tee from which to hit golf balls into the Door to Hell, and so we are sticking with it for now.

Having packed Noah full of wholly unnecessary items like a toilet seat and a litre bottle of olive oil, and enough random sporting equipment to open a small shop, we finally hit the road to Goodwood, where the rally would begin. We pulled into a petrol station to fill up, but while walking over to pay we noticed a pool of liquid rapidly growing beneath Noah, and found on closer inspection that petrol was quite literally pouring out from under the car. We thought that we had just set a new record for the lowest mileage ever completed on the Mongol Rally, but the petrol thankfully stopped flowing, and we realised that the petrol tank was even smaller than we had thought, and we had just completely overfilled it. Or so we hope…

If you’re interested in our visa/passport/licence situation, the new driving licence was delivered with 24 hours to go, and we managed to track the passport down from a storage depot. The missing visa is still an unresolved issue, as was the realisation literally 10 minutes before departure that there was another visa one of us hadn’t applied for, and so there may well be some more embassy visits yet to come along the way.