The European Leg

After somehow completing a few months’ worth of preparations in the last 72 hours before we left, departure day finally arrived. Following a parade lap of Goodwood, during which we narrowly avoided wiping out numerous other cars, we cruised down to Dover (with a quick stop in Brighton to sort yet another piece of paperwork we’d forgotten about) to catch the ferry across to Dunkirk. Our first border crossing went without a hitch, with the only question asked by the UK border guard being: “You got any bombs, guns, or badgers in that roof box?”

See ya England

Having spent our first full day visiting the Calais refugee camp, we didn’t hit the road to Heidelberg, where the first of the European parties was scheduled, until 5pm. Navigating with a map that thought that Berlin still had an East and a West, and that the USSR was a country, it wasn’t entirely surprising that we got hopelessly lost. Road signs were sufficient to get us to Heidelberg itself, but unfortunately the Adventurists (the Mongol Rally ‘organisers’) take pleasure in making the parties as difficult to find as humanly possible. Fortunately, at 2am the only man we could find to ask directions happened to be a chef who was literally on his way back from the party, so could point us in the right direction. Instantly forgetting what he told us, we still managed to fit in a couple more U-turns before finally arriving just as the final camping spots were being taken.

Relaxing on the Austrian lakes

The second party was in Budapest, two days later, allowing us to spend a fantastic night wild-camping with a few other teams on the shore of an Austrian lake. We again arrived well after dark, having spent an extended lunch stop in Munich, where a couple of locals had given us what seemed like incredibly simple directions to what they claimed to be the largest park in Europe. We soon realised, when once again entirely lost, that they had either forgotten to include significant bits of the route, or had just entirely made it up for their own amusement. Luckily though, when we asked a van for directions while waiting at a set of lights, they just told us to follow them, and gave us a personal escort through the city to where we wanted to go. Who needs satnav anyway?

'Mongol Rally line' at the border

After the party in Budapest, the next morning we spent half an hour blindly stumbling around the city until we bumped into the car park where we’d left Noah. Zac was almost left by the side of the road when he accidentally spent all our local currency on sparkling water, but a couple of hours later we made it to our first proper border into Romania. Unsurprisingly there was much panicking over misplaced passports and driving licences, but we made it through without too many issues. We have discovered that one of the quirks of having such an old map is that the majority of the motorways were yet to be built, and so we found ourselves very much on the back road to where we planned to stop for the night. Having met up with a couple of other teams, we led our first rally convoy, looking for a place to camp for the night. Our first choice of track to explore down led to a head-on meeting with a couple of fiery Romanian horses, and so having made a hasty retreat, we let another team have a shot at leading the search, with much more success.

Rolling Thunder hits the Transfagarasan

Day 6 of the trip saw the formation of Rolling Thunder, a fantastic long-standing convoy we made with two other teams – 101 Damnations, and The Honeymoon Roadtrip (a genuine honeymoon!) Noah was really put through his paces crossing the stunning Transfagarasan highway, but he coped admirably, and we’ve started to think that maybe British Leyland, entirely by accident, built something approaching a good car. After a wrong turn took us on a brief tour of downtown Bucharest, with its array of soviet-style apartment blocks and questionable smells, we beat our own record and arrived at the beach party in Constanta 12 hours late. We drank beers on the beach and swam in the Black Sea at sunrise, before retiring for a couple of hours sleep in what we later discovered to be an ants’ nest.

Letting the cars breathe on the Transfagarasan

Someone had a vague memory the next morning of having been promised a free kite-surfing lesson by the owner of a bar we had been in the night before, but we decided that given we were struggling even to put away a couple of roll mats, it was probably for the best we hit the road to Bulgaria. Stopping to pick up supplies, Iain purchased the largest watermelon anyone had ever seen, and it became a constant companion for whoever was sitting in the back seat for the next few days. We flew through Bulgaria, stopping for dinner at what appeared to be a local dogging spot, and decided to press on to Turkey that night. Once again we found ourselves on the back route to the border town, which allowed Noah to get a feel for the quality of road surface that would face him in the weeks to come, but again he was more than up to the challenge. It seems that Austin decided to replace the springs in the suspension with inflatable pillows, and so we can roll over bumps without a care in the world.

The Turkey border was much quicker than expected, helped by the fact it was 3am and we quite literally had to wake up each border guard in turn to stamp our passports and give us car insurance. If we had been making the trip a week or so earlier, crossing the Bosphorus through Istanbul would have been a very different experience, but we cruised across and waved goodbye to Europe. Bring on Asia!

Comments

[Anne watson (Chaz's mum)]

Excellent. Great humour. Good luck x