Mongol Rally 2007 - Windmill Giants official blog

A long overdue update:

We are back Stateside. . . Jetlag and heading back to work the day after we arrived got the better of us and we lost track of time. The rally came to a screeching halt on August 14th as the 19-hour plane ride landed us at JFK.  Happy to report, we are back in one piece (well, actually two: one piece each) and very much alive! There are countless stories to tell, so keep an eye on the website as we post diary entries and photo albums.  There are 6 hours of video as well, so bits and pieces of those will find their way onto the website as well.

See you soon!

When the port office opened we learned that the office and docks for the ferry to Turkmenistan we’re down the road and they drew us a map.  We followed their directions down a broken up back alley and across railroad tracks until we came to a police checkpoint.  We were told to come back at 10am, so we sent a text to our friend Rich, an American whom we knew from Bulgaria that was now working with an NGO in Baku.  We met Rich at his place and he gave us a key so we could shower while he went to work. 

The shower was refreshing for all of one minute until we stepped out into the street on another 100+ degree day.  We returned to the ferry port and were shocked to learn that not only was the Turkmenistan ferry expected to leave that day at 1pm, the ferry to Aktau, Kazakhstan was to leave that night at 10pm.  Or so we were told.  Like it or not, we were still on the Mongol Rally with two options to keep moving east.   When the Turkmenistan ferry was delayed until later that evening, we decided that we would be cutting it a bit too close to try and cross the country before our transit visas expired, and everything that we had heard about Turkmenistan told us that would be a bad idea.  We reluctantly came to terms with the fact that we would not risk jail time for lip-synching in this remarkably peculiar country, and changed course for Kazakhstan.

This dodgy little ferry port was a bottleneck for many Mongol Rally teams, so we found our caravan thrust upon us by chance.  Already in port were two young Scotsmen and their Subaru in team Green Pea, The Mongolian Adventure in the coveted Suzuki SJ, Go North in their blue Citroen, and a bunch of brothers who weren’t on the Rally but happened to be in the neighborhood and going our way with a far more appropriate 4WD Mitsubishi.  At the urging of the other teams, and without really taking time to think about it, we checked in our car documents with the customs office which assured that we would not be charged some exorbitant fine but also effectively left us without wheels in Baku.

We killed some time in port while we waited for news on when the ferry would be leaving for Kazakhstan.  I popped the hood to the Skoda, which pulled in local truck drivers like a magnet.  More through pantomime than broken Russian, I learned that my engine was idling high and the air filter needed changing – both were quickly remedied by our new mechanically adept friends (who were all likely plotting to rob and kill us on the ferry by the looks of them).

The ferry port attendants took turns napping, going to lunch, and stalling us with outright lies that we could buy or tickets in a few hours.  One team, in a moment of fleeting brilliance, had included a Foosball table in their packing list while another feared that they might truly regret driving to Ulaanbataar without a cow costume (complete with udders).  The ensuing playoff ended with emphatic waving of the Scottish flag and Chris from the SJ posing in the cow costume with confused and amused locals.  All agreed that the local beer Xirdalan was quite good  (and readily available from the shack by the Lenin head mosaic). 

Eventually we got word that our ferry was in port, but that it was in need of repairs and was expected to leave at 10am the next morning.  We shared our number with Ross from Green Pea and trusted he would text us if we left the port and things got moving sooner. We decided to take advantage having a friend living locally, and met up with Rich for dinner before returning to his place exhausted from the heat, the road and the Azeri way of life. 

We set out early from Anthony’s place, and set about taking in T’bilisi’s sites as quickly as two legs would carry us.  Those city streets that did have signs were almost all in the Georgian alphabet, so we really just stumbled about hoping to chance on charm and wonder by dumb luck.  We searched in vain for an elusive Zoroastrian fire temple, ultimately making our way to some of the more high-profile sites along the river.  After taking in the panoramic views from a church overlooking the city, we grabbed an assortment of local bready things from a small bakery, and began to find our way out of the city for uneventful drive to the Azerbaijan border. The border crossing itself was painfully slow, though we suspect that we probably could have sped this up with a bribe.  We sat about two hours in line outside of the gate where they process cars and passenger documents, as Rusty turned into an oven under the sun.  We gave cigarettes to the bored teenage border guards, took Polaroids with tem and hoped it might save us some hassles.  The hassles came more with the officials inside the gates who took their sweet time with our documents, probably hoping we’d catch on to the fact that everyone else was handing their passports over with a few banknotes inside.  We jumped through every hoop they had over the course of two hours, even driving over a giant gaping hole just to freak Illiana out and give the guards a good laugh.  We couldn’t play dumb enough to avoid paying a small “Sanitation” fee of about $5, for which no actual sanitizing was performed.   

We hadn’t gone five miles past the border crossing before we hit our first of many police checkpoints, which exist entirely for the purpose of wasting your time and soliciting bribes.   We played as dumb as we could, stopping just short of just standing there drooling with a far-away look in our eyes, though we understood from the officer’s Russian that he was asking for a bribe.  He shamelessly wrote $20 on a scrap of newspaper and pushed it at us, but we weren’t as dumb as we looked.  I had emptied my wallet of all currency, showed him that and asked if he took credit cards.  He pointed at my belt pouch, which contained a few small bills in Bulgarian leva and Turkish lire, which were worse than worthless in Azerbaijan.  He eventually grunted in frustration and waived us on, but not before wasting a half hour of our time. 

We were pulled over five times on the road to Baku, never for any reason other than being in a car covered in stickers.  Each time the police saw our American passports they literally drooled in anticipation of a big payout, but each time we outsmarted them by playing dumb.  One cop was just a little too patient for our hurried time line, so we gave him two I heart NY T-shirts and he let us be on our way.  Worse than the time they wasted pulling us over was the time we wasted driving their ridiculously low speed limits so as to not give them a legitimate reason to fine us.  We learned later from an American friend in Baku that most people (at least foreigners) don’t even stop for the police.  The hi-way patrol doesn’t even have cars; getting pulled over in Azerbaijan involves a fat little man stepping out from behind the only tree for miles and waving an orange stick at you.  

The delays with the border and police made it clear that we would not be getting to Baku at a decent hour, and this was before the roads turned to complete garbage.  We absolutely had to make Baku as soon as possible and get on the next ferry to Turkmenistan.  The three day visa was starting the next day, and we figured that the first day would be spent on the 18-hour ferry ride across the Caspian Sea, after which we would have two days to drive 700 miles through a country that we knew next to nothing about.   Not making the ferry on July 31st would likely put us out of the Mongol Rally.  We didn’t dare to hope that luck would put the weekly ferry to Kazakhstan in port when we arrived and the idea of driving north around the Caspian through war torn Chechnya and Dagestan didn’t sit to well.

We weren’t about to allow a little thing like good judgment and reason put us out of the Mongol Rally, so we pushed on to Baku after sunset along a cratered road through the desert.  A huge blood red moon was rising over the road directly in front of us as we dodged potholes and weaved between the trucks hauling large rocks that would regularly fall off into the road ahead of us.  Half of the team reveled in what felt like a quintessential Mongol Rally moment, while the other just wished it could be over.  The map showed that there was another road leading to Baku through the mountains that might be better, so we headed north through desolate foggy swamplands to meet up with the mountain road.  The prospect of some maniac flying around the next corner was unnerving, but the better condition of the road was a welcome change after hours of running the Azeri slalom.

It was after 2am when we finally reached Baku, and an hour more before we managed to find what we thought was the Ferry building.  It was closed, but we planned to come back first thing the next day to assure that we would be on the next ferry to Turkmenistan.  Though we had showed up to meet our hosts late before, we decided not to drop in on our friend Rich at 3am and opted to catch a few hours parked outside a hotel near the ferry building. 

We woke up early, stuffed ourselves on the decent breakfast that was provided, and set out towards Georgia.  We decided to take the road less traveled through the mountains rather than take on the crowds crossing the border near the resort town of Batumi.  Rusty excelled on the sharp turns and steep roads that passed though terraced slopes of tea trees, and we were relieved to find fewer death-defying stunt drivers around us.   

As we climbed higher toward Artvin, we came upon absolutely jaw-dropping gorgeous scenes around almost every turn.  An impressive dam and several quarries were among the sights that gave us occasion to pull over for photos.  The quality of the road itself was fantastic, with a rare rocky stretch or two serving as the exception rather than the rule.  Even after 14 hours in the car the previous day, we were happy to be on the road again.  This day was probably the most enjoyable driving we did on the entire Mongol Rally, and arguably one of the best drives we’ve taken ever, ranking up there with Highway 1 in California and Rocky Mountain National Park.   

The trip through the mountains was going more slowly than we had thought, and we were concerned that we would once again be arriving at an unreasonable hour for our Couchsurfing host in T’bilisi.   It was bad enough that we were arriving a day later than we had initially told him, and we didn’t want to push our luck when he was generous enough to put us up for the night.  Pressed as we were for time, we reluctantly continued on past a festival resembling Turkey’s answer to Woodstock, before eventually coming to a high mountain pass of rolling grasslands.   We drove for over an hour without seeing many cars or people at all for that matter; just the occasional shepard out to the summer pastures with his flock like it was a thousand years ago. 

Finally the road narrowed and we came to a gate that closed just as we pulled up.   We were the only car at the border, and hoped that would help speed us through the crossing.  Clearing Turkish passport control was slightly bumbling but largely uneventful.  The scenic drive and smooth dealings with Turkish officials had left us a bit unprepared for what sharp transition a border crossing can be.  We were about to drive into what had been the Soviet Union, and we hadn’t thought much about it until we got there. 

In stark contrast to the lanky, silly looking guard that waived us our of Turkey, the gate to Georgia was opened by a thick-necked, sausage-eating, vodka-swilling, brute of a soldier impatiently barking orders at us in Russian.  We promptly forgot all of the Russian that we knew and fell back on the play-dumb strategy that we hoped would keep us from paying the many bribes we had been told were on the road ahead.  We stood for a while under direct sun on a hot day while guys in crew cuts and military fatigues looked suspiciously at the pages that had been added to my passport.  We smiled stupidly, occasionally pointing West, saying “London” then East and saying “Mongolia” and the pointing to Rustinante.  The soldiers marched back and forth between various sheds with our documents.  While they certainly weren’t the friendliest of fellows, the Georgian guards at least were not corrupt and did not hassle us for bribes.   

Passing at this little used border crossing took just over an hour, which helped make up for the time we had lost driving through the mountains.  We expected to arrive in T’bilisi later than we had hoped, but most of the road ahead on the map was marked as a major road so we figured we would probably make good time.  As was often the case on the Mongol Rally, we had figured wrong. 

The gate into Georgia opened onto what one half of our team argues was the worst road on the whole Rally, until the other half reminds him of driving through 20 miles of sand in Kazakhstan.  We’re not talking potholes; it was if the whole road had been jack hammered before they hit it with heavy artillery.  This continued for about three miles before a perfectly paved road forked to the left and we turned.  Illiana jokingly said that she hoped this wasn’t the way to some secret military installation, and about two seconds later a military vehicles passed us going the opposite direction beeping and shouting.  We passed over a hill and saw that the road ended at some sort of power plant, so we quickly turned around before they opened fire and made our way back to the opposite of pavement.   

This God-awful road eventually gave way to something was just plain bad but at least drivable.  We passed through some very economically depressed communities in the mountainous northwestern part of Georgia before we reached the valley that we followed to T’bilisi.  Rustinante’s ego swelled as he passed rusting old Moskvich and Lada cars, but he got the occasional dose of humility as a new BMW would race by.  None of the road signs were in the Latin or even Cyrillic Alphabets, and we quickly learned the letters that spelled out T’bilisi in the local scrawl to keep us heading in the right direction.   

We came to the city limits of T’bilisi after dark and learned that the city was much more sprawled out than we realized and that we really had no idea where we were going.  All we had from our CS host was an address, and though we knew from his online profile that he lived in the center, his street wasn’t on our map.  Our cell phone was only good for texting after leaving Turkey, and we knew that our pre-paid texts were running low and had to be conserved.  We stopped often, showing reluctant strangers the map in our Lonely Planet book and asking them to point us in the right direction.  Not being able to read the alphabet surely didn’t help, but trial and error eventually brought us to a local prostitute who was able to show us the building.   

Our CS Host Anthony was very understanding of our challenges on the road, and welcomed us to his very spacious apartment after 10pm and set us up with our own room.  We picked up some nosh and local beers at a supermarket and talked for awhile about the Rally, Couchsurfing, life in Georgia and NYC before he let us rest up for the next day’s drive to Baku.

I can’t explain it, but sleeping in the car always leaves us surprisingly refreshed.  It could just be the delirium that comes with stepping out into the cool morning air after a sleep broken periodically by the sound of cars coming and going.  Maybe it’s the call of the open road that would have us sleeping in the car in the first place.  Whatever the reason for the extra ounce of bounce, we felt renewed that morning as we realized that everything ahead of us would be entirely new for us both.  For the first time on the Mongol Rally, we were setting out into the unknown.

 We gladly left behind the most heavily trafficked road in Turkey between Istanbul and Ankara, and turned North and East at Gerede heading towards the Black Sea.  The roads were fantastic and scenery better as we drove for hours through golden grassy hills.  Turkish hospitality showed itself again at the gas stations, where we were always offered complimentary coffee or tea.  One friendly station attendant was eager to practice broken English with us and seemed genuinely happy to greet international travelers in a part of the country that doesn’t see many foreign visitors.  We filled up our tank, did the math converting liters to gallons, and Turkish lire to US Dollars, and realized that gas was costing us about $10/gallon!  Turkey is a big country and we would surely be filling up again before we left, so this strech was going to cost us a lot more than we had thought.  Word of advice to next year’s rally-goers – fill up your tank and jerry cans in Bulgaria! 

As good as the roads and scenery were, you can get too much of a good thing.  Ten hours in the car had been too much already, but still would not be enough to get us where we needed to be before we could call it a day.  When we reached the Black Sea, we took about 20 minutes to stretch our legs along the rocky coast before getting back in the car to push on to Rize in the far northeast corner of Turkey.  We were incredibly pressed for time to cross Turkmenistan on our three-day transit visa, and ironically enough, we were a day behind schedule because after spending a day in Istanbul waiting for that same visa.  We had to reach Baku, Azerbaijan on July 31st at the very latest to catch a car ferry to Turkmenistan.  Even if we did catch the ferry, the gods would have to smile on us if we were to have any chance of making it through Turkmenistan by the time our three-day visa expired on August 2^nd.  

At roughly 6pm on July 28^th, and we still had 400 mostly mountainous miles ahead of us in Turkey before we reached the Georgian border.  There we faced the great unknown in the form of border crossing delays, which could take up many hours both here and then again crossing from Georgia into Azerbaijan.  Aside from these potential border setbacks, we had 400 miles of ground to cover between the Turkish border and the ferry port in Baku, and a friend had told us that the Caucuses had the worst roads he had ever seen.   Any car trouble beyond a flat tire would likely end all hope of reaching Turkmenistan before our visas expired.  We pressed on in spite of these obstacles and more.

 We had been keeping a list of the worst drivers by country so far, but it didn’t seem fair to include a few speedy Belgians and high-beam-happy Czechs on the same list as the Turks.  Time and again, we were stunned as yet another driver attempted some ridiculously risky stunt for no apparent gain or reason.  Getting behind the wheel of a car would transform the otherwise friendly, hospitable, welcoming Turkish people that we met into a bunch of malicious, spiteful, reckless SOBs.  The heaps of twisted metal that we often saw on the side of the road were a regular reminder that driving in Turkey is just plain dangerous.  Drive here at your own risk. By the good graces of some benevolent force, we avoided several close encounters with carnage to arrive in Rize around 10pm.  This somewhat seedy port city was not easy on the eyes but was a welcome sight nonetheless after 14 hours on the road.  We managed a quick meal of bread and soup in a restaurant just as it was closing, parked on the street near the hotel, and tried not to think of how likely it would be for the car to be stolen and how screwed we would be if it were.   We spent the night at the Hotel Milano, which at $70 was double the price listed in Lonely Planet.   Since it was the first lodging we had paid for since leaving London, and we were utterly beat, we decided to shell out.  After much needed showers we turned in and tried not to dream about driving.

A few hours after collapsing, exhausted into bed, we were up and at another day.  Eser & David drove across the Bosphorus into Asia, but were really to tired to take much note at the time of Rustinante’s triumphant crossing of Europe.  The car had outperformed all expectations so far, and seemed fit to circle the globe. 

They found secure parking, and after a futile search for camping gas that led them to a scuba store (curse you Jetboil website!), were on board a ferry to meet with Illiana on the other side of the city in Yesilkoy.  Illiana was successful in dropping off the passports at the Turkmenistan embassy, but despite the fact that we were likely the first people to visit that office in weeks, we were told that we could not pick up the passports before 6pm.  It was not up for discussion; those were simply the rules, probably chiseled in stone by Turkmenbashi himself, and there was nothing we could do to get on the road any sooner.  It was kind of silly that we were in such a rush largely because we had such a short window of time on our Turkmenistan visa, yet just getting these approved visas physically in our passports would delay us by a whole day. 

There are worse places to kill a day than Istanbul (as we learned later in the trip), so we headed to trendy Taksim for traditional Turkish food and stuffed ourselves good.  We left just enough room for sweets at the legendary Saray Muhallebicisi, which has a well deserved reputation for serving the best desserts in Istanbul.  After eating our fill of flaky, nutty, syrup-soaked deliciousness, we thanked Eser for his extraordinary guidance and support and made our way back to the embassy for Turkmenistan.   

While we had planned to just kill a little time, we ended up slaughtering it, and had to run from the train station to the embassy of Turkmenistan to get there before they closed.  A few bureaucratic obstacles later, we had our passports in hand with a three-day transit visa for Turkmenistan, not the five-day visa that we were told on the phone that we would be getting.  The Rally-ending potential of this turn of events on our time line was not lost on us as we ferried across the Bosphorus, retrieved Rustinante, got in a minor fender bender, learned the Turkish word for highway, and hauled ass as fast as endless stop-go-traffic would allow. 

We managed to put about 200 miles between ourselves and Istanbul before the previous night’s sleeplessness caught up with us.  We had enjoyed the comforts found in the homes of family, friends, and Couchsurfing hosts each night since leaving London, the time had come to rough it for the night at a Turkish rest stop.  We were clearly the only non-Turks at this all-night fuel and food stop somewhere near Gerede, but certainly not the only ones catching a little shut-eye.  Several families had spread out blankets on the lawn and slept under the stars while dozens of others snoozed in their cars.  So with our windows rolled down enough to let in air but not a hand, we leaned back our seats and allowed ourselves a few hours of desperately needed Zs.