As our Mongol Rally fundraising pages draw to a close, the five of us would like to say a final thank you to everyone who donated or supported us in one way or another over the past year. The whole endeavour really wouldn’t have been the success it was without you. We raised almost £14k for our two charities, gave them a heap of exposure and delivered an ambulance which, with a little TLC, will enjoy many years of valuable service in Mongolia.

The trip itself was incredible – we drove 9617 miles through 18 countries in 32 days, scaled mountains, bribed police, tackled the worst roads we’ve ever seen, got stuck in sand, endured grim ferry crossings, spent weeks without showering and got totally lost in translation, but we were mostly stunned by the fantastic scenery and all the great people we met along the way. We’d definitely encourage anyone who can find the time to just go for it – it was an experience we won’t ever forget.

If anyone is keen to learn more about our trip, there is a selection of our photos up on our website at www.thedouglascar.com as well as the first half of a cheeky video diary of sorts (more will come as it gets done). Advait has also embarked upon writing a full blown novel which, judging from the first chapter, will be up for several literary awards when it is finally released in 2020 ;-)

Thanks again,

Dave, Nick, Advait, Matt and George

We’ve been massively slacking on the Blog front – this is due to a combination of a lack of Internet Cafes, and the fact that we’ve never been more on the run. In fact it’s been pretty much non stop. Here’s a brief run-down of some of the more memorable moments from Kosovo to the Caspian Sea…

 

We rocked up to Pristina complete wrecks after a massive night drive and were met by Scottish efore promptly passing out on the floor of his and Gerard’s rather nice flat. Couldn’t have needed it more at that point. We then spent the next 36 hours hanging out with Scottish, Hacker, Gerard, Standy and the rest of the Chad’s gang who were all doing placements of one sort or another at the UN. We ate well, drank well and enjoyed ourselves. Pristina really is a great place and it was brilliant to see Scottish and spend some time doing the usual inane things such as walloping footballs at each other in the park. Just like old times but in a slightly surreal setting!

 

After having such a great time we decided to punish ourselves with another lengthy night drive. Highlights included explaining ourselves after turning up at the wrong border (Serbia, no less) at 2am due to some suspect navigation, and the various service stations and dodgy toilets of Macedonia and Bulgaria. After all this we then took on the unforgiving rush hour of Istanbul, with the mission of finding the Dedeman hotel. No mean feat when we didn’t even have the address of the place to start with and our map simply showed Istanbul as a blob!

 

Waltzing into the 5 star Dedeman hotel in our grubby shorts and flip-flops was akin to meeting the Queen with chocolate on your face. Thankfully, the doorman knew we were coming and took time out from welcoming wedding guests to chauffer Dougie to the secure parking lot. Now to explain, Advait’s future Mother in Law kindly hooked us up with a fantastic sponsor for our trip. In return for placing Dedeman logos on the ambulance, they offered us several free nights at their posh hotels across Turkey, with meals thrown in. Jackpot! And so started 4 days of lounging by the pool, tennis in the sun, power showers, massive buffet breakfasts, and real beds. There was a little bit of drivng involved too mind, but the perks really took the edge off the Turkish heat for us as we passed other rally teams camping on gas station forecourts by the side of the road.

 

In the midst of this Turkish luxury, we spent a day (yes, a whole day) exploring the sights of the Cappadocia region. Without getting too scientific, Cappadocia has some rather large volcanic human termite mounds, which hopefully some photos will explain more thoroughly than this description! We were also witness to a bizarre Turkish ceremony that appeared to have been devised by someone under the influence of opium. We’re not sure if it was to do with coming of age or some poor young man in a crown was ready to be sacrificed, but it involved a lot of tuneless chanting, endless spinning, and a clown.

 

Next came Georgia and Azerbaijan, of which Georgia is memorable for being the first place in which we turned up at a restaurant and being completely clueless as to what we ordered. This resulted in what appeared to be 25 colostemy bags, but were actually meat filled dough packages followed by kebabs that could rival Jayne’s place. In reality, it was all really good, and a definite reminder that you should try everything once. The rest of Georgia probably warranted more than the short time we spent there, even the parts near South Ossetia, but we had a ferry crossing in our sights and were hell bent on getting there. The border crossing from Georgia to Azerbaijan was something else. We arrived there around 2am to be greeted by a pile of stinking sticky mud, diesel fumes, complete darkness, a couple of portacabins and complete confusion. One of the border guards asked if we’d ever been to Azerbaijan before, and on replying no, commented “well, you won’t like it”. He wasn’t wrong. The roads were the worst so far – Dougie got a good coating of mud.

 

We eventually found the right ferry port in Baku for our Caspian crossing and were met by 20 rally teams, some of whom had been camping in the port holding bay for 4 days. After our 36 hour drive we were delighted to find that there would be a ferry departing that afternoon. In reality, although it was great that there was a ferry leaving, we shouldn’t really have been looking forward to it quite so much…

Will post some photos when we get a chance, and for those of you following the map, sorry it's missing the comments - don't know why it's just showing the titles right now. Each mobile network we use seems to introduce it's own problems... However, it does have the pins in the right place -  we're in Almaty, having had a rather large night out for Matty's birthday, and are about to head North to the Russian border where apparently all sorts of Border fun awaits. Game on.

Dave

Shots from the Road

Not got tıme to upload loads of pıcs but here are a few...! Wıll hopefully get tıme ın Baku to wrıte another proper blog entry. All ıs good here.

Daveş Advaıtş Mattş Nıck & Sly

Czech Out party 100kms from Prague

Macedonıan Border crossıng

Monastery ın a Serbıan Enclave wıth Scottısh.

Turkısh traffıc jams.

The First Leg!

After an uneventful stint through the chunnel, we emerged in France with the intention of putting some pedal to the metal till we reached Amsterdam. Sadly not having maps with a small enough scale to navigate through towns and cities meant we circled the 'King Leopold II tunnels' in Brussels some four hundred times. This wasted a good couple of hours and so we finally launched into Amsterdam around 2am. We waltzed into town with the hope of finding some action, but all we managed was a few glimpses of the red light district, a couple of beers and got soaked. Poor effort! Driving is more tiring than we thought. As there were only the three of us, rather than lugging our tents into the campsite, we just kipped in the 3* luxury that is Dougie. An interesting move when the next morning Advait tried to sneak into the campsite for a cheeky shower, was rejected big style and 10 minutes later we had the dutch rozzers knocking on our window. Some swallowed toothpaste aside, it was a surprisingly amiable encounter with the 'good cop' expressing a fair bit of interest in the rally, and the 'bad cop' taking our passports away for a brief going over. Nothing too stressful, and we did what we were told and hit the road with the mission to get to somewhere near Prague.

The drive to Prague was going smoothly until we learned that Matty was arriving a full day before everyone else thought he was. Ah well, that's coordination for you. We left the oblivious Matty with the task of finding us a suitable hostel, and lit the afterburners. A few hours later, we had a Matty, a parking spot, a bed and were chowing down on some Maccy D's. Was almost like we'd planned it. We left in the morning with a quick detour to the local Tesco before envisaging a quick twenty minute drive to the outskirts of Prague for the official 'Czech out' party. Imagine our surprise when we found out that it was actually a full two and a half hour drive away in a non-descript 14th century village. This meant we had a quick turnaround in way of putting up our tents on arrival into the campsite before heading to the castle which was the venue for the night. The theme was 'the age of exploration', so we went dressed in our scrubs, naturally.

The party itself was surreally good. Imagine the scene; hundreds of people in fancy dress eating barbecued food in and amongst the ruins of Klenova castle. After queueing for a few pieces of miscellaneous meat, we sat down at the picnic tables next to a group dressed as the Knights of the Templar. The head knight was clearly disgruntled, muttering something about it not being a bad meal for £650 (our entry fee to the rally). The evening went much further south after that, with a free Hendrick's gin bar not aiding our efforts to stay disciplined.
After having drunken banter with a South African wearing a kilt (don't ask), drinking until speaking became difficult, and setting Matt on fire, we bedded down for the night. Fortunately, when morning came around we were buoyed by the fact that it was clear the free Hendrick's gin had punished others more than ourselves. One guy was lying unconscious by a fire with a dog licking his face, and a bunch of mischievous Durham grads (!) throwing balls at him. Once we'd stomached the last of the potato grule that was on offer, we hit the road with Nick having the unenviable task of driving first off, with a head that felt like someone was trying to park a truck in there.

We intended to drive for the day, and camp somewhere over the Serbian border but then a unanimous decision was reached whereby we thought it'd be a better idea to reach Kosovo as soon as possible to allow for more downtime with Scottish George. This meant an all night drive, a feat which was made all the harder when we did a few unecessary laps of Budapest. The ensuing cyclical driving was pretty draining, with driver and navigator in the front and the two non-drivers in the back trying to sleep as they bounced off the walls and ceiling.
Driving though the Serbian and Kosovan borders in the early hours of the morning could be descibed as slighty spooky or by lesser men as shit scary. To be honest it was fairly uneventful but on around five hours of poor quality sleep in the last 48 hours our imaginations were running wild and when the rear door of the ambulance gets flung open and you're faced with a gruff border guard who speaks no English, it's hard not to have sticky situations running through your mind. That's even without the snipers posted on the bridge. We eventually arrived at Scottish's at around mid day after a stunning drive through a misty sunrise and promptly passed out in his front room. 26 hours driving and we were shattered!

By the way, we now have a Sly, the team is complete and we're chilling with Scottish in Pristina. Rock on!

Ready, set, go!

Sly, Nick and Dave rocked up to the launch not quite knowing what to
expect, and were met by a paddock crammed with 300 rally cars, all
decked out and ready to roll. What a sight!

The dougie fan club were out in full force, having travelled from all
over the place, and were happy to fend off the hordes of inquisitive
folk eager to hear more about us and especially how we managed to
raise as much as we did. The three of us, kitted out in our surgical
and patient get ups (thanks lizzie!) took refuge on dougie's roof and
just soaked up the atmosphere with a bottle of champers from Beccy's
Dad! Sweet.

Being at Goodwood Motor Circuit, it'd have been criminal to leave
without doing a lap, and we were ushered to the front to join the fire
engine covered in fur, the thunderbird 4, a car with hammocks hanging
from the side, one with a full blown Viking canoe on top, an ice cream
van and more. We weaved our way round at 20mph hanging out the windows
past the few thousand people waving in the stands. Cracking stuff.

Sly had to leave us due to visa issues (amazingly not actually his
fault - the rally organisers properly messed his up - more on that
another time). He's going to get himself sorted and fly out to Kosovo
to meet us later this week. Matty is at his bro's wedding this weekend
and will be meeting us in Prague on Monday, and Nick and I are about
to pick Advait up from another wedding somewhere near the Chunnel....
Never straightforward!

That's it, we're outta here. Can't believe it's actually happening.
First stop, Amsterdam!!!!

Dave

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Dougie finds fame in The Indy

To perfectly coincide with the rally launch, our good pal Chris fixed
us up with a piece in The Independent! National news baby!

Head to page 17 of today's paper for a full run-down of the rally,
cheesy quotes from Dave and description of our charity, Helen &
Douglas House.

Cheers Chris, we're chuffed with it!

You can find the online version of the article here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/mongolia-or-bust-the-appeal-of-the-mongol-rally-1751560.html?action=Popup&gallery=no

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£10,000+ raised for Douglas House!

Way back in 2008, before we managed to get hold of our trusty ambulance and most of us had worked out exactly where Mongolia was, someone thought we could use our trip as a way to raise a whole heap of cash for charity. After visiting Douglas House and deciding it was the one for us, we started talking about targets. To this day I'm not sure precisely where the figure of £10,000 came from. I remember someone pointing out that it's 'nice and round' and that it 'sounds big'. Which I guess is difficult to argue with. Anyway, the trip was a long way off and not worth worrying about right away. Trouble is, once we'd said we'd do it we kind of had to give it go.

It's been quite a journey since then; we've sent letters, baked cakes, been to Wales, shook tins, got sunburnt, been sick, been sick again, counted pennies, had photo shoots, worn hideous orange T-shirts, shouted at people in a tube station, been on the radio and in newspapers, sold our bodies, sold our boxer shorts and generally pestered lots of people in an effort to get to that all important target. To be honest for long periods of time we seriously doubted that we would ever make it. But we have and I think there is one simple reason that we did. We had an absolute shed load of help. The response we've had has been incredible, with people prepared to offer huge amounts of their time, patience, skills and money. You have made this a great success and having visited Douglas House we know it will make a big difference. So here goes with some extra special thanks for the following people who have put in effort beyond the call of duty into our fundraising, and getting us ready for this trip:

Mike at Red Stone, Jim & Neville at SCAS, Ruth at Douglas House, Beccy, Kerry, Milston, Harry, Maria, Lisa, Tom, Clare, Lara, Michelle, Greg, Philip and Helen Smith, Ash at Snowforum, Reza at Zeefax, P&H Decorating, Betty and Julian Holmes, Craig Wootton, Cathy Gaynor, the Bar, JCR and Chapel at St. Chad's College Durham, Hymers College, Radley College CCF, King's College School CCF, Old King's Club, Old Radleian Society, Daphne and Anna Holburn, Fortune, JT, Chris Green, Elaine, Hetty, Pat & Carol, Dave's family, Nick's family, Adele and papa Parsons, Comms dept at Uni of York, Adur School Nurse Team, Will & Dan at GPS Log, Dean Jones, Barbara Doyle, Advait's Mum, and Heather, Nigel and Jo Smith

Now we've just got to get to Mongolia....