The Great Canadian Beavers

Well, after almost two months all of the Beavers have successfully returned themselves to Canadian soil!

For those followers without Facebook, you can view some of our photos here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2335752&id=121500050&l=0807ac0bf7

and here:

Dancy here, writing from my new apartment in Halifax, my dog in my lap. It’s been a bit overwhelming heading back to Canada in what seemed like a crush of people after over 2 weeks of exclusively fields and nomads. The 27 hour ordeal of traveling back home also didn’t help. Still, once  in Our Home and Native Land I promptly went out to dinner at a 24 hour place at 3 in the morning and stuffed my face full of fast, greasy food. A lot of it (I still hurt). Sorry Mongolia, your dumplings were great the first few times, but they wear thin fast.

Speaking of Mongolia, let’s start where we left off. We were all a bit beaten down after or little crash mishap, and spent the night in Altai. What a night it was! A bunch of other ralliers were there, many whom we had met (if briefly) before, Jizzy Disco and Nomad Feat among them. We all ended up in a Mongolian Karaoke bar, and were regaled with gems like Krishan’s rendition of Gold Digger or Nick and the Backflip’s “Build Me Up, Buttercup”. After a few, I couldn’t help but join in either (I never met a karaoke bar I didn’t like). 

Luckily for our hangovers, the next day was forced to be a slow one as Jamie’s dying van was born again by getting the front wheel fixed. There was a short-lived funeral for our little Max as well, because he wouldn’t even start with a push start. One fuse swap later, though, he too was resurrected and we all rejoiced (push starting still required). And then we were off! — about 10 km away to camp, since we were all afraid night driving would lead us to parts unknown in the Gobi Desert. That night ended up being a surprise party as well, with everyone loading into Krishan’s tent to bother him — all 8 or so of us ended up sleeping there (according to Krishan, my elbows are deadly.)

The next few days that followed were the dustiest of all. DUST EVERYWHERE EVERYWAY EVERYHOW. Dust on our bags. Dust on our food. Dust on our dashboard. Dust up our nostrils, on our face, under our fingernails. And not a shower in sight. Ourmeager baby wipes merely turned the dust into mud. Days and days of dust.

We all kept pushing forward though, with only one brief split from the convoy when Andrew and the Ambulance pushed on ahead for about a day. During this time, Face Race suffered their one major flaw this entire trip: a ripped fuel line. While waiting for it to be fixed (it soon was by helpful Mongolians who also fixed the Backflips’ fuel leak), we came across 2 of the most insane Mongolians I ever met. They pulled up in their Land Rover blasting Lady Gaga and soon gave us a dance party in the middle of the street. They got a little tetchy when the Backflips’ whisky wasn’t offered so freely, though, and we had to make a bit of a quick getaway. 

Later that night, the night of the 5 week party, we reunited with the Ambulance on what was to be our last camping trip. The next day, we drove our heads off trying to make it before sundown to UB — and we almost did! But seeing as we are The Lost Convoy, that was really never going to happen. Poor Chuck Norris, Jamie’s van, lost his life for good on 13 km from Ulan Bator. 13 km! It was literally around the corner, and not even due to his wheel weld issues. So Chuck was towed by an ambulance — both cars without breaks at night — into the finish line.

Admittedly, the finish was a bit of an anti-climax. First off, we missed it 3 times (ahem, Lost Convoy) and ended up driving straight into a Evil Mastermind Traffic Cop who decided to pull us all over for an hour or so for rowdy behaviour (except us, The Beavers, who kept on driving like the criminals we are). When we finally got to the finish line, there may have been one dozing man, but no one else. A bit discouraged, we packed up our stuff, got into a restaurant and then a hotel, and vowed to make the next day a real party.

In the end, the rest of my days in Ulan Bator were a real party, even the monthly “Dry Day” on the first of every month (weird, huh?). We all hung out, had some food and drink, went to the Black Market and local bars. My only regret is not being able to go to the shooting range, but the day we chose (our last day) it happened that they had no RPG (basically: rocket launcher) ammo, and so we decided it wasn’t worth the money. By the end of this amazing trip, everyone is such good fun and family — a planned reunion is in the works as soon as I can visit Andi in her new London home (which will be soon, promise guys!)

I would just like to thank everyone - friends, family, supporters, ralliers and convoy members for all your support, from money to advice to Joe’s tireless ability to fix whatever car problem. I love you all! 

Nick is okay, no broken bones but maybe a few bruises.

We have made it to Ulaan Bataar! Everything is dusty and we’ve never been so dirty in our entire lives.

The “finish line” was completely anti-climactic. Little disappointing to be honest, but Catch us if you Khan’s van died about 25km outside of UB, making things a LOT more interesting.

We’ll write a bit more when it’s not 3:30 in the morning and we’ve all slept and showered.

Love,

The Beavers

We will attempt to refrain from using brackets in this post since it seems to annoy a particular reader - but might I suggest if you find it that annoying you discontinue following the blog? Just a suggestion.

Mongolia has kind of eaten up the Beavers and spit us out, in particular Max. In this convoy, it seems when one thing goes wrong, everything follows suit. It began with our starter completely crapping out. After spending an entire day in the auto shop, they still hadn’t found a way to fashion a useable starter out of the parts they had, but we couldn’t afford to wait any longer so we told them to just load it all back in the car and we would deal with push starts from then on in. Wouldn’t you know, this time it worked!

For about a day.

This morning however, we noticed a leak in our fuel tank. We did a temporary patch job with some soap and that has lasted us the 100km or so to Altai. However, about 5 minutes outside of Altai, Andrea wasn’t paying as much attention as she should be and ran half the car into a ditch. In an attempt to overcorrect, she sent the car fishtailing and ultimately head first into a ditch, causing the car to roll over on it’s side. Andrea and Dancy were okay, but Nick may have bruised his ribs and hurt his foot, so he’s in getting x-rays at the moment; we hold out hope that he will be alright however.

We gathered all of the stuff that had come flying out of the car and with the help of the rest of the convoy turned Max back over and got him re-packed and started again. Our rear suspension has been almost dead for the past little while and, sadly, did not survive the crash. Neither did our windscreen, which has subequently been duck taped up and we’re praying it lasts. Max has been checked into a garage in Altai where we will fix his rear right suspension and the fuel tank leak, but we aren’t going to do anything about the windshield, or the giant dent in the right hand side until we have to - hopefully never.

Catch us if you Khan’s van is also in a bad way. Initially, the tire had driven itself right through the car body, now the suspension is off-kilter and the wheel is completely bent basically. We’re hoping it can be fixed today or tomorrow while ours is being corrected as well.

The good news is the rest of the convoy is here, and we’ve met up with a ton of other teams here being fixed as well; Jizzy Disco, Fear and Roaming in Mongolia, Nomad Feat, Part of the Magnificent Bastards, Asphalt Arsonists? and a few others I don’t know the name of. We have hear rumours that Chapeau Nouveau is also only a day or so behind so hopefully they catch up as well.

Wish us luck! On the plus side, the roads are supposed to get better this next little while.

xx

The Beavers

So, The Great Canadian Beavers have officially made it to Mongolia! After two semi-hellish days at the Russian exit border and the Mongolian entrance border, we officially drove max across the border line and felt the roads immediately go to crap.

But we’re here!

It took us a full day at each border crossing, and we actually almost all did not get through the Russian exit border. It was completely inefficient, and a complete waste of time, with bus drives butting in front of us and being allowed through when they had no right to, and us having to sit around and watch border officials essentially do NOTHING. Apparently the teams that got stuck behind us that night actually staged a bit of a process, blocking off both lanes of traffic until they got the Russian border officials to agree to let the remaining eight rally cars throuhg the next mornign (it took us from 9am until amost 6pm to get that amount through the day before). They also got on the phone with someone from the US embassy, who contacted the Russian one and told them to stop letting bus drivers and locals through before us. It was just ridiculous.

We rolled up to the Mongolian border JUST as it was closing, and we were allowed in and to have our passports stamped, so that we as people were allowed across the border to get food and supplies, but our cars had to stay to be processed (mainly because we are leaving them in the country). We therefore camped ourselves in no-mans land, and crossed over to find some dinner. We’ve become quite a big convoy (eight teams or so) and there were others left at the border from earlier that day, so we all split up. Dany and I ended up in this little hotel/house where they made us tea and these DELICIOUS meat dumplings with some beer. It was probably the best meal I’d had in weeks (instant noodles get old. fast.) Nick split off with some other people and had soem delicious fried potatoes and onions (which, subsequently I had the next day for lunch). Completely stuffed (and slightly drunk after plenty of shot of vodka) we wandered back to our makeshift camp to have some beers, play some soccer and generally just hang out.

Dancy somehow be-friended one of the border officials (I sense vodka had something to do with it) and therefore had our car jump the queue to be the first processed the next morning. It didn’t much matter because we were waiting for the convoy anyways, but it was funny to hear the border official walking around going “Canadia number one, UK number 2!” with a pretty drunk Dancy (she’s become the unofficial resident alcoholic,who’d have thought?). Then ext moring some of us went for a hike up one of the smaller mountain/hills with a local dog we’d nicknamed Bear (who we also appointed as our unofficial spirit guide), and we basically hung around in the sun and played with some of the local kids while the cars were processed. It’s a royal pain in the butt, but the internet is a necessity and it apparently frequently fails, so registering the cars to stay in Mongolia is MUCH more time consuming than we’d intiially thought. We were all done and processed (and fed) at around 4pm, so we decided to cover as much distance as we could that night before it got dark, and we ended up camping just off the highway. Our progress was severely hindered by blown tires (by Catch us if you Khan and the Mongol Schumachers) and a general worry that we would run out of gas (or Petrol as we’ve now taken to calling it).

The next morning we made a quick pit stop for a shower in a nearby mountain stream (which was quickly negated by all the dust that gets kicked up on a regular basis) and we headed our for the next city. Unfortunately, Cake or Death’s car was refusing to accellerate, and they had to organize a tow back to the city we had passed through after the border, and this is where our convoy got compeltely split up. Half of us went on ahead, but ourselves, Catch usif you can, and some members of the Mongol Schumachers, Mad Hatters and Brighton to Bataar (all in Catch us if you Khan’s van) ended up a little bit behind when we found we couldn’t actually start Max anymore! We ended up resorting to a push start and, on our way, took a wrong turn and headed for the NEXT Vvillage (instead of the one we came from) thinking they’d pushed on instead of heading back. It wasn’t all bad for us though; Upon arriving in Khovda, Mongolia, we went to a Mongol Rally sanctioned Ger camp, complete with food, beds, showers, a toilet and internet! It was miraculous! We were fed a delicious dinner, got to watch some traditional Mongolian musci playing/throat singing and sleep in a REAL bed! Dance and I found ourselves a little weirded out, being among a bunch of people we didn’t know, and without most of the convoy we’ve spent all this time with, but we chalked it up to seperation anxiety and did our best toenjoy ourselves ;)

 Cake or Death was told it would take a couple weeks for the part to fix their car, so they ended up ditching it (properly) in Olgie (not sure on spelling) and their group continued on, camping in the mountains for the night. They caught us up early this morning and we’ve gotten some delicious breakfast and decided to explore the town and utilize this opportunity for internet. Max is in the shop right now, hopefully getting a new starter so we don’t have to push start him everytime, and we’ve had to re-pack him (as his roof rack came flying off at a particularily bumpy part of Mongolian road). Other than that and having to replace one punctured tire, we’ve been pretty good (knock on wood!).

At the moment, some of our convoy, the Beavers included, are looking into buying a motorcycle that we can rotate riding to Ulaan Bataar,  hopefully we can get a good deal! Andrea and Dancy got a taste of riding a locals bike the other day and absolutely LOVE it! Mongolia itself is also an unbelievably beautiful country, even if the roads are an absolutely nightmare!

Until next time!

Love,

The Beavers

We have just arrived in Astana Kazakhstan (after traversing, for the most part, quite nice roads!) and I think the general consensus is none of us know where the tans end, and the dust and dirt begins. That being said, Kazakhstani (?) people have been some of the absolute nicest we’ve encountered so far (though their border was not the most efficient).

We are currently in convoy with Catch us if you Khan, Cake or Death, The Mad Hatters (yes! after a straight 52 hour period of driving and seven garages later, they have managed to re-join us!), Brighton to Bataar, and a new team we joined in a small Kazakhstan town, Backflips and somersaults.

Our first day in Kazakhstan was sort of a mixed one, which epitomized a lot of what the rally is about I think. We ended up pulling over in the smallish border town of Troick (Troisk? not sure how it’s spelled outside of Cyrillic) for some money and some groceries. Unfortunately, the Bank machines had a weird habit of taking our cards for extended periods of time before FINALLY returning them, without allowing us to take out any money (I think John of Catch us if you Khan was the only one who got any out, and he went first), and so we attrached some attention from the locals, and three boys came over to ask if we were okay. They kindly showed Dancy and I to where a grocery store was, and Nick managed to be-friend four other individuals, who ALSO led them to the same convenience type store and proceeded to buy us about a 5L bottle of beer, and some dried fish. We then amassed a group of about forty or fifty locals, who all gathered around our cars asking questions, chugging beer, and drinking very salty dried fish. It was absolutely awesome! there were only a couple people who really spoke any english, a girl studying linguisitics, and a boy from Uzbekistan (who subsequently, should be adding us to Facebook!) but somehow we got our point across, talking about everything from Geography to Russian pop stars. It was nearing two am by the time we gathered our things, exchanged presents (a couple Russian flags for us!) and headed to the border.

The border itself was a bit of a nightmare, mostly because of the giant mass of cars waiting to get through. Our car popped on some planet earth, and promptly faded in and out of consciousness. By the time we finally reached Kazakhstan customs, it was about 7am and we were quite out of it. Thankfully, it was a pretty straightforward process, they asked us for $240, we said no and pretended we had no idea what they were referring to (and even tried to give it in Russian currency - a fairly useless sum), and they gave up. They began the process of searching our cars, we distracted them by asking them to sign our cars, and they very quickly became flattered and let us go….all in all, one of the more painless border crossings (especially on the wallet). We ended up pulling up to a random field to sleep for a couple hours, and then made our way in the direcion of Astana.

Unfortunately, on our way, we had to travel through a city called Kustanay, and, in classic convoy fashion we got EXCEPTIONALLY lost. It was compuinded by the fact that we were all SUPER overtired and underfed, meaning everyone was snapping at everyone else and we weren’t making much progress. When we eventually found the road, we didn’t have much left in us to drive (or much daylight), and so we pulled into a smaller town further down the way called Aluekol (or something similar) and MAN did we cause a commotion. Just searching for a Bank machine, we found ourselves at the police station (which we soon discovered was also the towns only ATM), but once we got money we needed to locate a hotel, and there wasn’t any in sight. The police spoke almost no english, so they called a couple Peace Corps volunteers who were in the area teaching english to come set us up - everyone was so nice! they brought us to the store for some snacks before they closed, took us to a restaurant, and set out trying to find us a hotel. Because the town was so small, there wasn’t an ACTUAL hotel. They briefly toyed with the idea of us staying in the local boarding school (that would have been awesome!) but the chief didn’t like that idea, they they eventually settled on a hotel about 5km away (all we really wanted was a shower!). The police then personally escorted us to the hotel, negotiated a good price, AND stayed the night to ensure we weren’t ripped off or robbed. Wonderful. After a few beers, we all passed out until well into the next day.

The producitve members of our convoy managed to tour a slaughterhouse, and a saw mill (where we were given a genuine wooden pigs trough!) before we all grabbed some food (a whole half of a chicken for Dancy and I?) and decided to head out (at this point we needed to change a tire on Max, and we all did a collective car clean).

We are now in Astana, and the hotel, while good, doesn’t like us too much but we can’t be bothered to care. Max had a bit of a puncture in his oil tank, so we had to put him in the garage for the night and hoepfulyl he’ll be all sorted when we get him today (we werre supposed to pick him up last night and that didn’t happen, so hopefully he’s alright!). Cake or Death is having some car problems as well, so we’re not sure how much progress we’ll make today,  but we’re hoping to make it to close to the Russian border. I forgot to mention, John of Catch us if you Khan does NOT have a visa for Kazakhstan, so he’s had to train it to Barnaul, where we will pick him up on our way to the Mongolian border, so we’re hoping to get a bit of a move on in that respect.

We will do our best to keep you guys updated, but internet seems to be getter few and far between. For now, we are relatively well rested (if not a little hungover), well fed and loving the Kazakhstan people!

Hello from Russia!

I think the general consensus is Russia and the Ukraine have just been…O.K. so far - sorry to any Russian/Ukranian individuals who might be reading this. Compared to the complete shock and awe we experienced over Romania (how beautiful the landscape was, how nice the people were, how well-maintained the roads were and, how awesome the Transfargarian highway was!), Ukraine and Russia have just felt like a little bit of a let down.

After camping halway through the Transfargarian on a mountain top, surrounded by sheep, horses and herders, we  aimed our car in the direction of the Moldovan and Ukranian borders. The Mad Hatters were using a rather…interesting version of a map of Romanian, and so we failed to see that there was a river in between us and the Ukranian border BUT we ran into a wonderful Romanian/Canadian woman from Missausauga who translated for us and ensured our cars (and hers) were safely loaded onto the ferry to cross. She also hooked us up with a group of Greeks heading to the same borders as us who had a GPS (is it cheating if it was really only a twenty minute drive or so?)

The Romanian exit border, and the Moldovan/Ukraine borders were fairly uneventful. We arrived later in the evening, so it wasn’t too packed. We opted for the “small search” at the Ukranian border (who would choose big?) which came accompanied by a shiny $20 USD tucked into a passport to for customs control and we were, essentially, on our way. What took the longest was purchasing fifteen day insurance for Moldova, when really, we were only going to be in the country for about….oh….500 metres.

The real challenge came AFTER the border when faced with Ukranian roads. I had THOUGHT Romania was going to be bad but was pleasantly surprised, Ukraine however, lived up to our expectations and more. Pot-holed, cobblestoned, bumpy, poorly marked and generally just deterioated beyond belief. We ended up pulling into an abandoned gas station to sleep (after trying for a couple hours to find a hotel and, understandably, getting lost), and we set off for Odessa early the next morning.

Odessa itself didn’t seem all it had been hyped up to be either. The architecture was run down, even their good roads weren’t all that good, and MAN was it hot. The Mad Hatters were having car trouble though, so we decided to spend the night there in case we needed to purchase a seperate part for their car, and we would take it into a mechanic in the morning. I stayed at the sketchiest hotel I think I may have EVER been in (sketchier than Eastern Turkey Sica for SURE), and when we requested a cot for me to sleep on (since there were only two single beds) I was sent a beach recliner. No joke, like one of those fold out sunbathing type lawn chairs. The type you might find in your backyard. Only yours would be in better condition….

Needless to stay, Dance and I squished ourselves into a single bed and made do.

We spent the majority of the next day at the Garage getting the Mad Hatters car looked at. The fuel pump was replaced, the filter cleaned etc. We were there essentially until the garage closed, and wouldn’t you know it assoon as we thought we had it all working and drove away, their car acted up again. We decided we’d have Catch us if you Khan tow them part of the way, just so we could make up some ground out of Odessa, and we’d figure out what to do a little later. We travelled until the tow rope itself broke, and then pulled into a hotel off the side of the highway. The next morning, Aaron and Joe (the Hatters) felt it’d be best if we continued to make progress towards Volgograd, (Moscow is now out by the way, given the forest fires in between here and there), and they would either get the car fixed and meet up with us, or dispose of it (properly) and catch us up by train, joining Jamie in the van.

We have since made it to Volgograd this afternoon (we camped about 50km outside of it last night), and we’re checked into a hotel until tomorrow morning for a much needed shower/proper sleep and meal.

We have had some more tragic news, we’ve just had word that a fellow rallier died in a traffic accident this past friday and two of their team mates were critically injured, but are now stable in the hospital.. We have very little details, but some of our convoy knew the individual and we would just like to say we are extremely sorry to hear about it. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family at this time, as we recognize there is very little we can say, or do to help. It may have been naive, but I think a lot of us were operating under a false sense ofo security that no one had actually died on this rally, and so we felt safer in turn. We no longer have that luxury, and I can assure you the point has been driven home, hard. However, ourselves, and our convoy (Cake or Death and Catch us if you Khan at the moment) are all safe, sound and hopefully freshly showered. 

For now, I’ll leave you with a list of things we miss from back home:

- Easily accessible flat water (none of this carbonated crap).
- Fruit juice from concentrate. Drinking essentially peach puree when I’m parched does NOT help.
- Easily being able to change into (and out of) our clothes each morning.
- Air conditioning.
- Knowing what roads lead where, and being able to find where I’m going easily.
- Fresh fruit and veggies.
- A proper bed.
- Menu’s we can understand.

That being said, the overall experience so far has been wonderful! We do miss you all though (especially you E.C!) and we’ll try and update soon.

The Beavs

Disaster has struck the Beavers, and it’s struck us hard. While convoying it through Constanta, Romania, we stopped off at a grocery store to stock up on some supplies before finding a room for the night, and, while some of us were in shopping, a couple people were just hanging around guarding the cars. Somehow, Emily Clairs purse got stolen and inside of it was ALL of her identification. Devistation is an understatement. Things had been going so well up until this point, we felt we were solidifying a timeline that worked with a couple of the Beavers time constraints, everyone was getting along well, the Lost Convoy was still getting lost but that’s beside the point.

All of our convoy promptly got to tearing our car, and Catch us if you Khan’s car apart in hopes of finding it. A team even tracked down the beggar man who had been wandering around our cars that night AND got some locals to ring the police and translate for us but the purse was absolutely no-where to be found. While all this was going on, there was also a small hoard of Romanian kids hanging around trying to get our attention, and Jamie Mac, being nice, was grabbing some bubbles from the top of the van for them to play with. on his way down however, he smashed his foot through his front windscreen and essentially cracked the entire thing. Feeling sad, defeated, frustrated and more than a little panicked, we decided our best option was to check into a hotel narby for the night, and have the Beaver girls head back to Bucharest (the nearest Canadian embassy/consulate) the next day, while Jamie tracked down just how he was going to have the windscreen fixed (and afford it).

I cant speak for the boys, but I hear their next day was relatively painless, filled with nice men giving them awesome rates at the garage (I don’t know what some teams were talking about, honestly, Romanians were AMAZING to us!) and the beach. Andrea, Dancy and Emily however got lost heading out of Constanta, and finally made it on to the E60 to Bucaresti (NOT the most direct route at all, but we were late so it would have to do). We made it to the Canadian Embassy at 4:30pm (it closed at five), and the most amazing embassy employee let Emily at least come in, get the paperwork in advance so we could speed up the process etc. and answered some questions. We checked ourselves into the Hotel Triumf down the road, which was this sprawling, slightly rundown hotel that looked like it could have had it’s heyday in the twentys and was still riding off that high. But the beds were comfortable, and the company was even better. We watched some Randy Jackson presents America’s best dance crew, and some Jersey Shore (!!!) and called it a night. We awoke at about seven the next morning and after showering (unfortunately, not a/c in the hotel), Emily set off for the embassy to weigh her options while Dancy and I set out unloading and re-packing Max (our car).

Unfortunately, getting replacement visa’s appeared like it was going to be impossible. Emily could have replaced her passport (it would have only taken about three days), but to replace the visa’s we were told she would have to re-apply for, and re-pay for each and every one. She could have rocked up to the border and just paid there (albeit with a bit of a wait and likely more money) but it was going to prove to be far too costly a solution.

I have to say, the Beavers, and our entire convoy are absolutely gutted. Andi cried on and off the entire drive back to Constanta (no lie) and the general demeanour has been pretty down since. E.C. was an integral part to our team, and she certainly balanced us out a lot better than we’re managing to do now. I know it won’t help the situation any, but she will be missed.

We are writing from Odessa now, and hoping to make it as close to the Russian border as possible tomorrow, so we’ll see what happens. We will try and be more consistent with this thing, internet has been few and far between (believe me, the Beaver girls walked around Bucharest for a good two hours trying to track down an internet cafe, but to no avail), but we’ll see how it goes.

xx

Well, the Beavers are certainly far behind in their updates. I had hoped to put some photos up as well with this post, but again, this comuter does not seem to suppor that function. Not to mention it is all written in….German?

Despite bets to the contrary, we have managed to make it to Vienna, Austria! The road so far has not been too too bad, given all the potential to go wrong. We are currently convoying it with four other teams - Team Fudge, Catch us if you Khan (we can!), Mad hatters, and Cake or Death. We have taken to calling each other family, as we have had teams join and leave, but this core group has been more or less consistent. We are also known as ‘The Lost Convoy’ because we make it into the city we WANT to be in, and then spend two hours driving around in circles getting lost. We even have official hats and, while they dont improve our navigating skills any, they are pretty cool.

It is likely we will be convoying with Catch us if you khan for the majority or this journey, if not all, so if you want to track our progress so far (and watch where we go in the future) you can watch us at http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0q22oe1fjbNS7ZRrmaGB43uP3S961HADz apparently you can even watch us go back and forth as we get ridiculously lost.

The car is holding up well and, surprisingly, we are all picking up standard alright.Although the number of stalls that occur is directly related to how stressful a situation we find ourselves in. We had some problems on the first day of the rally, what with not getting a new gear box fitted until the daz BEFORE we left (therefore leaving little to no opportunity to practice driving), and then finding our that the gear box was not fitted with a speedometer, nor a working odometer as a consequence. So we never know how fast we are going, or how far we have travelled. Our brake lights ALSO didnt work for the first day and a half (before we got a fellow rallier to check them out), so I had to drive into the centre of London with none of these things. Who needs to follow laws anyways….

Other than that, we accidentally took a couple bumps too fast and completely destroyed our roof rack for a bit, but with a little tea and bisquits on the side of a Czech road (along with lots of helpful non-mechanically challenged boys), we managed to fix it in decent time. We are going to be spending some of today exploring Vienna and then hit up Budapest - any teams still there? We hear McWhippy is stuck sorting our IDP stuff, so hopefully we can regain some of the original convoy but if anyone else is in the area get in touch with us any of the above listed teams.

Also, the Beavers phone  number is 44 792 406 2320. I do not fully fathom how to work these UK phones, but texting does seem to work alright so get in touch!

More stories to come! and hopefully pictures sometime soon.

Andi.

Well.

There certainly was a lack of updates. Between learning to drive standard, getting to the insane Czech Out Party and having a few roof rack mishaps, there just  was not enough time to maintain this blog until now. I am currently sitting in a hotel in Vienna. I do not know the name, I think it is just called ‘hotel’.

Ours was not the most auspicious of beginnings, considering we didn’t exactly know how to drive our car, for one. Moreover, we got into Goodwood camping at 2 30 in the morning. Why, you ask? Well, on Andrea’s second day of driving manual we needed to head directly into the centre of London. There, we got so lost that we ended up seeing, I kid you not, Big Ben, The London Eye, London Bridge and Westminister. We also went across every bridge except the Millenium Bridge, and that is only because it is a pedestrian one (the way it was looking, we would have ended up crossing that too eventually). All in a day’s work. Promptly after arriving at the camping we were told our little red fighter was, in fact, a crap car. Luckily, there are about 5 other teams with them.

We then tried our best to zoom towards the Czech Republic for the Czech Out party, but the Adventurists were testing us. NO signs, practically no idea where roads were, and the roads that were there were windy and small. When we finally pulled over a hill to find the completely hidden campsite we were overjoyed. We then spent the day after in Prague nursing hangovers from a mighty good night.

So, we are now in Vienna, after being offered to sleep in the back garden of a family of hippies (we only declined because they lived in the opposite direction). Our problems have been somewhat minor, a ripped roof rack being the worst of it, and that happened yesterday and was fixed by our wonderful convoy. We are heading towards Romania, where apparently bribes abound and roads are shit. Except the Transfalgarian, which Europeans are massively excited about and I don’t think I know how to spell. Then it is off to Odessa and Volgograd, where I will pick up a handful of Matryoshka dolls.

I have missed so much, I am sure, but Andrea will fill you in I assume, and with pictures!

Love you all,

Dancy

I had wanted to upload some photos with these next couple posts, but it seems as though my one camera is currently out of batteries, making this a bit of an impossibility.

So what does one say about Amsterdam? What a BEAUTIFUL city! It was warm, clean, sunny and just lovely. The public transportation was quick and super easy to figure out. Emily and I took a 12-hour bus ride overnight from London to Amsterdam, and so we arrived at around 9am. It sounds worse than it actual was - the most annoying part was having to get out of the bus for the ferry ride across to France (as we couldn’t just take a few sleeping pills and pass out). Nick flew in that morning on a flight from London and we met up at our hotel - Westcord Fashion Hotel, which was just on the outer skirts of Amsterdam, about a 10 minute tram ride into the city centre. After we got settled, we decided to explore the city and eventually made out way to the red light district. it was…..interesting? to say the least. Not as shocking as I’d thought it would be, and not all dingy and closed off (well apart from the very small alleyways). the main street was pretty and open, the only thing to distinguish it from the rest of Amsterdam was metal posts with red lights around them upon entering, and the red neon lights around some of the window panes.

We had all been pretty jet-lagged and tired since London however, so we called it a relatively early night. After exploring some of the red-light district, we stopped in for some very large, extra cold Heinekens and headed home for a blissful sleep in a real bed - apart from the fact that it was three of us to to essentially a double bed. But that’s just a minor detail.

The next day, Nick’s friend Tim met us at our hotel early in the morning (having also flown in from London), and after we’d all had a nice little sleep-in we decided to do some more exploring (and hopefully find some costumes for the Czech-out Party we’ll be attending in Prague). Emily and I took advantage of the fact that Nick’s friend Tim was around and decided to split off from them and have a girls day. We picked up some great hats for our costume, saw the Van Gogh museum and the I Amsterdam sign, Dam square, the royal palace, the national monument, and we got some nice little sun-tans in the warm weather.

We met back up at the hotel at around 7pm to shower and get ready to go out with Nick’s friend Cathy. She took us all out to the red light district again, but this time we frequented a peep-show. Initially it was just a girl gyrating around with a fake-smile plastered on her face, but I guess every hour on the hour they show actual sex so we waited around for that. The whole thing was just….odd. If sex ever becomes that much of a chore I think I’d be pretty upset. Afterwards, Cathy had to head home but she directed us to a cool jazz bar called Sugar Factory. Even though it was a Sunday night it was very busy! and quite a cool concept; it was live jazz music being played over like techno beats. One thing Emily and I noticed about Amsterdam however, was that the ratio of guys to girls seems to be completely out of whack. Everywhere we went we felt like we were some of the only girls - and not just in the red light district. This bar was no exception, apart from the stage which seemed to have quite a few girls dancing on it. At one point we were on the dance floor and we were essentially surrounded at all sides by boys. Very weird.

Emily and I bussed back to London while Nick and Tim flew, so we parted ways late afternoon on our last day in Amsterdam. Our bus ride back to London however, was a bit of a disaster. The french/English border control was (understandably) hard on buses returning from Amsterdam across the channel to London, and the bus in front of us apparently had a lot of “problems”, requiring us to wait more than 45 minutes behind it before we were even allowed through passport control. This meant, of course, that we missed our 4am ferry and had to wait until 6am, throwing off our arrival time in London by almost two hours. We had arranged to take a noon 10-hour bus to Glasgow from London, but we had stored some stuff at Tim’s to pick up in between. Obviously, with missing our first ferry this was going to be an impossibility and so we will just have to pick up our stuff on July 23rd on our way to Goodwood. We need to keep reminding ourselves that this is all just a practice for all the stuff that is going to go terrible, horribly wrong on this rally.

More to come on our time in Glasgow, our car and standard driving (with pictures!) to come soon!

*GCBeavers

This is Emily C.  Really just wanted to say that I’m here too.  Gotta get into this blogging groove.  I didn’t read Andrea’s post and don’t to bore anyone with doubled up details, suffice to say London is FUN and I am really thrilled to be here.  9 more days til launch!