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And the rest...

Excerpt from a two-part article written by myself (Sam Glover), published in the March and April '07 editions of Practical Classics magazine.

We all rose the next morning feeling liberated, and hired a chauffeur-driven UAZ 452 - undisputedly the backbone of Mongolia - to take us the remaining 1000-or-so miles to Ulaan Baatar. Our new transportation took all terrain confidently in its stride, allowing us to bask in relative luxury and enjoy the scenery. However, the curse of Clive remained resolutely with us, serving up a collision with a reversing UAZ pick-up at a checkpoint, arranging a fuel drought in one town that reduced our driver to buying petrol by the drinks-bottle from passing motorists, placing a tyre-piercing Kamaz valve upturned in our path, and bringing about a recurring misfire. Such happenings aside, we made it safely to UB within a few days of almost constant driving, crowned by a bracing 36-hour final stint with nothing more than short comfort breaks.

Over a third of Mongolia’s population is stationed in UB, and the modern, bustling city is entirely unlike the rest of the country. With hardly a UAZ or Lada in sight, almost all vehicles are imported from Japan or Korea, and the roads are in no way big enough to accommodate their numbers, making inner-city driving very much a contact sport.

The city made a very pleasant place to relax for a while before arranging flights back to the UK, giving us time to reflect upon our achievements. Vladivostok was more than 1000 miles away, but we had managed to drag a decrepit London Taxi 7000 miles to Mongolia, and had made a pretty good time of it. The challenges we encountered had enabled us to meet fantastic characters who would otherwise have passed us by, and the joy of returning to the open road in search of the next destination never abated. Although almost every town on our route would have been well worth visiting in isolation, it was making the connection between them that made the trip so special, experiencing the gradual metamorphosis of culture and landscape that somehow made each location easier to make sense of upon arrival.

My advice to anyone anticipating a road-trip is thus: allow yourself plenty of time, don’t plan your route until you get there, and never stop smiling.