0

Off the map in Northern Mongolia – Another photo essay

After I’d recovered from a sudden illness, we hit the road again with fresh enthusiasm. We set out from Hatgal at the southern tip of Lake Khovsgol, knowing nothing about the state of the route

0

Mountain Biking across Outer Mongolia

What attracts me to this place? Many of the reasons are lost in a rose-tinted world of romantic notion – vast mountain-flanked steppe, nomadic yurt-dwelling horsemen, the descendants of an ancient empire living now as they have for thousands of years.

3

The Adventurists: No guides, no rules, proper adventure

Mongol Rally / Photo by The Adventurists

It’s perhaps the very frank and open manner with which The Adventurists approach and describe the risk involved in their adventurisms that we feel disconcertingly comforted. The most well known of their journeys is probably the Mongol Rally in which 300 teams travel a third of the way around the world from Europe to Mongolia in a car with an engine no bigger than 1 litre.  Ever since they had their first disclaimer drawn up The Adventurists have had social goals at the heart of operations.  Their aim is to raise a million pounds every year for charity.  They’ve recently established Adventures for Development – A charity to get money to projects in those harder to reach areas of the world. All projects will have a real impact on the local comunity and progress will be reported back to the teams who raised the cash.

“Imagine yourself in the middle of the gargantuan Kazakh desert, your car slowly being shredded by the dirt track your map says is a motorway, completely lost hundreds of miles from civilisation with no back up crew to rescue you. Just you, your wits, your increasingly brown pants, a car that the laws of physics say shouldn’t have got you past Peckham Rye and a slightly angry looking man with a gun.”

- The Adventurists

The other three journeys they’ve created are equally nuts and require a similar lack of concern for your well being:

• The Rickshaw Run will be happening three times during 2009.  Participants drive, push, pull a 150cc  three-wheeled Indian Rickshaw thousands of miles across the subcontinent over two weeks.
• The Africa Rally was first run in July this year from London to Cameroon over four weeks.  Transport once again must adhere to the one litre rule introduced on the mongol rally, unless of course you choose to travel on two wheels in which case the  0.125 litre rule is enforced.
• Ruta del Sol is the latest edition to their portfolio and involves driving a VW Beetle from Quito, Ecuador to Rio in Brazil.  Señor Pablo will help you to secure your wheels in Ecuador but after that you’re on your own.

Rarely is it possible to find such good spirited, organised chaos, and with all events raising huge sums of money for charities around the world it is certainly not pure self indulgent hedonism.

“We don’t want guided tours up the first third of Everest. We don’t want some gangly suntanned arse from Peckham explaining how the “locals” cook pickled gonads while ushering us around tourist sites we saw last week on the telly. Flush your guide books down the loo people. Join The Adventurists in our battle with an increasingly boring, sanitised world.”

- The Adventurists